Lately, I’ve struggled a little bit trying to get back in to the groove of regular writing. Between the balancing act of trying do things whenever my child is napping, and the fact that I haven’t really found a good rhythm or inspiration to write about things, I’ve often times found myself sitting at my laptop with nothing much going on, other than scrolling through news sites and feeds to look for something to inspire me before ultimately killing time on YouTube watching chiropractor popping clips or scenes from Marvel movies.
But then I saw an ad, of all things, for Nike’s Alphafly shoes. Supposedly, they’re causing somewhat of a stir in the running community, and I guess there are some tryhard enthusiasts out there who think they’re illegal or performance enhancing or something along those lines, but I can’t really care enough to delve deeper because I can’t really get over the fact of how fucking hideous they look. With their gigantic, bulbous and protruding soles, all I can think of is that they’re basically the modern-day equivalent of the jump shoes from that one episode of Seinfeld.
Seriously, my mouth curled into a wtf face after I saw these things. I gave a cursory google search to see what they were even capable of, but there’s so much noise and chatter about the legality of these things in organized marathons, that I can’t actually find any credible information on what the whole point of these shoes actually are, nor do I feel like expending the effort to dig any deeper.
Regardless, they’re basically Seinfeld shoes, visually. And much like Kramer was pegged as looking like a special needs person when going out in public in them, I imagine anyone wearing these that isn’t actively in a competitive run would probably look similarly having these thick-ass shoes on while wearing jeans or ordinary pants. But given the fact that they’re like 3” off the ground, I imagine a lot of height-conscious people might do it anyways, to make themselves look taller. That’s the tradeoff however, for wanting to look taller than less mentally capable, I suppose.
