Tag: Vibram Five Fingers

Muse in concert, Dallas 10-12-09

Yesterday I had quite an adventure getting to the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium to see Muse open for U2. So come along as I regale you with a tale of deception, heroism, and triumph.

Since I was going to the Dallas show and I live in and know people from Houston, I decided to go alone. It is hard to justify a 12+ hour trip (as I had to go out of my way to Nacogdoches and then headed back there after the concert) with a $100 ticket for 45 minutes worth of music to a non-obsessive Muse fan, so I’m really hoping for a real US tour next year so I can actually go with a few people.

To set the stage, I had the day off yesterday but decided I would work a full day today (Tuesday) which meant I had to be back in Nacogdoches to wake up at 7AM. As I was starting from Houston, I had to wake up at 8AM to shower and get ready and around 9AM I left to go get a haircut. Unbeknownst to me as the Sport Clips website said the place opened at 9, I arrived a full hour before they actually opened. Luckily on the door they had the correct hours, and thus I left to Walmart to pick up a few things that we needed before I left. At this point I returned home, waited a little bit, and then left for Sport Clips again at 10AM. Got out around 10:45 and then proceeded to go home to finish packing.

It was at this point that my wife asked if we could have Taco Bell for lunch, under the assumption that I had the time to stick around to eat lunch (I didn’t). So I did go get Taco Bell and ate with her, and finally left just after 12PM which was about 30 minutes after I wanted to leave. In retrospect I should have just dropped off Taco Bell for her to eat and gone ahead anyway, but that’s in the past now.

So first I need to drive to Nacogdoches to drop off everything since I have about $3000 worth of computer/electronic equipment, XBox and games, clothes, etc. that I travel with and I’m not leaving that in plain sight in the back seat of my car in an unguarded arena parking lot. This went relatively smoothly and I arrive just before 2:30. At this point I race to get everything inside, use the bathroom, take a 5 minute breather, and hit the road again. Now I need to drive up to Kilgore, TX where I hop on I-20 West towards Dallas. Since I don’t have the time I wanted by leaving late, I’m relegated to stopping at a McDonalds briefly for bathroom and some food somewhere along the highway. Things go smoothly until I hit Dallas.

And then I hit what can only be described as a test of willpower and patience from God himself in the form of massive Monday rush hour traffic, coupled with construction. At this point it is 5:30 and I see I only have about 20 miles to go, and Google Maps on my iPhone is showing that the drive should only take 30 minutes. That’s not going to happen, and in the middle of the traffic I actually have to stop to use a bathroom in a gas station – you know, the kind in the ‘run down’ area of the city where the clerk is behind bulletproof glass. So whilst I am literally pissing, I am figuratively shitting myself wondering if the hours I have driven will all go to waste if I am stuck in traffic while Muse is playing.

So finally the traffic opens up and I’m now about 15 miles from the stadium and it is just about 6PM. I realize the Devils game is about to start and switch from my iPhone to XM radio to listen to the start of the game, where I get to hear the refs blow bench minor call on the Capitals for too many men on the ice, only for the Caps to score afterwards within about 30 seconds. At this point I’m gunning it and just trying to get to the nearest parking lot so I can rush inside. I start to see those portable LED signs that are saying “CONCERT PARKING NEXT EXIT” so I take the first one. I figured it was pretty impossible to fuck this up since all I had to do was follow traffic and I got to a parking lot easily enough. By the time I’m getting out of my car, the Caps are already up 2-0 and the Devils are on the road (and I mean, come on, it’s the Capitals – the guys with Alex Ovechkin), so I’m going into the concert figuring the Devils are on the way to a loss with a Devils t-shirt on.

I just want to comment on the absurd prices of parking. If you look at this picture, I basically pulled into the lot on the right from where it was taken. That is a pretty good walk to the stadium, and I wound up paying $30! I know some people who often go to concerts/sporting events will probably laugh at my ignorance on the subject of parking prices, but that is fucking absurd whether it is the norm or not.

So anyway, now I need to walk to the stadium. By the time I got out of my car, it is just about 6:30PM. I throw on the Devils practice jersey I brought with me as it was a little cold. Within 100 feet of walking from my car I get boo’d by someone driving by. Fair enough, I’m not in Jersey.

Now, to get to the stadium, first I have to cross over wet grass that has puddles in it since I am rushing to get directly to the stadium without any detours, which soaks my shoes. As I wear Vibram Five Fingers, that means my entire shoe basically became wet instantly since they are a bit like water shoes that you would wear on a jetski or something similar. After that it is like a good half mile of walking in wet shoes, which stay wet pretty much the rest of the night until I get home.

Now, mind you I had tried to scan over my ticket to see if there were any indications of where I should go as I was exiting my car, but the text about where my seat was ran into the part where it said “J” and above that was printed “Entry.” In all fairness, I wouldn’t have even though there was a “J” entrance since it is a fucking stadium – how do you need 10 entrances that would require the naming convention of Gates A through J? Worse, walking to the stadium as directed by the cops put me at entrance “A”. I realize they are turning people away and “A” seems like most are headed for this side entrance that has gates B-F or something like that. So I walk over there, the woman scans my ticket and I walk in. I check the time, see it is just about 10 minutes until 7PM when the show starts, and run into a bathroom real fast before exiting and looking at the main concourse with about 5 minutes to go. Since I arrived late, I haven’t had the chance to buy any alcohol of any kind, which winds up being beneficial that I am 100% sober for the challenge that lays ahead.

I head over and see the stairs leading down through the rows, but they don’t reach the field. Thus begins my fun trip trying to figure out the stadium layout.

Now, this stadium is best described as a labyrinth. Indeed, halfway through my trek I came upon a minotaur and had to fight it off. The most shocking thing to me is that at ground level (the main concourse) that I entered on, you CANNOT walk around the stadium fully. There are guarded areas for what I assume are VIPs. I talked to no less than 5 staff members who tried to direct me where to go. Some hadn’t worked concerts before. I had to piece together information from most of them to figure out where to go. My route is as follows:

Upon reaching the stairs at first, I talk to an older gentleman who tells me he has no idea how to get to the field level. I then walk over to the next guy checking tickets at the top of the stairs, who then informs me I should have received a wristband when my ticket was scanned. Luckily, he has them and gives me one, then tells me I need to walk around the concourse and look for “the ramp” and if I get lost to ask any staff to point me towards “the ramp.”

I then head that general direction until I have to pass a checkpoint that guards the VIP area. The guy looks at my ticket, of which does not grant me access, and tells me I need to go around the corner and take an elevator up to the 4th level.

So I go around the corner and find the elevator with a long line in front of it. I ask the next staff member who is standing near the elevator where to go, she directs me back towards guy #2 where there is a large flight of stairs. Luckily, she mentioned the section number once I got on the 400 level of where I need to be around to be on the “correct” side of the arena to begin my descent back down. I head up the stairs to what I thought was the “400 level” which is where I need to get to, only to find it is VIP suites. I ask the guards blocking the suites who tell me to go back downstairs. I do this and wind up looking back at the elevator and the woman who told me to go up them in the first place – I don’t even bother asking again.

By this time it is just past 7PM and I am about to resign myself to watching the backs of Muse performing from one of the viewing decks that are in the middle of these staircases. So I decide to go up the stairs, and as tons of people are on the first desk, I keep walking up the stairs hoping to find an open spot. Luckily this leads me 1 floor higher than I previously went. When I get up there, I recognize a giant ramp! Success!

Now if I could paint a picture, I’m in a t-shirt with a hockey jersey over it, inside a building that has tens of thousands of people who are generating heat, and I am about a step away from a full out gallop through the arena at the pace I’m keeping trying to get around so that I don’t miss Muse, which is the only reason I even came. I’m sweating hard, I can feel the t-shirt is soaked, but even worse I realize my boxers are getting bunched up and are chafing my legs. For a brief moment I start to have flashbacks of my teenage years when I went to Six Flags Great Adventure in Jersey once – I went on the water rides with flannel boxers on (I have never worn flannel boxers again). Luckily this memory subsides, and at the end of the day it wasn’t so bad, but do remember that my legs are chafed halfway through just trying to get to my seat, and then I still have to get back to my car.

Apparently the stadium does not name the concourse levels by the 100s (thus my confusion when I thought I reached the 400 level and only got suites), as I then had to walk up about 4 more floors on this giant ramp to get to the upper concourse, or the “400 level.” Immediately I realize I am on the right track as I can walk around the stadium without a problem. Thanks to the elevator lady, I get to the correct section and see a massive staircase that I am practically leaping down. Luckily after the massive staircase takes me down a few levels (much quicker than a giant ramp, mind you), there are escalators to take me all the way back down to the main concourse. Great! At this point I see a giant sign for “FLOOR SEATING” once I get to the bottom and immediately run that way. Take a left, and on my left is a guard watching a staircase.

I flash my wrist band and run down the stairs. This is about 3-4 more levels, with no signs, and it gets tinier as I go down further. Finally there is simply a door at the bottom, I open it and a female guard turns and faces me.

At this point I look around and realize I’m in an interior tunnel used for backstage and crew type stuff.

I sigh and say “Great, this isn’t the field.”

To my delight, she responds “Well, yes it is the field level, hold on though.”

Immediately I whip out my ticket in my left hand and the wristband on my right and say I just need to get to the field. She points over at a tunnel and tells me to head down, and as I turn the corner I can see the field. At this point I’ve been power walking in wet Vibram Five Finger shoes for about half an hour as it is 7:25 by the time I finally get there. As I’m standing I notice a small amount of pain on the ball of my left foot and realize I managed to get a blister. This is really the only time my VFFs have failed me – I don’t workout or run in them and am stationary most of the day, so seriously doing some hardcore walking in these things is something my feet were not used to, especially being wet. Anyways, I’m sweating profusely as I just practically had a workout in what effectively is a sweatshirt in a stadium that feels like it is 90 degrees from all the people.

Then 5 minutes later, the lights go out, “Dance of the Knights” comes on over the loudspeaker, and Muse make their entrance.

Quite honestly, it was fucking awesome. I’ll be honest upfront and say I would have preferred a different setlist – it was the same one they had been doing for a few shows, and while I recognize that they were opening for U2 who has a different brand of fans, at least one out of either Knights of Cydonia, Stockholm Syndrome, or Plug In Baby would have been nice. Especially Knights – I know it is trite to say that, but the song is epic and begs to be played when they are performing live. Still, closing with Time Is Running Out wasn’t so bad.

The setlist:

1. Uprising (sounded great)
2. Map of the Problematique (was glad to hear this live – they rocked)
3. Supermassive Black Hole (I know the Twilight crowd loves it and most U2 fans would probably know it from their kids loving Twilight, but I can do without)
4. Interlude + Hysteria (love that I got to see this performed live)
5. Undisclosed Desires (good performance)
6. Unnatural Selection (I’m glad they threw it in, but at the end of the day I would have preferred Resistance or MK Ultra if they needed to do 3 from the new CD)
7. Starlight (a given – still rocked)
8. Time Is Running Out (was awesome)

I took a video during Undisclosed Desires with my iPhone. The quality is terrible for both sound and audio, but I’ll still show it off here:

There are also a bunch of photos (mostly crappy – again the iPhone) in a gallery here. Muse fucking rocked. All the time, effort, and money for those 8 songs were worth it. I wish it was a concert that Muse was headlining as the U2 crowd wasn’t nearly into it enough, but they are not the type to be jumping up and down like lunatics in the first place apparently. I imagine it would be hard for all the women in high heels who weren’t aware that clothing style has changed from the “1980s Madonna” look to really jump around anyway. You could tell Muse had to tone it down and not play some of their epic rock songs like the 3 I mentioned above for the crowd. However, by looking at the various tweets of U2 fans, it seems after most shows that Muse opened, the large majority are hearing Muse for the first time and loving it. That, combined with the new CD and another song going to the Twilight movies (a remix of “I Belong To You” will be in the new movie’s soundtrack) hopefully will help them explode here during their US tour. The VMA performance, the reviews, the interviews in Rolling Stone and other magazines, opening for U2, etc. all seem to suggest that the record company and media are really getting behind them to get them as big here in the US as they are in the rest of the world. I think that is great since they deserve it.

I have to say I was focused on Dom a lot. I don’t know if I’ve made mention before on my blog, but Muse’s music and Dom’s drumming in particular finally pushed me over the hurdle to really want to pursue learning to play drums as more than just a passing fancy. It is something I’ve always wanted to do since I was scared off it and over to saxophone by my 5th grade music teacher (I understand why he did it since all kids want to play the drums, it just turns out that I should have pursued it instead of saxophone I think). Not that I’m hoping to become a rock star, but I would like to just be able to drum along to all my favorite songs or maybe sit in with a few musicians just to jam from time to time as I love playing music, even on instruments I don’t care for as much (like playing sax for 7 years). I stood to the left side particularly to see him. Matt sounded great and played well, and Chris absolutely tore it up playing bass as usual.

So after TIRO, they walked off stage, I turned around and fought my way through a small crowd to get back to the tunnel. At this point I follow the crowd easily back up to the main concourse that you walk into from the outside, however now I am on the opposite end of the building from where I entered (and the side my car is parked at). I resign myself to walking out and simply walking around the building rather than dealing with walking up and down stairs again. As I walk out and begin to leave, the guard tells me that if I walk through I can’t come back in.

“That’s fine, I’m not going back.” I withhold comments about U2 simply because I’m too tired to deal with it. The chafed legs and blister are really starting to cause me some discomfort at this point. As I’m walking along the sidewalk, I overhear two girls walking behind me. The conversation goes something like this, though this is by no means word for word:

“That was awesome!”

“They played my favorite song! I wish they would have played a little longer though.”

“Haha we flew to Dallas for 45 minutes of music.”

“Yeah I wish they would have played Absolution though.”

(Note: “Sing For Absolution” is a great song, but I don’t see how they could shoehorn Absolution into an 8-song set when they had to leave out about 10 songs I would have preferred to hear before that one. It’s just not a song you sell to a stadium full of U2 fans to get them into your music, but I have to say that I at least understand since I would have preferred Glorious, which is an extra track on the Japanese release of Black Holes and Revelations, to half of the songs they played. Every diehard fan has to have their non-popular favorite song) :)

This was comforting if for no other reason than someone went to similar lengths (though I imagine a plane ride was generally easier to deal with compared to the drive and walking) just to see Muse open. I’m crazy, just not the only one :)

What was super nice of the people who designed this stadium is that there aren’t even walkways all around the stadium on the OUTSIDE that are not blocked off. On opposite ends of the stadium, they block off an ‘interior’ in front of the doors for people to hang out, eat some food (they have standing tables), and have the merchandise tents setup. Speaking of the merch tents, I wish I knew they’d be closed or emptied during the show after Muse came on or I would have tried to stop for a shirt beforehand. No real loss here though since it wasn’t a real Muse show and I still have my ticket as far as mementos go.

Anyway, so now I have to walk across more grass and a parking lot until I finally reach the street that runs in front of the stadium. This is the same street that will take me back to the parking lot I’m on, so now it is just a matter of getting back to the car which would have been fine if not for my legs and foot.

I bet you thought my fantastic journey would end with an easy car ride home. Nay, that is not the case.

I relax in the car for about 10 minutes trying to psych myself up for this ride. I put Muse on (I had listened to them all day on the drive to Dallas of course, and all the way back, so for about 10 1/2 of the 12 1/2 hours total this trip took I have listened to Muse either from my iPhone or at the concert), get settled in my seat, and begin the drive home. At this point I’m pretty tired and it is about 8:45-9PM by the time I’m getting to the highway and really starting to drive. I’m so tired and exhausted that I can barely deal with focusing on doing anything but driving straight, and keep checking my GPS on my phone every so often to make sure I didn’t miss a sign since I’m not even paying attention to them. Ironically, I checked with just 1 exit before the one I was supposed to turn at to get onto a small highway that leads to the main one I need to get to that takes me straight back to Nacogdoches and my apartment. Yet I am so tired that a thought pops into my head to change to another Muse song (I don’t even remember what one) and I miss the exit. Luckily, I can take the next exit, however this has me driving through the town center of Kilgore to get back to the highway rather than taking the side-highway shortcut and avoiding all the lights. As I’m trying to navigate, tired, and look at my phone, on wet roads since it has been raining and miserable all day across the entire state of Texas (at least the Eastern half), I nearly skid through 2 red lights and basically look like I’m a drunk driver. Luckily there were no cops around, and the only thought running through my mind is the necessity to get back to the ‘highway’ part.

This leads to a new challenge as it is now about 11PM. It is still raining a bit, my window is fogging and as the air in my car only blows out of the front vents since the switch is broken, I am alternating between blasting cold air to defog and turning it off so I don’t freeze. Worse, visibility is about 100 feet in front of me with my brights on unless I see a rare light turned on outside someone’s house or my headlights are reflecting off a road sign. Since leaving Dallas, aside from seeing signs for fast food or gas stations along the highway and travelling through the sprawling metropolis of Kilgore, TX, the only light on the road is headlights. Naturally as I’m tired, I decide the best course of action is to do 80-90MPH and take my chances that no cops will be around and no deer or other woodland creatures will be stupid enough to run in front of me so that I can get home faster.

This works as the only cop I encounter is one I pass doing 10MPH over the speed limit going the other way through Henderson (I was doing 50 in a 40 around their loop). The two other cars around me are doing the same speed though and the cop just goes on by.

Once I get through Henderson, however, visibility gets even worse to the point that I basically need to leave my brights on to see more than 30 feet in front of me. Being a safe driver, I take it down to 70MPH. It is so dark and hard to see at some points that I’m not even sure where I am on a road that I travel every day to work.

Finally, at just past midnight I roll into Nacogdoches. Thus far I’ve had 3 soft tacos and 2 McDonalds cheeseburgers for sustenance all day since waking up at 8AM, and I have basically no food that is easily prepared (or much food at all for that matter) at my apartment. So, I head into town and go to Whataburger which is just about the only place open (although I did notice Papa John’s was open across the street as I sat in the drive-thru, but I’d rather drink bleach – at least I know what the funky chemical taste is in my mouth if I’m drinking bleach).

Since I’m clearly too tired to even think at this point, I see advertisements for their limited-time buffalo chicken sandwich. It wound up not being too bad (I finished it, but when you have barely eaten all day and are that tired, taste doesn’t matter as much), but not something I would order again. I then proceed home and pull in at about 12:20AM. Go inside, take my shoes off, and check the blister. Interestingly enough, because the shoes were wet and made my feet shrivel, the blister is actually shriveled as well. I have no pins readily available, and I couldn’t grasp the moist, dead skin well enough with some nail clippers, so I literally use my fingernails to tear the blister slightly to drain it. This proceeds to hurt even more for the next hour until I fall asleep.

So I dealt with the blister, head to the bathroom and wash off my face and hands since I had been sweating so much at the concert, eat my food, checked some webpages real fast (mainly Facebook, Twitter, and the muse.mu message boards), uploaded the video I shot to YouTube, and finally head to bed around 1:15AM. It takes me maybe 5 minutes to pass out, and this morning at 7AM my alarm goes off playing Bliss for me to wake up and get ready for a full day of work. So now after about 5 1/2 hours of sleep, I sit up and have to reason with myself logically that it is not worth losing hundreds of dollars by not going in until noon while I’m half asleep and all my body wants to do is fall back over and force me into sleep. I manage to get up with the intent to check my cabinet for a “5-hour Energy” shot. I don’t normally drink these, but I thought I had one laying around in case of emergency, and this appeared to be one of those times. Although there is no 5HE bottle, the act of getting out of bed wakes me up enough to the point where my body doesn’t have much of a case against my brain to lay back down since I’m already out of bed now.

And thus, I get ready, go to work, and proceed to indulge myself in uploading photos from the concert, reading the message boards, and debating going to Vegas on December 12th since a show with Muse headlining just appeared on Ticketmaster yesterday.

It was totally, 100% worth it. I probably won’t say that as I hobble around the grocery store doing my weekly shopping for my apartment tonight though.

Vibram Five Fingers shoes

About a month ago I decided to give up traditional footwear for a few reasons. I had chronic pain on the top of my foot/ankle area for close to a year, which I thought was a result of my foot being twisted oddly in my car where my legs don’t really have enough room to expand properly. While that can still flare up when I do put my feet in awkward positions, I noticed that it got better whenever I was barefoot walking around my house.

Around the same time, I started getting into The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss which I have talked about here before, and more importantly reading his blog. He posted a video of these new shoes which I initially wrote off even though I was intrigued by the science behind them, and how feet are manipulated in shoes and wind up becoming deformed because of them. Hell, as I look at my feet now, I notice that my big toes both curve inward quite a bit as a result of shoes pushing them into my other toes. When you start looking at the images and putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it became decently clear that a few issues such as bad posture weren’t necessarily caused by my shoes, but certainly didn’t help either. The constant pain in my foot usually meant I had to remove my left shoe while driving back and forth from work (a 3 1/2 hour trip from my house to my job on Mondays and then the same trip returning on Fridays).

So, I decided to jump in and buy a pair of Vibram Five Fingers shoes. There was a store about 45-50 minutes away (I have since found one that is more like 20 minutes away, though their stock was running out and I’m not sure if they will be replenishing it) that I went to, a local high-end fitness store called Luke’s Locker that is pretty much only in the major cities of Texas. I tried on a pair of Classics and the person suggested I get a size bigger because my toes looked cramped. Truthfully, they weren’t cramped, however I didn’t know better either as I looked at them kind of popping up against the top of the shoes. It turns out the reason for this is they were so used to being in shoes that they were getting stuck in a scrunched-up position.

It took a few days to get used to them, but I haven’t looked back since. The larger size felt pretty good, though there were a few issues. I figured that my feet might just be “inbetween” sizes and I’d have to stick with them being a little oversized (plus they go by European size, NOT American size, so I was really in uncharted territory), and the strap used to tighten the shoes didn’t really help keep my heel seated in the shoe, it just hurt as it dug into the top of my foot. This made me go try out a pair of KSOs, and in a rush to get to work that day, I simply tried them on for a minute or two and decided to buy them and leave, even though I immediately began to notice that there was a large amount of space between the back of the shoe and the back of my foot when I pushed my foot all the way forward in the shoe. Even the strap didn’t help tighten this up.

Here, I’m going to point out a warning. If you are buying shoes that are supposed to mimic being barefoot, yet with protection from the urban ground that has concrete, shards of glass, etc., then you need to buy shoes that perfectly envelope your feet because the idea is to let all the parts of your feet work naturally. Because the shoes were the wrong fit, I now have a good amount of pain in my left foot between my big toe and the second toe from wearing shoes that didn’t fit properly. The pressure of the shoe not lining up to my foot properly is amplified from what I can tell because your toes now take a very active part in how you walk. DO NOT just buy a pair of these online if it is your first time, and do not settle for what someone says in the store. Tell the assistant they can help another person if they want, but that you want to walk around for a few minutes to make sure the size is correct. It should feel like a tight sock with a soled bottom, almost as if it was shrink-wrapped onto your foot. I was shocked when I held up my new M43s to my previous M44-sized shoes and saw a huge difference in size. Getting this right is CRITICAL, trust me.

Another quick word of warning before I continue is that these take a few days to get used to. These are not shoes that you simply slip on and walk out of the store and wear from then on. You will notice muscles you haven’t used previously start to ache from being used for the first time as you walk around throughout the day, especially if you work on your feet (I don’t, so the impact wasn’t nearly as bad). However, aside from yesterday when I slid on my sneakers, I had not worn regular shoes in weeks. Most people say about 3-4 days before you can really start wearing them full-time, and even then it seems some people switch back to regular shoes once or twice a week, although I do not.

The pain around my ankle was gone after only 3 days(!!!), and had I gotten the correct size from the start I wouldn’t have any foot pain at all (I can feel with the new pair I bought today that fits well that the pressure on my toes is much less and once they heal I imagine it will be gone completely). I just bought my third pair, another of the KSO model (this time the grey/blue camo model), which I find to be by far the best of the available choices. The Classic is nice to slip on quickly if I have to run outside to the mailbox or hit the store real fast, but for daily use the KSO looks the most like a normal shoe and is the most comfortable in my opinion. The Sprint I haven’t bothered with as I think the strap without the added mesh-covering protection on the top would irritate me, maybe even more than the tightening cord on the Classic model (I have gotten more used to that now, and I wear it much looser and just deal with the fact that they feel a little loose constantly). It seems my fears are mostly warranted based on Tim Ferriss’ experience with the Sprint model as well. The Flow would be fine if I was using it to do white-water rafting in some cold water or something I suppose, but as I’m not there is no need for a neoprene shoe, especially in Houston during the summer (the stores here don’t even carry the Flow model as far as I can tell).

VFFs feel great. I imagined that the “fingers” (finger and toe are the same word in Italian, so the literal translation is Vibram Five Fingers even though it would be Vibram Five Toes in Italian, and Five Fingers sounds kind of cool) would annoy the hell out of me, but they actually are comfortable with the added bonus of scratching an itch inbetween my toes without having to remove my socks and shoes, or using my big toe furiously trying to create friction to make the itch stop. Even with the larger sizes that were not right for my feet, they felt comfortable to walk around in and I’m sure that will be even better now.

I have gotten comments about them and some weird looks a few times, but I couldn’t care less because for me the question is “Do I want to have pain in one foot all day long wearing regular shoes, or do I want to not have pain and wear some weird looking shoes?” Aside from the toes, they don’t really look any different than water shoes that you’d be using to go jetskiing anyway. If nothing else, they are a neat conversation starter.

If you like being barefoot or simply comfortable (I cannot stand clothes that feel tight or suffocating and don’t just lightly ‘lay’ on me) with the rest of your outfit, these are definitely worth a shot. Apparently a lot of runners and people who work out are switching to these because of both the health benefits (posture, agility, etc.) as well as the increase they are getting in production (running faster, lifting better, whatever). If you are having foot problems, these are amazing orthopedic shoes. I could have spent hundreds of dollars getting x-rays and seeing podiatrists, and instead I spent those same hundreds of dollars on three comfortable pairs of shoes that I would have had to spend anyway if I was diagnosed properly (and there is no telling if that would be the case, and I’m not sure a doctor’s first thought would be “Oh, shoes are the problem, stop wearing them!” as compared to “Here are pain pills and a Dr. Scholls insert, come back and pay me another $200 in 2 weeks”). I’ve also noticed the back pain that I’ve had for awhile now (both because of being overweight, having terrible posture sitting at my desk, and my shoes) is going away for the most part. It is still there a little bit, but I haven’t had the kind of pain where I literally need to take pain killers in order to not go crazy in weeks now.

These do require more maintenance than traditional shoes, especially if your feet sweat as mine do. Right now I’ve been wearing them for 2-3 days before washing them, but I’ve found some tricks on the forum at birthdayshoes.com to clean them more effectively and reduce the odor, which can get bad quickly similar to when you wear shoes without socks for a few days.

Aside from a few stories of people who have REALLY bad Morton’s Toe (both myself and the CEO of Vibram have this, mine is similar to the second picture on the Wikipedia page, and yes they feel fine if you get the proper size), I haven’t read more than 2-3 comments by people saying they didn’t like the shoes and returned them, compared to hundreds of others raving about them. I have to say that the people who wear these are pretty die-hard fans, much like myself now after only about a month. You will notice that you naturally begin to walk different and more normally compared to the way Nike has designed people to walk.

I cannot recommend VFFs highly enough. They are a little more expensive than normal shoes, or sometimes right on par with shoes, depending on what brands you buy. The KSO models I’m fond of cost about $90 after tax. They are apparently incredibly durable, especially during outdoor activity, so with a normal routine it seems they might last even longer than regular shoes, and DEFINITELY longer than the cheap pieces of crap you might buy at Walmart. I haven’t had mine long enough to even begin to see any wear and tear on them, so you are getting your money’s worth. And the fact that it took the pain in my ankle away and helped my back pain is priceless. These shoes are one of the best investments I’ve made in my life. As the saying goes, buy the best bed and best pair of shoes you can afford, and it is entirely true as we recently got a Sleep Number bed. I realize that could have helped with my back pain, but I sleep on it only 2-3 days a week and while I can certainly vouch that I don’t wake up in pain any longer, I imagine the shoes have played a larger role in my balance and posture. I would ammend the saying only to also include the best desk chair you can afford now that we work mostly sitting down rather than standing up.

It is nice to see that they are even beginning to make new models that are more for outdoor adventures with soles that have better traction (although the current projected price of these models, at near $250 supposedly, seems rather ridiculous to me, but it is reassuring to know that the company is moving forward with the shoes and are committed to maintaining them as a brand. I have to be honest, if they were going to discontinue them, I’d probably race to their site and buy up about 30 pairs as soon as I could to ensure I have them for the rest of my life.