Lunas v.s. Hokas
Sometime after our Arizona/Utah road trip last October I managed to inflame my peroneus brevis tendon attachment to the fifth metatarsal bone and this thnig has been dogging me ever since. I took an entire month off running and tried natural (Hammer Tissue Rejuvenator & Scott Jurek’s Starburst Anti-Inflamatory Smoothie) remedies as well as good old Vitamin-I with little success. X-Rays show no stress fracture and I really did not want to do the course of oral steroids that were prescribed so I just took it easy. After a month I was going crazy and began using a Precor Open Stride machine at the gym to keep up aerobic conditioning without impact. Then I began running again and I noticed that it really didn’t get any worse running or any better not running so I started working back up to an average 5 mile daily run.
Then I’d hit a rock. Hitting a rock or stepping on a root just wrong would cause the thing to flare up completely again and hurt like hell for a day or two before it settled down again. Of course I was running in either my 10mm sole Luna Leadville sandals or my pretty minimal Inov-8 Trailroc 245s, both of which offer little protection against whacking a rock and you feel pretty much everything under foot wearing either. I had no ‘real’ shoes left for daily wear or running since I’d gone totally minimal over the last few years. I finally ran a pretty rocky Grand Ridge trail with my beefiest shoes which were Inov-8 Roclite 285s, they had a bit of padding and seemed to keep my foot from getting re-injured during the 5 mile run.
This got me to thinking, if a few mm of cushion helped what would 2″ of cushion do? This is the Hoka One One shoe philosophy, you have a giant cushion of foam in a shoe that looks like a tank and allows you to run over rocks and roots without really feeling them. These were suggested to me by Roger Michel of Evergreen Trail Runs as a possibility and I’d had other former minimalist runner friends switch to Hokas after dealing with some type of foot injury. I did a bit of research on the web and found that several people had used Hokas to recover from stress fractures, plantar faciitis and several other foot injuries.
I headed to The Balanced Athlete to try these out. I did a test run in the Stinson EVO Tarmac and was surprised at how light these shoes were for their size and how easy it was to maintain my forefoot strike with them. The Stinson’s have the 4mm heel drop as my Inov-8 TrailRocs, they are just overall much higher. They are also relatively light, the Stinson weighs in at 295 grams which is heavy by my standards but only 10g more than my Invo-8 Roclites and still lighter by the majority of real trail shoes. The cushioning felt good though I was testing on pavement instead of trail. Unfortunately they did not have my size in the Stinson EVO trail model but I did find one pair left in 10.5 on eBay and ordered them that day. The Hokas just showed up and I plan to run in them the rest of the week and see how they do, I’ll be posting a full review after a week or so after I get some miles on them.