A sound footing for a rewarding career
Chris Gates might have trouble remembering names, but he never forgets a pair of feet.
‘‘To be honest my memory for names is awful, I remember feet or I’ll remember the shoes the feet were in, the Nelson podiatrist said.
‘‘Often I think, oh I’ve seen this person before, she has an ingrown toenail on the left foot.’’
He qualified as a podiatrist in 1980 and has worked in the industry ever since, looking after the feet of those from infancy into old age.
His daily work involves a fair bit of surgery for ingrown toenails sometimes under local anaesthetic, creating orthotics for shoes, treating sports injuries and removing corns and calluses.
‘‘People often say, will it hurt? and I say it won’t hurt me but they don’t find it too amusing.’’
Gates loves running, which is a fitting hobby for the podiatrist who has lost many toenails and once had to remove one of his own after an Abel Tasman Coastal Classic.
‘‘I did a really rough job, it was probably the worst surgery I have ever done.
‘‘It wasn’t until afterwards I thought, my hamstrings are really tight and I couldn’t see what I was doing because I couldn’t get down there.’’
A trophy in his practice shows he is the 2017 Old Ghost Road Ultra winner in the Super Veteran Man category.
He recently ran the West Coast trail and as a result had two toenails threatening to fall off.
‘‘They are not going to because I have done things to them to keep them in place.’’
‘‘That’s what happens with long-distance running, you lose bits of nails.’’
The trail runner said he ran to work at least four days a week, preferably over the Grampians to make it interesting.
‘‘It’s really great being up there at 7am just as the sun is starting to come up.’’
The shortest route to work was 6km but he often added bits on to double that distance.
‘‘I don’t like running on the flat so I always try and find a hill, and bush preferably.’’
He also spent a bit of time creating orthotics and treating injuries for sports people and was known as the go-to-guy on the running scene.
‘‘Effectively the orthotic changes where the ground is, you often can’t change the foot’s structure but you can change how it works by changing what is underneath it.’’
The most dramatic case he could remember was being asked to help a man who had run the Blackball Hilton Croesus Crossing mountain race without any training after being ‘‘conned’’ into it by his mates.
The man’s feet weren’t hardened for running and by the end of the 26km mountain race he wasn’t in a good way.
‘‘When he came in the whole skin pad of both heels was literally hanging by shreds of skin, the whole heel had come off.’’
Gates said he put back as much of the skin as he could, took the rest off, taped his feet up and suggested he get some strong painkillers.
He made a point of not treating appearances, instead focusing on the symptoms.
‘‘Some feet are pretty manky but they run around the world just fine, others like that foot type will run once and they get injured.’’