So you think your feet hurt???

My feet hurt. Somewhat. Mostly just from mild repeated shock. 
See, in addition to my life of band, I do irish dance (I just finished practicing b/c I must practice 9 hrs. a month at home). It's that stuff they do in Riverdance or Lord of the Dance or any of those Michael Flatley dance shows. Not only is it good exercise, I have lots of opportunities to injure myself. ; ) Not really, I've only done that once and it was around last year.
Dance has a lot to do with feet, actually, just like in marching band! Some of the only differences are that in dance we're always on our toes and that we start our dance steps with the right foot instead of the left. I'm proud to say that, thanks to all that fancy footwork in irish dance, I'm one of the top five marchers in the marching band. Mr. Hughes, one of our band directors, said so. I can actually do a backwards slide (that's how you march backwards in halftime shows) without dropping onto my heels! In dance, we're always on our toes, leaping through the air, making precision-sensitive rhythms with our feet, drilling moves that cause problems over and over and over again...
Now, on the subject of feet...
These are my marching shoes:

These are my dance shoes:

Which ones do you think would cause more foot pain?

WELL, I'll tell you. Your feet have not been in pain until you've broken in a pair of irish dance hard shoes! Those are the ones on the right that are akin to tap shoes. Something about the stiffness of the leather and the way they're shaped causes more and larger blisters than I've ever gotten from regular shoes in my life. These shoes need more breaking in than marching shoes for sure. Or maybe my feet are just pain-proof at this point, after 6 years of dance and 5+ pairs of these feet-killing shoes. 

And, take a look at these fiberglass taps:

If you hit an ankle with one of those, you're toast (just for about 3 minutes, but the idea is that it hurts a lot). I suppose you could fracture an ankle bone if you hit them hard enough, though. 

Anyway, a LOT of people complained about their marching shoes over the summer and how they had so many blisters and how their feet ached so much and all that, and I was just like, "Your feet haven't hurt YET! Try on these shoes and THEN your feet will hurt!" And I would shove a picture of my dance shoes under their noses. No one really said anything in response to that, but... yeah. Although I was mildly annoyed by my bandmates' complaining, I WILL make one exception, and that's for my flute-playing friend Emily (find her blog here). Her marching shoes literally rubbed a hole in her big toe because they just didn't fit the shape of her foot. By the end of the marching season she had to wear all-black Converse sneakers instead of her marching shoes, so I don't blame her for that, because who can control the shape of their feet?

In the end though, irish dance hard shoes are almost guaranteed to make your feet hurt more than marching shoes do.

The end. (Photos by me.)