The Dead Zone

As I continue to narrow in my ideal shoe rotation, I'm currently down to 2 shoes. The Evo is my primary running shoe and my other shoe is the Nike Air Zoom Streak XC. Of course, I own many other shoes, and many more than I care to reference. In fact, my wife told me I have more shoes than her, which isn't a good sign. In any event, there are a lot of shoe options that fall between the Evo and the Nike XC's but I've found that the closer I get to the Evo, I just opt to run in the Evo. Conversely, the closer I get to the XC, I find other shoes lack either the protection I need on trails or lack the range to be used on both hard and soft surfaces, so I end up back in the Nike XC's as they have great range and function well on concrete, asphalt, packed dirt trails and roads, and more difficult rocky trails.

I call the zone between the Evo and the Nike XC, the "dead zone." If a shoe falls in the dead zone, they generally don't provide much worth to me other than to be used as specialty shoes. For example, I own the Inov-8 F-Lite 195's and they are great on more difficult trials but do not perform well on hard surfaces so that puts them at a disadvantage to the Nike XC which can function on both surfaces, and cost half that of the F-Lite 195 with the Nike XC only costing $49.95.

It goes without saying that the Evo is the best minimalist shoe in my opinion. It's an incredible shoe and works well on any surface, until you start running on more difficult trials but the Evo wasn't designed for difficult trails. Hint, hint, Terra Plana, you may want to consider designing a trial shoe.

HHH