An Open Letter to Adidas (The Next Takumi Sen)

An Open Letter to Adidas (The Next Takumi Sen):

If you've followed my posts since around the beginning of last year, you'll know that it is no secret that the Takumi Sen Boost was my favourite every road shoe. Since I bought a pair, I have run nearly 400 km of road miles. To be honest, I did not expect them to look so good at 400km. My main concern was the exposed mesh-midsole bond around the ball of the foot area; Adidas loves to make shoes with suede overlays in all the wrong places. I have gone through 2 pairs of Adios 2s in exactly the aforementioned area and fully expected a bust through on the Takumi Sens by now.

So, why is this? Well, when you put the shoes on bare feet, you notice that there is a sort of inside rand around the ball of the foot. This will reduce outward pressure on the mesh and so allow it to remain intact for longer. So, can it be improved?

Yes, I think it can. Here's a list of things that I hope Adidas considers before they finalise their designs for the world's best shoe (no I do not mean the Ultraboost pillows):

An outer rand

You can never go wrong with an outer rand. Preferably a full rand such as you see on the X-Talon 212s from Inov-8:

This would at least double the life of the upper. Talking of life, at time of writing, I have put 1300km onto my pair of X-Talons and only now am I starting to see very small tears above the rand (so small as to be insignificant and invisible). I recommend perhaps a lighter rand with less upward travel (say 1 inch all the way around). This will doubtless add weight; 'tis no matter, there are plenty of places we can strip weight off.

Get rid of the wrap around heel counter

Yes, it does look very cool but that heel counter goes all the way from the last adidas stripe on one side to the last stripe on the other and must be fairly heavy, perhaps 20g? I would personally be find with no heel counter at all but a small inch wide heel counter would do no harm I suppose. This will be the biggest weight saving of all our hopefully-not-hypothetical surgery.

Get rid of the heel drop

This is a minimal shoe. It may be stiff but it is still very light and so I'm sure I'm not the only fanboy who wouldn't mind a zero drop on this shoe. Aside from saving a small amount of weight, it would help promote that forefoot stride that these shoes already do a fine job to encourage (after all, the boost is only at the front). The 4mm might be useful for some people doing marathons. I recommend that Adidas keep the Takumi Ren line and put all the 'comfort' features into them and make the Sen a true thoroughbred racer.

Rethink the outsole

This one is a bit picky and I really wouldn't mind if it got left out. The diamond rubber sections on the Sen are rather grippy but they allow some odd flexion in the outer midsole material since none of them create a large enough tension bearing manifold. The longitudinal EVA-Boost-EVA sandwich on my pair is separating (think Nike Free) and while I don't fear for its short term future, I see this becoming a problem as we approach 1000km (and no, I don't want to hear 'manufacturers and experts recommend you spend loads of money buying shoes every time you run 20 miles to avoid injury' blah blah). Yes, I think with an outer rand, 1000km is doable. I would suggest the outsole found on the Adios Boosts given their durability and grip on the road.

Shave off all the useless overlays and bits

The only thing left to do is just go around the shoe taking off unnecessary bits like the Adizero 'thumb' at the back, the non-structural suede on the forefoot and anything else you can find.

The Result

The result will be the best shoe in the world, just ahead of the original. It would probably weigh in at around 150g so given a 1% performance improvement for every 100g (Jack Daniels) you'd see probably 0.2% better performance than the original 170g version and if you take into account the Boost estimated to hold 1% performance increase it will perform like a 50g shoe in terms of speed without sacrificing cushioning. So if I used my hypothetical Takumi Sen 4s for my next marathon, I would expect to shave off around 20 seconds.

#marginalgains