It'll be different this time, better, and I swear that I won't get hurt this time. Until I did. Oh, Saucony Peregrines, I thought you were the answer but you only raised more questions when I began to feel pain in my left iliotibial band, questions like, "I wonder what shoe I'm going to have to try now?"
Here's the answer:
A new pair of Vibram FiveFinger Bikilas. If they look vaguely familiar, it's because I'd actually had a green-and-white pair last year. They were my first pair of minimalist running shoes, my inauguration into midfoot striding, and I was delirious about them for the few weeks that I had them, aching soleus muscles and all, until I noticed that the outsole seemed to be peeling away from the upper. I took them back to the store and asked, "is this normal?" To which the reply was, "nope," and I received a full refund. "Okay; can I get another pair?" It was then that I learned that Vibram was entirely out of stock and it'd be another eight months before a new shipment came in. Eight months!? Glum city! Shoulders slumped, I left the store, and developed a beautiful long termer with Nike's Free Run+ (more to come on the Nike Free Run line), which are what I wore to run the drizzly 2011 L.A. Marathon.
But as you've noticed over the past few posts, it's been time to find a new pair of shoes, and here're the latest belles of the ball:
All 10 piggies! The Bikilas are named after Abebe Bikila, an Ethiopian marathoner who ran unshod to gold in the 1960 Rome summer Olympics. (I'd tried the Vibram TrekSports briefly last fall but discovered that they gave me wicked blisters, which meant they went straight back to REI.)
Frankly, after my dalliance with VFFs last year, I hadn't given serious thought to getting another pair, thinking things like, hey, maybe they were just a gimmick, and besides, my wife is glad that I'm not wearing toe-shoes, but then Vibrams made a cameo in Parks and Recreation as part of Chris Trager's collection, and then after the capture of Osama bin Laden, these pictures came out on the birthdayshoes.com website about Special Forces footwear:
wherein some astute, perhaps footwear-obsessed observer, noted what the SeAL was tiptoeing through the tulips in:
 |
| Okay, so maybe you'll be tempted to joke that seeing these toe-shoes made Osama die of laughter, but I somehow think the double-tap bullets to the chest and head were the actual cause of death. |
I didn't get the camouflage KSOs shown here, but rather got the Bikilas as Vibram's most running-specific FiveFingers shoes. The soles on the Bikilas are a whole 2mm thicker, i.e. more padded, than the KSOs, and they have a slightly grippier treading:
I picked them up today at REI (20% anniversary sale!), and even though I should be getting ready to go to Milwaukee tomorrow, couldn't resist taking them for a spin.
I've written before about running in zero-drop shoes, and the Bikilas were familiar territory. You get the same tap-tap-tap sound from the foot pods, although now that I've had a chance to sample several different kinds of minimalist shoes I have a better sense of what people mean when they say that one style has more cushioning versus another pair, etc. It's nice to run in zero-drop shoes again, although I can tell where my knees have been weakened a little by running in more padded, built-up trainers, but at least there's no IT band pain. Unlike the first pair of Bikilas I had last year, which had a totally hot-spot free liner, I noticed a little burning on the lateral midsole of my left foot. But running down the street in these foot-gloves felt good, my running form tightened up naturally, and even though they may look a little ridiculous, perhaps in the right setting they could look intimidating to, say, a terrorist.
Probably not if I'm wearing them; they'd probably just laugh at my farmer's tan.
First Run in New Vibram FiveFingers Bikilas
3.55 mi. 28 min.:31 sec. 8:01 pace.
No comments:
Post a Comment