What kind of boots do you wear on your motorcycle? Red Wings? Doc Martens? Blundstones? If your answer is any of those, you should rethink your riding footwear. None of those are protective enough to ride in or armored enough to keep you safe when you drop a bike on your leg, but they’re not the only ill-suited footwear out there. In fact, plenty of so-called “motorcycle boots” share the same dearth of protection as those fashion boots you got at the mall.
Rather than giving you a list of brands to look for, though, I’d rather teach you to fish — I’ll give you a list of what to look for in your next motorcycle boot, so you can know that whatever you’re buying is safe enough for your commute, road trip, or dirt ride. There are three main things that you’ll want to look for in a motorcycle boot: Malleolus protection, crush resistance, and height. What do those mean, though, within the context of motorcycle boots?
Just 3 criteria
You know that weird bone that sticks out the side of your ankle? That’s your malleolus, and it’s easy to damage if you drop a motorcycle on it. The obvious solution here is simply not to drop a motorcycle on it, but things aren’t always so simple — the two-wheeled world would be a lot easier if we could just decide to not have bad things happen. So, in the real world, you want to find boots that protect that area. You want more than just padding or leather coverage here, but some sort of actual armor. Hard plastic shielding is an option, but ideally you’ll want some viscoelastic armor like D3O.
One place you don’t want viscoelastics, though, is in your boots’ sole. There, you’ll want something stronger. Viscoelastics are great at dispersing impact, but they’re not going to have the same level of protection when laid out in a thin layer across the bottom of a shoe — that’s a place where hard armor does better, to prevent the bottom of the shoe from folding like a taco under the weight of hundreds of pounds of motorcycle. This will make your boots a bit stiffer to walk in than your beloved Docs, but you’ll be thankful the first time you drop your bike on the side of your foot.
The last criterion here is height, which sounds a bit odd. In theory, we should all be riding around in knee-high hard-armored boots, to protect against lower leg breaks under the weight of a dropped bike. I’ve personally dropped 500 pounds of motorcycle on my leg in dirt boots and emerged unscathed, so I can speak to the necessity of a full-height boot — but I’m not going to wear my dirt boots all day for my jaunts around Brooklyn. Here, you really need to weigh the ratio of protection to comfort (to looking like a normal person) against your use case. Dirt or track? Get a tall boot. Daily riding? Get something that covers your ankle, for sure, but you may decide to make the tradeoff for something that looks a little subtler.
Thinking about the parts of your foot, ankle, and leg that are most likely to be injured in a low-speed crash is a great mindset to take into boot shopping. Sure, you can go out and get some hard-plastic Boa-closure dirt boot with a hinged ankle and get objectively better protection, but that may not be worth the heat and discomfort for you unless you’re a beginner or a high-intensity rider. Hopefully you can now go boot-browsing with a bit more info under your belt, and make smarter choices about your moto footwear. Just, please, leave the Docs at home.