Rundefeated

I thought my relationship with running shoes had reached its final form: buy, review, run, complain, repeat. Then I read Kicksology by Brian Metzler and accidentally fell into a literary rabbit hole. Somewhere between foam densities and brand histories, I realized something that made me stop reading and stare at my shoe rack. Brian Metzler wasn’t just a shoe nerd—he was the neighbor of Caballo Blanco, the mythical barefoot prophet from Born to Run. I had read Born to Run years ago, but only now did a forgotten detail resurface: Caballo Blanco didn’t worship shoes. He butchered them.

In Born to Run, Caballo Blanco treated shoes like spare parts, not sacred objects. If the outsole annoyed him, he removed it. If the midsole felt wrong, he destroyed it. Sometimes he replaced everything with nothing more than tire rubber, turning modern shoes into something closer to ancient sandals. Reading that again—this time with Kicksology as context—felt like permission. Permission to stop treating shoes as museum items and start seeing them as experiments.

Coincidentally (or fatefully), I had a patient waiting for surgery: an old pair of Nike Zoom Fly. The glue was deteriorating, the Air Zoom unit had popped, and officially, the shoe was dead. In normal runner logic, this is when you thank the shoe for its service and move on. But Caballo Blanco whispered from the bookshelf: “You’re not done yet.” The upper was still fine. The problem was everything under my feet.

So I did what any responsible adult runner should probably not do—I decided to make my own shoes. I took my Inov-8 Bare XF as a reference model, because once you fall in love with barefoot shoes, thick foam starts to feel like emotional baggage. I completely removed the Zoom Fly’s outsole, midsole, and even the plastic plate. What remained looked less like a shoe and more like a crime scene. Lightweight, flexible, brutally honest.

Next came modern survival tools: Shopee. I bought a simple rubber outsole, nothing fancy, nothing marketed with “energy return” or “quantum propulsion.” Just rubber. Then I glued it myself, layer by layer, trusting instincts, patience, and probably too much confidence. When it dried, the shoe felt… alive again. No bounce. No lies. Just foot, ground, conversation.

Do I think this shoe will win races? Absolutely not. Would World Athletics approve it? Also no. But for a weekend 5K around the neighborhood, it feels perfect. Quiet, connected, and strangely personal. Every step reminds me that this shoe exists because I refused to throw it away. It’s not a product anymore—it’s a decision.

This little DIY experiment reminded me why I fell in love with running in the first place. Before carbon plates, before foam wars, before “latest version just dropped.” Sometimes running is just about curiosity, stubbornness, and listening to old stories—especially the ones where a barefoot runner in Mexico cuts up his shoes and keeps going anyway. And somewhere between Caballo Blanco and a tube of glue, I found a new pair of shoes that no brand could ever sell me.