Perfect Feet

Wee, wee, wee.

Wee, wee, wee.

Wee, wee, wee.

Wee, wee, wee.

Wee, wee, wee.

Wee, wee, wee.

Wee, wee--

Wake your ass up.

You still dreaming about feet?

What the hell were you thinking?

I'm tired of you having these dreams.

Do you have a foot fetish or somethin'?

No, no I don't.

Well, I think you do.

Maybe you should go out and find the perfect set of feet.

Well, maybe I will.

Do it.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Who the hell is this guy?

Laying around dreaming about feet.

Well, I'm Calvin Dwight Harris,

a Bahamian filmmaker who lives in Denver, Colorado.

As a track and field runner in college,

my feet meant everything to me.

But it's more than that, I just really like feet.

So join me on my quest to find the perfect set of feet.

I hope you find what you're looking for.

- There are some feet that we've encountered that

I think would be able to get everyone in Guantanamo

to give up every secret they've ever had,

plus ones they just make up.

- Hardened criminals would confess to crimes they

didn't even commit if they were exposed to that smell.

- Don't keep the stinky socks and shoes on all the time.

It's not cool, man.

- And when someone says, oh, sorry, my feet must smell.

You go, no, no, no, they're fine.

Oh.

Make sure there's not all that

stinky crud up underneath your toe nails.

- It was like week old roadkill on a hot summer day.

- Um, there's some really smelly feet out there.

The first stop on my journey was

to the Colorado Ballet Company, because if anyone would need

to have perfect feet, it would have to be a ballet dancer.

So, Sarah, let's get to the heart of the matter.

Let's talk about the challenges with your feet.

How did you get so good at standing on your toes

and being able to perform as a ballerina?

- You're trained to do that from a young age.

- Okay. - So, there's a certain age

or a certain strength level where they

start putting you into pointe classes.

They have your first pair of pointe shoes and when you're

that young, it's not so much like you

see us on stage nowadays,

where we're just dancing in our pointe shoes all the time.

It's more just about exercises and strengthening your

feet in the pointe shoes because

if you're not strong enough, you will injure yourself.

When you get older, you do some variation,

so that's when you see somebody doing a dance on their own,

and then when you get a little bit older,

you start doing partnering work.

It evolves and everybody is very different.

There's some girls who naturally have stronger muscles

or the muscles take to it very easily,

and that they'll get a lot stronger quicker,

and then you have people where you're a professional

and you still struggle with weakness of your feet

because it's just like you're more flexible.

So it just takes more effort and coordination

and work to make your body do what it needs to do.

Do you folks do certain exercises

or certain things to continue to strengthen your feet?

- I do, I do some like TheraBand exercises or I'll wear

my pointe shoes in ballet class and jump in them,

just 'cause they're harder so it takes more work

for you to use your feet while you're jumping.

What is it about ballet that keeps

driving you to continue in this profession?

- 'Cause you can never reach perfection with ballet.

I see.

So if I can never reach perfection,

I figure why not give it a try myself.

Who knows, I may actually have a second career ahead of me.

So let's see what you normally would do.

- I could show you how we start class everyday.

- Okay. - Get plie's in first.

Oh, my gosh.

You're gonna kill me here.

That and that. - Yeah.

That's as far as I'm gonna go.

("Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Tchaikovsky)

Woo, wow.

Yeah, I can see how this profession,

you have to be versatile and very fit.

- Mm hm. - And I do not meet

either of those requirements unfortunately.

Okay, I'll admit, that was a lot harder than I expected.

I guess that second career will have to wait a while,

since I'm headed to the Bahamas to visit someone

who truly has been hard on their feet.

But nobody ever said winning Olympic medals was easy.

My name is Jackie Edwards.

I went to Stanford University on a track

and field scholarship, did well at Stanford.

I won NCAA championships twice and that launched me into

a professional track and field career and so I went

into five different Olympic games consecutively; 1992,

'96, 2000, 2004 and then 2008 was my last one in Beijing.

I trained five to six days a week

depending on the coach I had.

Four to five hours a day.

10 1/2 months a year, for 17 years,

and now that I'm retired I look back,

I'm like, how did I do that for so long?

One thing that you do a lot as a jumper or a sprinter

is you roll your ankles, twist your ankles all the time

running through the sand because the sand is so uneven.

So I would have to specifically do exercises

to strengthen my feet and ankles.

So I would run barefoot on the grass.

We would do high knees in the sand.

All these things to strengthen my actual feet without

my shoes on, so that when my shoes were on,

my foot itself was stable and then

the shoe was just extra support.

So these are a pair of my long jump shoes

that I never got to wear.

You can see they're still brand new.

You can look at the bottom, see how beautiful they are.

They're pretty gold.

I guess they were hoping that I would win

a gold medal if I had these gold shoes.

Specifically in long jumping, you want your shoe

to be as snug as possible without being tight,

because when you hit the board with all that force,

you don't want your foot to slide in the shoe.

So they really just want your foot to be in place.

There's not a lot of torque.

Like a running shoe you could probably bend it.

A long jump shoe is stiff, there's no bending of the shoe,

you cannot do that, which is good.

But there was a period of time when,

sometimes I walk with my feet out like this and they wanted

my foot to be more flat, so I had these orthotics.

I was just trying to be, listening to my coach,

and wearing the thing, but when he was unaware

I would just 'em out because I just didn't like,

it made my shoes so tight and as

I said before the long jump shoe, it's so snug already,

to put that thing in there and then try to fit my foot,

I felt like it was gonna explode.

It was not comfortable.

If you wanna do a sport for a living,

make sure you take care of what you need to do that sport,

and for me, if my feet were no good, I could do nothing.

- You know, you go to the gym and you watch people work out.

They work out every muscle in their body, right?

They're working on their arms, their legs, you know,

even their lips sometimes right when they're talking, right?

But the one part of their body I've never seen

anybody in the gym workout is their feet.

- My name is Kara Dawdy, I am 44 years old.

I grew up in Colorado,

I am married and I have three children.

I've always been interested in figure.

I've always been active in fitness.

I am what you would consider a gym rat.

The difference between what I do and a fitness model,

is I'm actually a figure competitor.

I go and I compete against other women