I don’t torture test the shoes that I review. They’re all personal purchases, so I don’t want to destroy them. Moreover, I think it’s more useful to produce a review based on normal use of a product rather than adjusting my behavior in order to gather data which speaks to or subverts the validity of certain marketing claims about performance. If a shoe works for me, I don’t particularly care if it lives up to its own hype or not. I certainly don’t have an agenda in terms of finding means of bashing or praising any particular company out of blind hate for a brand or blind fandom for it.

When I incorporate a shoe (or any piece of running gear) into my regular routine, I can get a good sense of how (or whether) the experience I’m having is being influenced by the item in question.

I offer this as preface because I had a pretty lousy time with the Brooks PureCadence 2 this past weekend. And it’s not as though I meant to.

During a Saturday long run in the PureCadence 2s, my feet got drenched when it wasn’t raining, and on Sunday, I fell (and HARD!) during a run for the first time in my life. Yikes. I’m a little over halfway through my goal shoe review mileage of 60 miles, but I thought that this no good very bad weekend merited a post even though I’m not comfortable rendering a final verdict on this shoe just yet.

Saturday
Having huddled inside while the bitter Polar Vortex was parked over DC, I was keen to log some outdoor miles in the milder winter weather, no matter the conditions. I woke up to light rain on Saturday morning, but it let up quickly, so I was able to lace up for a morning run on one of my favorite routes. The pavement was wet, but there wasn’t any standing water to speak of. What little there was, I was able to discern and navigate around easily.

Nonetheless, my feet were positively drenched about three miles into my 10+ mile run. I don’t mean just a little bit of moisture on my socks; I mean toes to heel completely saturated with water. I’ve run through downpours in non-waterproof shoes and had my feet stay drier than that! I noticed that drips of water were kicking up from the toe of my shoes, right where the sole material is missing, a feature that supposedly allows for independent flexion of the big toe. Moisture was able to come up and over the toe of the shoe in this spot, but not only that, it was seeping in at the big toe groove because that spot is only covered in fabric. The only good things I can say about the PureCadence 2’s inclement weather performance are that the shoe didn’t have any issues with traction on the wet pavement and that it didn’t make gross squelching noises, even when it was supersaturated late in the run when the rain started back up again in earnest and I ran through puddles (why not since my feet were already wet?).

Sunday

I went to an open gym session in the morning and put myself through a BFit like workout for an hour: five sets of the following, as quickly as possible: 10 pullups, 10 ring dips, 20 kettlebell swings, 10 slam balls, 50 situps, 100 single-unders (100 jumps with a jump rope), 400 meter run. So on Sunday evening, I was tired and would have been content to skip my run, but I don’t like skipping workouts, so I laced up anyway. I was finally in the groove and speeding up a hill when SMACK! My right toe catches on an uneven bit of sidewalk and I go sprawling onto my hands and knees, tearing a small hole in my tights (let this be a lesson to you: get Target-brand tights since they are as good or better than some expensive brands and you won’t be so heartsick when something happens to them) and bruising and bloodying my knees. I’ve run a lot in DC so I’m familiar with its treacherous sidewalks, especially the sidewalks on this route since it’s a short one that I frequent. Even when I get in the zone or I’m tired, I pay attention since it’s easy to get in trouble while out running, so it’s not as though I was mentally elsewhere while zipping up the hill. So what happened?

Despite the reduced profile of the Brooks PureCadence 2, the groundfeel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There is a lot of rubber underfoot, and while it provides satisfactory traction and durability, it limits flexibility and groundfeel.

What happened to the PureCadence 2 after the kick to the sidewalk was disappointing, too. The whole shoe is wrapped in the same fabric with few overlays, and there are no reinforcing overlays at the toe, so when shoe met sidewalk, the shoe ripped. The fraying is minor now, but it could eventually compromise the integrity of the shoe.

Everyone has bad days sometimes, so I’m not going to write this shoe off yet. I’ll even concede that some of its crummy performance this past weekend could have been my fault; I might have tripped at that exact moment no matter what shoes I was wearing because I was really motoring, but I should be able to reasonably expect that my feet will stay mostly dry while running on recently-rained-on streets if it’s not actually raining during the run. Even if I was completely at fault and my expectations were unreasonable, I still have to question whether this shoe works for me. I run in the rain normally and I traverse uneven terrain in the urban jungle on a regular basis, and I need a shoe that can keep me comfortable and safe.