gwax's rumblings

A cou­ple months ago, I bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes, specif­i­cally a pair of KSOs. I’ve been wear­ing the shoes pretty reg­u­larly and, to be entirely hon­est, they are prob­a­bly the most com­fort­able shoes that I have ever worn. The shoes don’t pro­vide sup­port in the way typ­i­cal shoes do so it takes some get­ting used to and rebuild­ing strength in mus­cles that have been under-utilized since child­hood. Once your feet get used to the FiveFingers, it becomes a truly fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence to redis­cover walk­ing, jog­ging, sprint­ing, and the like.

Additionally, recent research shows that bare­foot run­ning is low impact in a way that shod run­ning is not. Apparently, run­ning bare­foot changes your gait, which I can anec­do­tally confirm.

Worth not­ing, in the neg­a­tives col­umn, you can­not wear tra­di­tional socks with FiveFingers and they will start to smell if you wear them reg­u­larly with­out socks. FiveFingers shoes are machine wash­able, which is an option, or one can pur­chase toe socks from Injini (or oth­ers), which is the solu­tion that I’ve cho­sen. Sadly, the toe socks solu­tion is some­what expen­sive but, for me, I’m suf­fi­ciently hooked on my FiveFingers that it’s worth it to me.