Apologies for the hiatus, to people who actually check up on this site. Life happened, and also idk wtf to put on this site. Not really a flashy webmaster, but at least the website is pretty fast to load, just pics and text.
Anyways, Heelys. The heel wheeled shoe, made everybody stare when you were in elementary school, and is practically an attention seeker. I speak from experience, but I'm elaborating on that later. They seem to be making some sort of comeback, but mainly out of nostalgia and fashion purpose. Given that the shoe needs enough space to hold the wheel in the heel, it's practically a boot-like platform shoe.
I bought a pair (Pro 20 Grey) for my brother a christmas ago, but the most he did with them is try them once and leave them on a shelf to collect dust for a month. So I put them on and used them for shoes. Yesterday I heeled to the mall with them on, and jeez those heelys weren't made for long distance trips, or uphill trips either. I actually made some new rules at some establishment with them on, so take that for what you will.
The shoe itself is sold in full sizes, so anyone with half size shoes have to scale up, which I find a bit crummy if you actually wanted to utilize the wheels part, because you need the shoe to hug your heel as much as possible for control. It's heavy on the soles, but that's because that's your brakes when you heel, so it's kinda like the foundation of a rollerskate built into the shoe. There's other gimmicks that you can buy with the heelys, such as lights, and at one point grind plates, but I'll talk about that later.
During my test ride, I both coasted on them and attempted to utilize them at a skatepark. I learned later that they built skatepark-worthy wheel bearings, but you needed the shoe that can accept them in order to use them, so that sucks a little. To convert your shoe to wheel-mode and to shoe-mode requires you to use the provided tool to pry the wheel/cover off, and it's an entire process that you would have to do sitting down. That also means lugging two wheels and the tool in your pocket, which unless you have cargo pants, JNCO jeans, or a purse/backpack, is going to take up your pocket space, and believe me, there's no way to have them comfortably stowed in any pairs of jeans. If you were me in 2nd grade, you could also just walk with the wheels on, but they'll make a 'clack clack' sound every time you walk. Also you run the risk of doing the Charlie Brown so I would recommend just saving the wheels for special occasions.
To glide, you do a running start and stick out your front foot to be the 'leader' of where you want to go, with the back foot being where you support your weight. In the event of your weight bearing leg getting tired, switch to the other foot by shifting your weight to the leading foot while you do a 'hop', and move your back foot to the front. You basically are doing a heels-only version of not doing the splits. Remember to keep your foot up, if you point up too much or your shoe starts going down, it's going to drag and slow you down. If you glide for too long, you might get some fatigue in your legs. My fatigue was at my shins since my posture kept my feet were lined up end to end, which conserves my speed and balance at the cost of having to steel my foot positioning.
I just outlined how to heel and how to switch, and I'm sure there's guides from 2008 or such that elaborate better than I can. Go on YouTube or start digging if you really want to perform tricks on your Heelys. I do like the design standpoint of naturally slowing down if your feet drag, and the 'fats' wheel doesn't go above a brisk jog speed, so it's easily recoverable. Going over cracks is a mixed bag, if it juts out too much, you will catch, or bail if you're unlucky.
Trying to do skatepark research was not exactly a scientific endeavour, but I had to try. I got some practice of switching forward stances, but going backwards was complicated. I had to steer my shifting my weight back and angling my shoe to go straight, but more often than not I would spin out. Ramps were slightly fun, but I had to keep in mind my foot placement otherwise I would lose speed. Ollieing, or rather footplanting, wasn't as great as I had planned. You essentially have to be in a walk stance to hop on and get back onto your wheels. They're more like 'hoppies' since you use your front parts of your feet to jump, though heel hoppies are possible if you don't mind destroying your heels landing on a wheel. Lips are more natural to perform, as it's partly aerobatics when you're not on the wheels. If I can dig up the link, it is possible to get some air with Heelys, but not on full ramps, just quarterpipes. I would imagine the grabs would take from the rollerblading notebook, given that Heelys feels like a cop-out version of aggressive inlining. No shade, but the difference is that when you got rollerboots on, you have to full commit, wheras with heelys you can more often than not walk out of a bad roll. Also, no grinds unless you somehow modded your shoe to get a grindplate or you somehow found a shoe with them on, not messed up and fits you.
Speaking as a person who won't try to judge someone until I try it out, yeah, I can see why Heelys were a bit of a middle school trend. I don't exactly see myself heeling around unless I plan on it, and it's an entire process to put on, and to even get the muscle memory to do it well. I might as well put on rollerskates, at least with those I can just move with some sort of ease.
Again, I found the research of the shoe/transport more interesting. There's an old Heely forum that I uncovered that I feel is like a historical document, as it also has an encyclopedia of prior Heely shoes. There's also topics of when people actually used them in like 2008, interesting stuff. Can you believe that Disney had a Heelys team? For everyone's sake, I ask that you don't antagonize any of the forum members, or necropost/post unless you REALLY are involved with Heelys. I'm simply linking to there because I feel like it does a better job of illustrating the usage of Heelys to people who do care. There could also be a tricklist that I missed, but it's probably out of my scope.
My local Zumiez also had Heelys in stock, and talking with one of the employees, the people who did buy the shoe would mainly get it for the clout or the look, less about the wheel in of itself. Which makes sense since Zumiez is more scene than anything, lets be real. Given that this is the age of digital shopping, you would need to have a solid amount of interest to ship out units to brick and mortar stores, and that interest may be in the 20 year cycle, or more technically, the "Strauss-Howe Generational Theory". Maybe a lot of people just got internet-nostalgia sick during quarantine, and wanted to recapture that 'wireless' whimsy and joy that the 2008 recession held.
So for a TL;DR, gimmick shoe that's back because some peeps checked out their Dad's (or Moms) closet and found Heelys. I personally tried a pair I have and found it to be novelty on the bounds of interesting. Tear the bearings out of the wheel and replace it with BONES for a real gnarly time.
