Climbing shoes ain't cheap, so here are our useful tips for keep yours in the best possible condition.
If you want to get better at climbing, it’s probably time to graduate from trainers or rental shoes and get yourself your own pair of climbing shoes.
With well-fitting climbing shoes comes better footwork and increased confidence in trusting your feet to smaller edges, which contributes to improvement in your climbing ability overall.
They're not an absolute guarantee you’ll turn professional overnight, but you'll hopefully find that routes feel easier, or at least more attainable.
It is worth thinking of your shoes as climbing equipment rather than just a part of your outfit. Climbing shoes aren't cheap, even at the less technical end of the scale, and it's good to try to look after them to maximise your investment.
Most importantly, don't walk around in them unnecessarily - as well as wearing down the rubber this tends to embed chalk, gravel and dirt into the sole, which then becomes a low-friction layer between the wall and the rubber, reducing stickiness and performance.
It's also not great for your feet to be constricted when they don't have to be. Your toes are likely to tolerate the required tightness much more happily if you just wear the shoes when actually climbing, then let them spread and relax in between. If you can't bear the prospect of going barefoot, some flip-flops or hut slippers could be a useful addition to your kit bag.
Even with diligence a little muck is inevitable, so it's worth getting into the habit of giving the soles a quick wipe with your palm, perhaps with a drop of moisture too. 'Squeaking' is the long-established practice of spitting on the soles and rubbing them together to get rid of any smuts and expose fresh rubber, for maximum grip on that crucial attempt.
And for everyone's sake, at an indoor wall at any rate, please do not wear climbing shoes into the toilet and then back to the routes.
Climbing shoes have a reputation for getting stinky, but this is not an inevitability, and even with those materials that are prone to retaining smells this can largely be avoided, or at least minimised, with a bit of attention.
Assuming you are reasonably diligent about your foot hygiene, the key is to minimise the retention of moisture in the shoes when not in use. Try to air your shoes after each session and store them dry, rather than keeping them tightly wrapped in a plastic bag or left to fester in a locker. A sunny windowsill - accommodation and season permitting - should generally suffice, or an airing cupboard, so long as it's not too humid. But it's best to avoid too much heat as hot temperatures can deform rubber, melt glue and delaminate rands (rands are rubber areas on the sides, front and back of your shoe that are not the sole). Leaving your shoes on a radiator or under direct strong sunlight could cause brittleness in materials and may damage glue.
Adding something like a Boot Banana or giving the shoes an occasional spray with an antibacterial liquid, can also be worthwhile, reducing the likelihood of smell-causing bacteria taking hold in the first place.
If your shoes need proper washing, they can usually withstand a turn in a washing-machine, on a gentle cycle and low temperature, but it may be worth checking with the specific manufacturer beforehand. If in doubt, handwashing in lukewarm water and with mild soap should be sufficient. Be sure to dry thoroughly but gently- scrunched newspaper inside can be effective at absorbing the worst of the wetness, before the final airing.
In most cases, well-used climbing shoes can be revitalised by resoling. Given their expense, and the moral/environmental value of minimising unnecessary waste - not to mention the difficulty in recycling shoes - It is certainly worth giving thought to this, rather than simply wearing them to destruction.
It is best not to leave this till the last minute, however, structurally speaking; it will be easier for the resoler to do a better job if there aren't gaping holes to patch up. Usually the process involves stripping off the worn front section of sole and replacing with fresh, crisply-edged rubber, and if this is done before the wear creeps above the original line of the sole/rand join it needn't affect the feel and performance of the shoe significantly. But if holes wear right through to your toes, or higher up on the rand, it may be necessary to add an additional toe patch, which will likely make things feel a bit less precise.
If given attention at an appropriate time it is possible for your shoes to last through several cycles of resoling and wear. They may not retain their full original performance, but they should still be perfectly serviceable, and at least can be used as a back-up pair or more comfortable, broken-in option for when you don't need to be giving full beans on a long-worked project.
