Saucony, I am BEGGING you…
Please return to the Kinvara 13 style. I have exclusively worn Kinvaras since 2012 and I have never had a single problem with any of their iteration until I hit the Kinvara 14s. Once I started wearing them, I had tons of foot pain and lower leg pain – things that I’ve never had. It was to the point where it was incredibly difficult to walk* and I actually reverted back to my previous Kinvara 11 pair (see this blog for the out-of-order shenanigans of my past few shoes).
Then today I thought: why go back to the 11s? I have a whole pile of Kinvara 13s that have about 500 miles on them each; surely a few days of walking/running in those won’t be too bad.
So I wore an old 13 pair today while running and guess what? The foot pain disappeared.
Entirely.
It’s like there was never any pain to begin with, which is pretty shocking given how bad the pain had actually gotten.
So yeah. Please please please please PLEASE go back to the 13 style. Your most loyal Kinvara customer will thank you.
*I did anyway, though. And ran. So I’m sure that didn’t help.
I’d like to issue a formal apology to the Kinvara 11s
Ugh.
SO.
I’m having a really rough time with the Kinvara 14s – rough enough that I actually reverted back to wearing my old worn-out Kinvara 11s (the ones I just finished with prior to this pair of 14s). While they’re not nearly as comfortable as the Kinvara 13s, they’re better than the 14s because it doesn’t feel like my ankle is getting actively eaten by a chainsaw when I wear them.
An angry bear, maybe, but not a chainsaw.
ANYWAY.
I was looking at the Running Room website last night to see if they had the Kinvara 15s yet and they had ONE PAIR LEFT of the Kinvara 13s in my size. I have never gotten my credit card out so fast, haha.
So at least I’ll have one more pair of 13s before having to go back to an inferior iteration again.
I have not been having a good time with shoes lately.
These Kinvara 14s…
Hurt.
The accidental Kinvara 11 pair I was wearing before this hurt the top of my feet constantly except when I was running. When I was running, the 11s were amazing.
These 14s don’t hurt the top of my feet, but the right one is grinding into the base of my outer ankle and it feels like someone is stabbing it with a row of needles.
Not a fun feeling.
Also, they already feel really worn down, as if I’ve already gone 500+ miles in them. Especially when running.
Sooooooo yeah. Not a fan.
The Kinvara 15s are out on the Saucony website, but the Running Room doesn’t have them yet. And though my sizing has been consistent for like the past eight iterations, I don’t want to risk ordering a pair of 15s without trying them on first to be sure of the size.
So I guess we’ll have to deal with pain for a bit.
No pain no gain, though, right?
So I’m Dumb
(title states something that is obvious and well-known by everyone who knows me)
A month or so ago, I finally ran out of my stockpile of Kinvara 13s, which have been – by FAR – the best-fitting versions of the Kinvaras that I have ever worn (and I’ve been wearing them since the Kinvara 3s).
I had bought one pair of Kinvara 14s a while back and had been saving them until I ran out of the 13s. So last month, when my last 13s died, I reached into my pile of shoeboxes and pulled out the one box containing a pair of shoes, put them on, and went about my nonsense.
I’d assumed that I was wearing the 14s, which was super disappointing to me, because these shoes were TERRIBLE. The tongue was way thicker than it was on the 13s and the laces (no matter how loosely or tightly I laced them) really hurt the tops of my feet. Like, to the point I had to sit with them unlaced for the first week or so until I really broke them in. They felt amazing when I was running, but if I was just wearing them or if I was walking in them, they felt like garbage.
But I have hunted the 13s out of existence, so once that pair of shoes started to wear out a week or so ago, I decided I’d just have to get another pair of the 14s and suffer through them (and possibly future pairs as well) until the 15s came out.
So on to Amazon I went and bought some 14s with a gift card my mom-in-law gave me for Christmas ($40 for shoes? YAY!).
Well, I finally had to switch out the first pair of 14s today because they had 500+ miles on them. So I open the Amazon box and, upon taking out the shoes, noticed that they looked really different than the 14s I’d been wearing. Different tread, different tongue, different laces, those kinds of things.
I was like what the hell, did I accidentally buy the Kinvara Pros (a supposedly better and definitely more expensive Kinvara)? But I checked the box and it just said Kinvara 14 with the correct size and everything.
Then I went back into my pile of shoeboxes and hunted for my original Kinvara 14 box.
To my surprise, that box still contained a pair of shoes.
So what had I done? Well, several years ago, I had bought a single pair of the Kinvara 11 shoes but never wore them because I also had a stockpile of Kinvara 10s. Once I worked through all the 10s, the Kinvara 12s were already out, so I decided to keep that one pair of Kinvara 11s as an “emergency pair” and just jumped right to the 12s.
Well, that “emergency pair” was actually the pair I had been wearing. Yes, I had grabbed the Kinvara 11s instead of the Kinvara 14s from my shoebox pile.
LIKE AN IDIOT.
In my defense, the two pairs were almost identical in color, so I think that when I grabbed that box, all I really noticed was that it was full of shoes and just assumed it was the 14s box and not the 11s box, since I thought I’d tucked the 11s box far away from all my others.
But I guess I didn’t.
The upside? I will never have to wear the horrible 11s again because they don’t exist anymore, and the new actual 14s are really comfortable.
So…
Yeah.
Good job, moron.
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