The North Face Ultra Trail Shoe Review

  This is a guest review by David Henry. David is a 29 year old husband and father of 3 young children. He has completed over 20 ultra marathon events as well as many other shorter races. Some of the notable races he has completed include The Pike’s Peak Marathon, the White River 50 mile, […]

5 Things I Learned From Running A Trail Race Last Weekend

It’s been a long time since I’ve run a long trail race. I paced for about 7 miles last year at the Vermont 100 (my runner dropped), but the last trail race longer than a 5K that I ran for myself was the HAT Run 50K back in 2011. I forgot how much fun they […]

The Return of the New Balance MT101 Trail Shoe

I’ve run in a lot of shoes over the past 5 years since starting this blog. Some were memorable, others not so much. And there are a few that rose above the rest and found a special place in my heart. The original Nike Free 3.0. The Brooks Launch. The original Saucony Kinvara and the […]

Inov-8 OROC 280 Trail Shoe Guest Review

by Carsten Hoever The Inov-8 OROC 280 is a shoe I never wanted to buy. After two winter running seasons with way too many sidewalks, roads, and even trails covered in snow-turned-slush-turned-solid-ice I was fed up with running on the tread mill. What I needed for the coming winter was a shoe with enough traction […]

Saucony Peregrine 4 Trail Shoe Review by BikerNate

It’s not very often that there is a bright side to getting injured.  While visiting Performance Health Spine and Sport Therapy to have my Ant. Tib. Tendonitis worked on by Brett, I had a chance to visit with Pete and geek out about shoes for a while.  He asked me if I had any interest […]

B2R Trail Performance Shoe: Guest Review by Christian Messerschmidt

I am writing this review of the brand new B2R Trail Performance shoe as I recover from a 50K trail race last weekend. In that race I broke two paramount rules of long-distance running: 1. “Do not go out too fast”- I did, hung with the lead pack for a while, and crashed and burned […]

Scott Trail Rocket: Guest Review by George Harris

The Trail Rocket is a new racing trail shoe from Scott running. For those of you who don’t know about Scott, they are an outdoor sports company (skiing, mountain biking, motorsports) company that has been in the running business since 2006. Their shoes have evolved considerably (in a good way!) over the past few years, […]

Topo MT (Mountain Trainer) Review: A Non-Tabi Topo Trail Shoe

Last year Tony Post made a bit of a splash when he left his position as CEO of Vibram USA to launch his own footwear company. Post led Vibram through a period of time when the Fivefingers line of “toe-shoes” were red hot, and left just as VFF sales seemed to be headed off a […]

Biker Nate Reviews the Hoka Rapa Nui 2 Trail and Tarmac

Nate Sanel just posted reviews of the Hoka Rapa Nui Tarmac 2 and Rapa Nui Trail 2 over on his blog. I hope to get a pair of these to try as my first Hoka (I have the Mafate but only ran in it once – not bad, but way too much shoe for me), […]

Nate’s Top 5 Trail Running Shoes of 2013

Nate just posted his top trail shoes of 2013 over on his blog Biker Nate. He helpfully included a list of all of the trail shoes that he ran in last year, and narrowed that down to his five favorites. To give you a bit of perspective, Nate is a high-mileage trail runner who specializes […]

Dirty Runner: Skechers GoRun Ultra Review

One of the best things about writing this column has been the opportunity I’ve had to build personal relationships with shoe companies.  The one that I work with the most is Skechers.  By now I should not have to convince anybody that they are a “real” performance running shoe manufacturer, so I won’t…  For me, […]

Saucony Peregrine 3 Trail Shoe Review

My last two runs have been mostly on trails down by the Merrimack River. I like those trails for shoe testing since they include lots of surface variety – sand, a bit of mud, roots, rocks, leaf cover, etc. There’s also a good stretch of crushed rock that I can take if I decide to […]

Merrell AllOut Rush and AllOut Fuse Running Shoe Previews

(Update: I have now reviewed the Merrell AllOut Rush here) In the comments section of my post yesterday on why I run in minimal shoes, the Merrell AllOut collection came up. I haven’t posted much about this line yet, but I got a chance to try them on back in May and I’m really looking […]

Newton BoCo AT and Distance Elite Running Shoe Previews

Newton Running has historically been characterized by a fairly small collection of shoes. You have the Distance, Gravity, Motion, Sir Isaac/Lady Isaac and a few others, and short of incremental updates you pretty much know what you’re going to get. In the past few months, however, Newton has announced a bunch of new additions. First […]

Dirty Runner: Pearl Izumi EM N1 Trail Shoe Review

I’ve been struggling to write this review. I received this pair of Pearl Izumi EM N1 Trail shoes in May and have run 111 miles in them so far (Disclosure: These shoes were sent to me free of charge as a media sample courtesy of PI). I love these shoes, but when thinking about what […]