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.
Here are two reviews from @Slowman in 2011
Mafate
https://www.slowtwitch.com/running/hoka-one-one-mafate/
Bondi
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.