We get to the question, “can you name three things that are causes of stress for your spouse?” The first words out of her mouth are, “finding a new running shoe.” Oh – so that’s why women find these things so interesting.
I really wanted to like the New Balance MT101s, I really did. I’d read such glowing reviews about them in all of the trail/ultra/running blogs I frequent, as well as for another, more hidden reason: when I was in high school I had not-so-secret dreams of becoming a rock and roll god, a guitar hero, tight leather pants and big hair optional, but wailing feedback and distorted hammer-taps on the fretboard, multiple issues of “Guitar World” bought with my allowance when other, cooler kids were spending that cash on beer and drugs. A big part of this aspirational streak was the impulse to buy the same gear that my six-string saints slung – limited, of course, by budget – but the same brand, at any rate. I remember browsing the racks of one Guitar Center, dwelling on the Ibanez guitars, the brand that my then-current hero, Joe Satriani, played, when my mentor, who was helping me shop for a new guitar, pulled me aside, out of earshot of the salesman, whispering with no little frustration at my fixation, “hey, dude, why the hard-on for the Ibanez’s?”
Okay. So I wouldn’t call my desire to like the MT101s exactly a hard-on, and I wouldn’t call Tony Krupicka and the Skaggs my pantheon of running idols, but still, I really wanted to like the running shoe they’d had so much input into designing. And as you can guess, I didn’t.
So much seemed to make sense, the shoe’s light weight, lugged outsole, minimalist upper, but these attributes added up, at least for me, a shoe that was good from far, far from good. Perhaps it’s my own weird foot anatomy or something, but this shoe not only gave me some Achilles pain, also made the head of my fifth metatarsal ache, and after the second brief run with these problems I decided enough was enough and returned them to the store from which I’d adopted them.
I then did what a lot of people do when they’re looking for love: I turned to the internet. No, there is no eHarmony for shoes, no match.com for sneakers, but rather, I turned to Skynet with the hope that the wisdom of the running masses could crowdsource me some ideas for a trail-running shoe.
Which brought me to the Saucony Peregrine:
The Runner’s World Editor’s Choice award recipient for trail shoes, it’s a trail-running version of their wildly popular Kinvara, which is even more minimalizzle (meaning less actual minimalist) than the NB MT101, but has sold extremely well as a transition-to-minimalism shoe.
I’d shied away from the Kinvaras, because they just seemed like a lot more shoe than I had wanted as an aspiring minimalist, which you can see on this profile of the Peregrines:
Although they’re still light, particularly compared to most trail shoes, they feel oddly substantial, particularly if your benchmark is a minimalist shoe (not to mention your bare feet).
These things are definitely “Shoes”, capital S, and the Satriani-worshipping part of me that wanted to run like a Tarahumaru revolted against these things.
The toe box is, relative to many minimal shoes, fairly constrictive and more like a standard running shoe. The outsole lugs are pretty impressive:
On the one hand, wearing these (relative for minimalist) burly shoes, as compared to a minimalist zero-drop model, makes you feel like you’re walking on pillows six inches off the ground, which runs contrary to the minimalist/Satriani ideal. On the other hand, the heel-to-toe drop of the Peregrines is a much-more-minimalist-felicitous 4mm, compared to the near centimeter drop of the MT101s.
They ain’t pretty but they look like they’d git ‘er done. For some reason, perhaps the lower heel-toe drop, they make me fast; I can keep up with a mid-8 pace with surprising ease and lack of effort. Maybe it’s the placebo effect of those chunky lugs, but I could run in them with a surprising speed. One observation that’s been shared around on the interwebs is that the outsoles are surprisingly grippy, and I’d have to agree. Perhaps it’s little more than the placebo effect, but even doing nothing as exciting as walking across the parking lot to the gym, I noticed a surprising degree of traction with these shoes, even just on the concrete walking from the car to the gym.
“What do you think of these?” I ask my wife. “Oh, they look nice – they look like normal shoes.” I know what stresses my wife out right now: the thought that I might buy another pair of toe-shoes.
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