Fivefingers KSO Black
I just recently bought myself five fingers, which is a new type of footwear. Unfortunately they are a bit hard to get, depending on what country you are living in, but the guys from five fingers try to sell them world wide as soon as possible. Since I like innovative things and needed a new pair of “shoes” I wanted to give them a try.
First of all they are really very comfortable to wear, like a pair of socks with rubber soles. But if you haven’t been running around barefoot for all your life, you should give your feet a bit of time to adjust to the increased strain. Just as the instruction manual says, the muscles in and around your feet are more heavily used since there is no support from the “shoe” itself.
I believe the point in wearing the five fingers is to use your feet without all the fancy support delivered by modern running, hiking, and other types of shoes they never really needed anyways. Mankind ran around barefoot for thousands of years so why shouldn’t we today.
Here are a couple of close up pictures:
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- That’s how they look when you wear them
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- That’s the forefoot part of the sole which has quite a good grip on most terrain. Wet gully covers or wet metal in general is quite slippery even with fivefingers.
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- That’s the complete sole of a fivefinger which leaves interesting footprints on soft paths ;-)
So far they are brand new, I can’t complain about their built quality and they look quite sturdy. You’ll find the specs on the five fingers homepage. I’ll write more about them after I have worn them for a couple of months. So check back some time again.
Welcome to the VFF club! Note that though VFFs are getting a lot of adopters who want to run in them, they are probably the most versatile footwear around — and you can do most things you’d do in normal shoes in FiveFingers.
Anyway, I’ll just echo your point about taking it slow — it takes a remarkably long time to 1) unteach all the bad habits you’ve acquired from wearing your typical shoe — VFFs will change the way you run *and* walk 2) rehabilitate the atrophied foot, ankle, and calf muscles that have been weakened from a long time being stuck in the “casts” that are modern footwear!
Enjoy them — and beware, the more you wear them, the less you want to wear regular shoes!