A short shoe review/endorsement for anyone interested in exploring "alternative" brands...
A couple weeks ago, I looked into Mount to Coast shoes, which are designed speficially with ultra runners in mind. Since I'm a slow 6+ hour marathoner, I thought they were worth checking out.
The tl;dr is: they won't work for me - at least with the current design - but WOW, this is a really interesting shoe company worth others' attention IMO!
I tried the R1, which is their neutral road shoe, marketed to a slow-ish pace and designed for many, many hours of running at a time. It's good. Like, really, really good. The foam is like nothing I've ever experienced: simultaneously well cushioned, supportively firm, and forgiving. The longer I had them on, the better the foam felt! MtC's other neat feature is separate lacing for the forefoot, so you can really tailor the fit and/or tighten or loosen things quickly as needed. The forefoot has a ton of volume, though it does have a taper (so not as much horizontal space for toes as an Altra or Topo, but plenty of vertical space, and much more space overall than most running shoes.) The shoes are very light in weight. No noticeable rocker, but not a ton of flex, either: just enough rigidity to feel stable, but not so much as to feel like a brick.
The only con for me was, alas, a high enough arch bump that I was forced to send them back. If you've ever tried Topos, it's similar to that, but less pronounced. It felt like some of the Hoka models I've tried, though the rest of the fit was quite different. I think for most folks, it'll be a non-issue, but I can't handle any medial bias, and MtC's arch has just enough bias to be a problem for me.
But for anyone else logging long miles this is definitely worth putting on your radar! I held onto them for two weeks, hoping I could just get used to the arch, because the rest of the shoe was that good.
