Kinvara!

I came home from Sports Base­ment Fri­day with a pair of Saucony Kin­varas. The Kin­vara is Saucony’s new «min­i­mal­ist» shoe intend­ed to be light­weight with a low heel, flex­i­ble sole and no sup­port or sta­bil­i­ty fea­tures. With all the talk about the ben­e­fits of bare­foot run­ning (and the stud­ies that sug­gest that fan­cy, high-tech shoes may actu­al­ly cause more injuries than they pre­vent) run­ning shoe com­pa­nies are scram­bling to sell shoes on the promise that their shoes approx­i­mate the expe­ri­ence and mechan­ics of run­ning barefoot.

Talk about the emper­or’s new clothes, right? But shoes aren’t by them­selves nec­es­sar­i­ly bad—while the human foot may adapt very eas­i­ly to most kinds of ter­rain, there’s all sorts of stuff in the urban envi­ron­ment that no one wants to step on. 

Bare­foot run­ning enthu­si­asts scoff at the claims that this new gen­er­a­tion of run­ning shoes are at all like bare feet. I can see both sides of the argu­ment. They clear­ly are not bare­foot, but they don’t feel like wear­ing a shoe, either. The Kin­varas are light and flex­i­ble and air flows eas­i­ly through the mesh they are almost total­ly made of. Wear­ing the Kin­varas feels almost like wear­ing slip­pers. They may be a prod­uct of the evil shoe indus­try but they feel super nice. I joked when I tried them on that I was halfway con­sid­er­ing going to bed with them on. In fact, I did take a nap with the Kin­varas on my feet, but I did­n’t plan to—I just fell asleep on the recliner.

The sales expe­ri­ence at Sports Base­ment was pos­i­tive. After I tried on the Kin­varas I point­ed to the «we do gait analy­sis» sign and asked for the sales­per­son­’s analy­sis. He did not do any­thing like a thor­ough analy­sis, but he told me that I am not a supina­tor as I had thought (judg­ing by my tread wear pat­terns) but a mild prona­tor. He and I had talked about my shoe his­to­ry ear­li­er and so I asked him what his «diag­no­sis» meant for my choice of shoe.

He said, «if you buy into the idea that you need shoes to cor­rect for your feet’s habits, you should keep on with the sta­bi­liz­ing shoes. But if you want to avoid injury by improv­ing your form and let­ting your feet devel­op bet­ter habits, you’ve already made a good choice,» mean­ing the Kinvaras.

He also cau­tioned me not to jump right in to run­ning in these full time. He sug­gest­ed I alter­nate with my old shoes. I’ll do that if I can resist the allure. 

This first run in the Kin­varas did­n’t go so well as I’d hoped. I spent most of the run adjust­ing my stride and foot­fall pat­terns. I’m try­ing to keep my cadence up to about 180 foot­falls per minute, focus­ing on pulling my rear foot up and try­ing to land with my weight on the fore­foot. I’ve been told not to run on the balls of my feet but I’m not real­ly sure how else to allow the arch of my foot absorb the impact so that my knees don’t take the brunt of it.

I also haven’t run as much this week and start­ed the run off by going uphill. That may have been part of it. In any case, I broke down and took a walk break before I got to the top of Potrero. The whole run felt like a strug­gle. I don’t think I can attribute it to the shoes; it just felt like I had an off day.

I did notice that down­hill run­ning is eas­i­er in the Kin­varas. With a less-pro­nounced heel than most run­ning shoes (4mm dif­fer­ence between the thick­ness of the sole at the heel and at the forefoot—most run­ning shoes have more like an 18mm dif­fer­ence) it did­n’t feel like I was smash­ing my heel into the pave­ment with every step, and run­ning down­hill is eas­i­er on my knees than it ever has been. That by itself makes the Kin­varas worth the price (MSRP $90.00 and I paid $64.00) so long as there is no hid­den dis­ad­van­tage to run­ning with them.