I’ve been using some Lem’s boulder boots and some wildling Arni shoes for a little while and this seems to be a great way to do most situations well but there’s an occasional few times where I think some other shoes with some other benefit would do well in a specific situation.
In the past I didn’t understand why some people have so many shoes but I’m starting to see why some might do that, like I’d imagine 4 pairs one for each season wouldn’t be a terrible idea as long as they cover enough points on a scale in a gradual way between sunny concrete and wet mud.
I like all the wildling shoes a lot but I think they are all pretty sameish besides a handful and some of that is to do with the bottom of their shoes always being pretty much the same, like no form of serious wet or winter or mud shoes would be from them simply because none of their shoes besides the one pair that looks like big classic yellow rain boots would have the right tread for those conditions.
At the moment my Arni’s are about done but ithink I could probably squeeze the rest of this year out of them and then my boulder boots from lems will last a long time still.
I do a bit of running and I find that is an important factor for shoes in all the conditions too because you can have those classic yellow rain boots that would do fine in a lot of rough conditions but you couldn’t run in them too well I don’t think.
Sometimes I wear the toe socks from injiji, sometimes I go no socks, the barefoot shoes from wildling are close enough to clothes for your feet that going without socks tends to be ok but not always. They say not to put them in the washer but they have done fine which is nice because I can treat it literally like clothes.
If you’re wearing shoes you aren’t barefoot. The expression “barefoot shoes” makes about as much sense as “naked shirts.”
Its a term that a relatively large number of businesses and people have agreed to call shoes that have zero drop and thin soles and often but not always, more flexible upper materials that are also shaped to give your toes more wiggle room so your toes actually splay outward correctly when you take steps.
Feet have a built in spring system that activates when we put enough force on it usually by going at a brisk walking pace or while running called an ankle which allows more momentum to be conserved with each step as well as less load on the rest of the body. Barefoot, also called minimalist shoes, allow people to use their feet correctly which happens to strengthen a variety of feet muscles around the toes and builds some more hard skin on the bottoms of feet so that if you step on things its less likely to hurt as well as holds onto more momentum with each step by being more dense and at the outskirts of where the momentum is going.
Highly recommend more people try some, even if only just one time for a month.
I compare barefoot shoes to a manual vs automatic transmission, its technically not a better shoe because shoes with a lot of cushion will conserve more momentum in a more ideal location like certain automatic transmissions (and yes some shoes will make you go faster and so some have been banned from races) but what a barefoot shoe will do, much like how a manual transmission will give you a sense of how the drivetrain is coming together to propel the car and it strengthens your ability to handle more environmental situations with more efficiency, which is very good for our joints long term if we can keep doing it the right way.
This does mean that we can wear regular shoes with the knowledge of how to move our feet and reap the benefits of both, but we should aim to strike a balance between a barefoot shoe and a regular shoe with a lot of cushion because both have their ups and downs and we dont have to choose between them in many cases.