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I recently got a pair of Saucony Kinvaras, so I only have a few run in them now, but
I'm going to give you my initial thoughts on them and then I'll follow up in a month
or two once I've gotten a few more miles on them, and have a better idea of what they're
about.
But just for my initial impressions, the Kinvara is the new naturalist shoe from Saucony. They
are supposed to flex and move a little bit more like your natural foot would.
It's certainly not minimal by any stretch of the imagination, but it does have a very
low heel to toe differential. It's only a few millimeters, and the way that it flexes
is a little bit more towards the forefoot where your foot will be going. It doesn't
have quite as much as my trail shoes, in terms of flexion this way, but I do like how they
feel.
They're very comfortable. They have a nice wide toe-box so my feet don't feel constricted
in them at all, but it's still nice and tight around the ankles, so I don't feel like my
feet are going to fall out of them.
One thing I do notice though, is even though there's a very small heel-toe differential,
you still have a solid almost 2 centimeters of height between you and the ground. So putting
them on, since I've been wearing much lower shoes lately, I felt a lot taller and it's
a lot more cushioning than I'm used to. That definitely took a few runs to get used to.
My first couple of runs, it wasn't uncomfortable but I wasn't sure if I would like them or
not. I got out for a 9 miler this evening though, and I got used to them pretty quick.
You won't be able to feel the road a lot through them, but they're not uncomfortable when I'm
running.
I'm definitely not going to be bringing them back. I'm going to give them a fair shake,
we'll see how long that they last. That's about the only thing that I've heard about
these shoe that people don't like, is that they don't last as long as some other pairs
do. But I will judge that for myself once I've had an opportunity to get a few hundred
miles in them.