The other day I was visiting my almost 87 year old dad. He does not run (I don’t think he has run a step since his mid 30s), but he does walk 2-7km daily. So he tells me that he was at my local running shoe store and they sold him a black set of “high stack shoes”.
I looked a bit more carefully and his black clown shoes (as slowman called them back in 2011) were in fact Hoka Clifton9, which happens to be my daily training shoe these days.
In those articles, slowman’s thesis was the Ironman marathon is not “a marathon” but it is the same think like the back half of an ultra marathon and Hoka was already all over that market.
In those articles he talks about the ridicule of showing up looking like a clown in the high stack shoes. Now they are everywhere!!!
I think by Rio 2016, 5 years after Dan wrote about this theme Nike had the clown shoes with carbon on their athletes. Now you don’t see anyone running in anything else. And now these high stack shoes are on everyone doing their personal daily ultas (which could be like the short walks my dad does).
I don’t know if it is slowman’s ability to spot things that have a solution gap and come up with something that fills it (tri geometry, tri wetsuits, etc), or his ability to evangelize, but it’s kind of cool rewinding 14 years to see his predictions on this shake out.
I remember meeting the two guys that started HOKA and talking to dan about their new fangled shoe. Think at the time they were a couple million dollar company, and now it is nearly a 2 billion dollar brand and still has high double digit growth most quarters…
And like you pointed out, virtually every shoe company has copied the “clown” shoe and other companies are much like HOKA in that is also their brand…Wish I had held onto my stock, got a good profit but nothing compared to what it is today…
The problem is my personal daily ulta is barely 7 km, but on a trailing 14 day window I am roughly finishing the last 7 km of a 100km ultra…but its takes me two weeks to do 100km. But hey, I am taking credit for that (and that’s a good two weeks…more like three weeks normally)…clown shoes and all.
We could add a new category in 100/100 for clown-less shoe people who do it the the old fashioned way
Hoka are still the only clown shoes (alternatively geriatric, nurse, or chef shoes). Most brands figured out quickly how to make a good looking high-stack shoe. Hoka is seemingly always 3-4 years behind.
Together with high stack, other brands simultaneously introduced foam which benefit from it. Just a few days ago i saw a video TRE with the Hoka rep who was so excited to share (even asked for a drumroll) news about an upgraded foam. It was supercritical… EVA.
OK, I am not talking so much about what they have now. What you are saying is like bashing blackberry for starting the smartphone market. Just because a company comes up with a new idea does not mean it can’t be refined.
However, I would point out that one of three of the themes of the early Hokas, namely low ramp, stable platform and the tapered toe off, they have stayed true to. Other shoes have come in with overall clown like thickness (3.8 rear, 3,0 forefoot), but by using squishy foams their shoes are unstable (@Slowman in his 2011 reviews talks about turning ankles previously and being positively surprised by how the early Hokas would ride and that was because they were built for trail running).
Most of the follower entrants into the clown shoe market (since we are on that theme), are not ideal even for turning a corner at high speed (ex Alistair brownlee wiping out at Dubai T100 finals on a downhill with a turn on Adidas Supershoes).
Some of the squishy foam options work against the biomechanical benefits of the orginal Hoka designs
In any case, both Hoka and slowman were ahead of the time. If other brands make better looking shoes it MAY also be because the foot is not sitting inside the sole and rather the foot is sitting on top of the sole and in any conventional footwear our feet sit on top and therefore our eyes may be more aesthetically trained to view a shoe with feet sitting on top as more attractive (beauty is in the eye of the beholder). I think from the dawn of time, for whatever reason humans have been trying to make their feet (particularly womens) look more narrow. Thus the ridicule of early Hoka users.
to a point. but one thing i will mention - as i have thought a lot about this - is that the (very surprising to me in the beginning) anti-ankle-turning feature of HOKAs is due to a kind of “independent suspension” of any part of the shoe that encounters a lever. what i mean is: you’re running along and your forefoot hits a rock you didn’t see. normally that levers the foot over. twisted ankle. a HOKA’s cushion sucks up that rock and the shoe doesn’t lever to the side. like a car, too much squish in the suspension bottoms the suspension out. but not enough is bad as well.
for my entire running life i’ve had dodgy ankles but that became a non-problem with HOKA and i do 100 percent of my running offroad.
No I just prefer the aesthetic of shoe last to so much “rubber”. Its not the “foot on top”…because, at first I didn’t even realize that the foot was “slung” in a bathtub of rubber.
I think by virtue of the foot being inside a bathtub of rubber, firstly there is less ankle turning (function) but because of it being inside, the entire foot + shoe complex looks a lot wider and there is a reason fashion models don’t walk around with flippers on their feet (or clown shoes). Our eyes view these forms on our feet as unattractive. This applies to both sexes. My dress shoes are painful to wear in my EE feet but they are built narrow tapered for aesthetics (which is why I almost never wear them !!!)
The question is how do you make footwear that is encasing your foot in a bathtub of rubber for the anti ankle turning feature look good to the eye…or do we even care?
Interestingly I recently added Newton distance back into my rotation in addition to Hoka Clifton9.
I was finding with a number of my shoes I was not actively using my lower limb as a spring (like when you skip rope) and was letting the shoe be the spring for me. The downside is with a degree of overstriding no matter what the shock absorption was of the shoe, I was having stress go up to my pelvis that should not that was mucking up my lower back injuries from multiple accidents.
Now I am using newton for my short “technique runs” and Clifton for the longer ones carrying over the mechanics from the Newton given their propriceptive active feedback.
Interestingly in one of the articles I linked to above, slowman actually said the Hokas were like a Newton if you taped over all the lugs and made it smooth and then added a layer of foam, so you can run in Hokas exactly as you would in Newtons (both also have 4mm ramp), however in the Newtons the shoe will tell us if we are pounding the pavement in a sloppy manner versus running like one would skip rope with knee over ball of foot and pre loading and storing before push off versus just slapping down onto the ground and losing the stored energy for push off
That’s because these brands used a tall stack of fast foams to make fast shoes. Hoka made wide shoes so that nurses don’t roll their ankles running to the ER. (mostly kidding around)
Ali slipped when he stepped on lose gravel. He didn’t roll his ankle or anything stack/foam related, though your point stands. Other brands focused on making fast shoes for racing using innovative materials. Hoka went a different route for a different target market.
If you look a little better you will see that it was me who wrote these pieces and not Dan.
Due to English not being my native language Dan did the last edit to remove grammatical errors.
Dan more or less explained this at the bottom of those articles.
I’m pretty sure Dan didn’t run in the Newton’s as I did at that time.
Apologies, but while I recall you wrote several footwear articles there was not a clear way for me to realize your part in this. Here is what I saw at the top, but putting that aside Dan was a pretty active advocate of everything Hoka back in 2011 (I think 2011 was also the last year Kona was won on Newtons by Crowie):
Hi BigBoyND, Hokas made low ramp, high stack padded shoes for ultras in which you don’t roll ankles easily. it turns out they happened to be good for Ironman racing (at least compared to racing flats from the 201x years and if I recall Jan ran with a standard ASICs racing flat for his 2019 win too…and then he wiped out and hurt himself in a high stack shoe in the rain during tri battle royale in 2021). The fact that they are stable for trail running also makes them good for “nurses running around” (thus my title of this thread that clown shoes are everywhere).
Now having said that is it a bad thing that Hoka sell a pile of shoes into the day in day out training shoe market + lifestyle market + seniors market + nurse’s market + loading dock worker market?
Do they need to compete for maybe 10000 feet in the pointy end tri market and maybe 100,0000 more (I just picked numbers, please feel free to correct them) from the marathon market? There are 10 brands chasing the fast racer market. They may not be worth chasing
