We have been selling them and so far the feedback has been nothing but positive as a daily trainer.
Cut and pasted this for letsrun.com
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?board=1&id=556239&thread=554219
OK. You clicked on this link because you are either in a Red State or Blue State, and you have questions about the Free. I have answers for you, but only if you decide to check your 30 second attention span and read.
Your Tester:
Even though I am not in the biz anymore, I have sold running shoes from the Air 180 to the Zoom Elite. I have been putting in around 70 per week about 30% on the roads and 70% on the trail. Before I got the Frees, I was running almost exclusively in the Montrail Masai. Before that, it was something like 15 consecutive pairs of Supernova and Boston Classics. I do not work for Nike, and for the record have not bought a pair of Nike’s in over seven years. I got hurt really bad once in the Air Alphas and never looked back until now. I was once described as injury prone, and have chalked up some healthy stress fractures in the past.
I have been running in the Free for four weeks and have run almost all my workouts in them with the exception of my long days. The longest I have run in them is two hours. Before my Free purchase, I did do a couple runs barefoot on the beach.
The Ride:
The Free is a truly amazing shoe. This shoe actually does require your foot to wake up and respond. It is like this: Imagine trying to hold a cup of coffee wearing hockey gloves versus wearing surgical gloves. These shoes are light responsive, and require your feet to join the party. Tearing up hills feels great because it feels like you can recruit extra foot muscles for extra grip; and tearing down hills feels good because you know that there is no chance of rolling an ankle. The serious curvy downhills were a little tricky, because the upper is pretty crappy and doesn’t hold the foot in the shoebed that well. I have also noticed that the upper tends to stretch out quite a bit, so if you get a pair, make it a bit snug when you walk out of the store.
McManus: This shoe is nothing like running in flats.
You would expect that the body would break down as there is hardly anything between you and pavement, but I did not find this to be true. In fact, I can say that there is a noticeable decrease in overall muscle fatigue, and those first couple steps out of bed in the morning don’t sting like they used to. For the last three months, I had been nursing a calf injury that I was having a tough time shaking. By all traditional accounts, the Free should have aggravated it. Sure enough, one week later, the calf problem had all but disappeared. Then I slapped on my Masais for my long day, and the hurt was back in full effect. Other observations: I felt like I was running taller.
Just in case I didn’t say this forcefully enough, I actually missed the Frees when I wasn’t wearing them. They make me feel fast and smooth in a way that is typically reserved for commercials.
Concerns about the shoe:
This bears repeating. The upper—blows. The grooves in the midsole—I hope I don’t step in anything because it would be hell to get out. It is not bad on the trails, but I would challenge the Nike crew to make a trail version, because that is where the Free really shines. I was concerned about the durability, but like I said, the impact is distributed throughout my body, so the shoe itself becomes less important.
While it was designed to simulate barefoot running, it does not fully accomplish the goal. If you check out the video on the Nike Free site, you can hear the developer say that they took wear patterns of people running barefoot and a designed a shoe that matched that. Not quite the same, but close.
A couple of side notes:
Go sniff around the NikeBiz webpage. The word that should jump out at you is Innovation. The obvious question is: how can you claim to be innovative when all of your shoes have Air? Like I said, I haven’t bought a pair of Nikes in years, but these are truly innovative shoes, and I ponied up the 85 bucks to buy them. Someone at Nike fought the good fight, and got this shoe built and this in itself is a remarkable feat. So a word to all you Let’s Runners who are all talking about the minimal shoe stuff—this is your opportunity. I don’t care if you think that the Cubato was handed down by God, you need to go buy a pair of Frees and get your friends to buy them too. Because I guarantee you that this minimalist shoe will die on the vine if the numbers don’t support its production. But if they do sell, expect to see the Free Trail, Free Racer, the adidas Free Cubed. You get my point.
So is the Free a “Training Tool” or an actual running shoe? I could find nothing in the literature to suggest it either way. My guess is that this is either a Marketing malfunction or they are being intentionally ambiguous. I talked to people at some of the local running stores and at Niketown, and there was consistent confusion. It seems that some of the reps are spreading the word that it is just a tool, but the people who actually buy the shoe actually run in it. This ambiguity will probably kill sales, and scare people away from the shoe. I think that if they gave all the HS kids in Beaverton a free pair and started telling the right story, the Free could be the biggest revolution to hit the industry since the waffle racer. Right now, people are afraid to actually sell it.
Speaking of which, adidas recently announced a shoe with a microchip that changes the shoe as you run. It is capable of making something like 1000 calculations about your footfall per second and adjusts the midsole accordingly. Memo to adidas: you lost this round. Nike made a shoe that makes hundreds of thousands of calculations per half second, and they did it by letting the body do the job it was designed to do.
Inside Track: The Free is rated R for confusing language, but could change the industry if people actually bought it.
