oh hi there! i come to you with shoe review 42.

(i don’t know if i’ve reviewed shoes that many times or if it just seems like that many times.)

in a quest for a comfy, cushy, low-drop shoe that has a nice room toebox, i think i’ve purchased and returned 5 pairs of shoes over the past 2 months.

when i found out that asics had a lower drop shoes than the last time i’d worn them, i decided to give them another go. a low-drop shoe means the distance between the heel and the front as far as how far off the ground. a zero-drop shoe is like going barefoot. high heel would have a ginormous heel drop. my asics i wore for years had a 12mm drop. when i started having super weird foot problems a couple years ago, a lower-drop shoe helped out a ton. the hokas i’d been running in for the past year or so have a 5mm drop, but the toe box is just a bit too narrow for my tastes. the wide is super loose in the heel.

so the asics novablast had an 8mm drop, which i tried and actually ran one run in, and it just was too much of a drop. then i tried out the magic speeds, which have a steel plate (!) in them at a reasonable(ish) cost. the drop was excellent. the space for my toes was good. but they had NO arch support at all. so back to the asics factory those two pairs of shoes went.

after reading for years about altras, which are a zero drop shoe, i thought that now was the time to try them out. they look like no other running shoe out there – probably because they actually look like your foot shape.

the first pair i got had medium cushion and high support, which is excellent for trail running. i love these in the woods. i got a second pair with high cushion and high support, but the 11 was a half size too small, and this company doesn’t make an 11.5???? what legit running shoe company doesn’t do that!! so have a pair of the men’s shoe on their way here, and they should be here tomorrow. i’m hopeful that they should work well, even if they aren’t the more fun colors of the women’s shoe.

ok, so the grey/lime isn’t so bad.

i hope i run like the wind! because ragnar training has begun and i’m going to run 2 runs this saturday in the 70º weather*!!!

*ugh i really want to write about our stupid hot weather and climate change but i feel like i will get so severely depressed.