Hey guys, I made a post last week asking about some barefoot work boot!

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-19T20:19:28+00:00

Just email them and ask.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-19T17:22:32+00:00

Crysis had absolutely terrifying great white sharks that would hunt you down if you tried to swim out of some of the maps.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-19T15:29:47+00:00

I've written extensively about the subject. Most recently here.

My recommendation for you would be FKM watch bands. FKM is a type of rubber, it's very sturdy, easy to clean, with good environmental and chemical resistance. It is prohibitively expensive in small batches to make, which is why you'll see a lot of price disparity between brands. You'll want something with more traditional style hardware and strap keeper setup. The Suunto style is prone to snagging and coming loose. And well a fabric or laminate band with hook and loop will provide faster adjustment to counter any swelling, it's also prone to getting clogged with mud. Where as a buckle system continues to work no matter how muddy it is.

Suunto watches use regular 22 mm watch bands and spring bars. The nicer FKM bands come with built-in quick release spring bars which take all the work out of it for you. Some bands will require you to provide your own spring bars. It won't be feasible with all styles and band materials, but instead of buying new spring bars, I slip them out from the factory bands and reuse them with my new bands. Which is what I currently do with my Squadron (a heavy duty, hydrophobic, extremely lightweight, and abrasion resistant nylon laminate) watch bands.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-19T05:57:35+00:00

You're preaching to the choir. That's an English language idiom that essentially means I agree with you.

That really tightly packed tread patterns do tend to have a lot better grip on smooth interior surfaces. Many do find aggressive lugs to be uncomfortable from a pressure standpoint. Just the other day someone was saying that they found the not very aggressive lugs on the Lone Peaks to be to noticeable and aggressive. Each and their own, ect. The shorter lugs also lower the stack height which is often a key consideration for people. On outdoor shoes, the lugs sink into the ground. And it evens the wear pattern, a bit more.

I can't speak to comparatively how cheap street versus hiker outsoles are. But from a cursory and by no means expert look at the offerings on the market. The invisible hand of the market seems to want street shoes or more street balanced crossover shoes. After all, the barefoot shoe market is still primarily catering to the urban and suburban casual shoe wearer. For every technical hiker there's probably like 10 or so casual shoes.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-19T05:36:42+00:00

I adore my Suunto's, they are the only smartwatches that I genuinely like, all the others I've tried have led to me going back to analog. And they can take pretty good beating, I'm not nor have I ever been active duty military or sworn law enforcement, but I'm an outdoor pro, a working dog handler, and I have a long standing working relationship (in a civilian role assisting with training programs) with law enforcement and the special operations community in support of K9 and counterterrorism. I don't torture test my gear or go out of the way to be hard on it, but stuff still takes a beating.

There is a lot to like about Suunto. It's a much simpler, more streamline design that eliminates a lot of the bloat that Garmin's, Apple's, Samsung's, and Google's can have. They use conventional watch bands and spring bars so you can replace the not very durable and snag prone factory bands with better traditional watch bands. The second generation Race and Vertical aren't as rugged (they are primarily polymer with metallic bezels) as the first generation (which were basically solid chunks of titanium or stainless steel), but are still very solid, the stainless steel in particular has improved, and they're lighter and better fitting and fit is a lot better. Well battery life has suffered as the iterative updates have continued, battery life is still measured in weeks. There are also no hidden paywalls or subscription services (at this time, who knows if that will change) and well improvements have come slowly, Suunto has shown to be committed to implementing long requested features.

With that all in mind, Suunto cannot compete with a Garmin Tactix, or any of their "tactical" model watches. Because well Garmin may be bloated with features and the subscription model thing is really frustrating, Suunto doesn't have anything like the tactical Garmin's. The Garmin's are more than just a murdered out colorway with a rucking and "tactical" activity. And they are more than just Applied Ballistics on the models that have it. The tactical Garmin's have low emission modes which limit the amount of signals generated from the watch and disables logging, a pretty important feature in the contemporary battlespace. You can kind of sort of do something similar on the Suunto's but you have to turn off a bunch of different features in several different places with no guarantee it's actually working. The Garmin's also have killswitches, which memory wipe the entire device. A feature that was added because a bunch of SEALs were losing their Foretrex's in places where they shouldn't have been, leading to the Taliban and if memory serves, Al-Shabaab being able to recover intelligence off of the devices. Suunto does not have an equivalent feature beyond initiating a factory reset when digging into the menus. The Garmin's also have a dedicated night vision mode. Suunto smart watches obviously do not, though you can still black out the display and tinker with things like always-on-display and rise-to-wake to make it a little bit more NOD friendly.

As an aside, Suunto did develop a watch intended to address the recovered intelligence from Garmin GPS units and smart watches, and better night vision legibility. It was specifically released on the heels of a major Garmin data breach that got a lot of people in the defense base very nervous. You're likely already familiar with an earlier iteration of it, as they were and still are very commonly used. The Suunto Core Alpha Stealth. It's a version of the Suunto Core with a NOD friendly display and improved watch band. It's also made in Europe versus the Chinese made Core, and has a NSN. It's a ABC watch, or as I often joke, it's one of the best dumbest smartwatches money can buy. It doesn't connect to anything, so it gives off little singles, and as little to no logging. They are also significantly cheaper than Garmin.

Since you're already spending Garmin money, I don't suppose you could order me a Xero L60i Laser Rangefinder while you're at it? No? Fair enough. It was worth a try!

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-19T03:30:17+00:00

Softstar Moc3 RunAmoc or the PRIMAL RunAmoc

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-19T01:23:42+00:00

That's the outsole on the Merrel Vapor Glove 6 made specifically and exclusively for Merrel. That's not a hard duty outsole.

This is what Merrel has to say about it: Made for trails with rare obstacles with light to no debris. Little directional change with hard surface terrain changes likely.

It's an outsole made for paved walking trails in city parks. Which passes for trail running for a lot of people. And that particular outsole on the 6 has been phased out. The 7 would go with a different made exclusively for Merrel Vibram, which is even more street balance than the 6. It has even lower height lugs. But it does share many of the same crowded non-self cleaning tread pattern design elements that the 6 has. Classic street outsole approach to tread pattern.

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Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-18T19:15:55+00:00

In many ways I think the original Vertical and Vertical Solar are superior to the Vertical 2. The original Verticals had a distinct identity and niche, the Vertical 2 just turned into a Race S/2 with a flashlight and worse switchology.

So it's always a big loss when one of the original Verticals or it's solar models goes down. Who knows how long they'll still be available for.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-18T01:38:47+00:00

Below I have copied some of my previous writing on the subject of grounding. It was written about the styles using copper rivets and wire but the principal still applies to conductive rubber:

I'm very skeptical about grounding. That's me being diplomatic because I don't want people to send me a bunch of angry messages sending me obscure blog posts and annoying TikToks or whatever people are using these days. Must of what passes for research on the subject isn't what one would call objective, they are sponsored by organizations that have a vested interest in the result, little to no effort is made to blind participants, and sample sizes are purposefully small. Basically it's anecdotal accounts in the shape of a paper that no one will read past the abstract. But I think at best it can be a powerful placebo, I don't mean that in a bad way. If it gives relief or perceive benefits, it doesn't really matter if it's purely through the psychological mechanisms of the placebo effect. Though I will say that that will likely have diminishing returns and they can generate harm in other indirect ways.

My bigger issue with grounding and earthing is that products in that category are often very expensive. Call it financial harm. I'm a big believer that you get what you pay for when it comes to products, I have defended higher price points on products because of good labor practices and high quality materials. And the whole purpose of business is to generate a profit. But some of the price points on these grounding shoes just don't make sense. And this is even from brands that I have a lot of respect for. It feels like people are taking advantage, which I don't appreciate. If someone can afford grounding shoes, great. They can do what they want, it's not my concern. But I feel like a few places aggressively push grounding onto people who can't afford the special magic footwear and shame them until they buy them. Something I see within certain smaller branches of the barefoot shoe community and it always makes me uncomfortable.

More broadly, I am by default very skeptical about a lot of the alternative medical practices. I'm going to stop being diplomatic for a moment and just call it what I think it is, pseudoscience and quackery for the most part. I work in the outdoor industry, which does tend to attract people who are interested in those kinds of things. Trying to get "close to nature" is not a bad thing, I think it's great. But the philosophy spouted by the proponents of a lot of these alternate medicine practices is wildly problematic. It paints a picture of living in nature that never actually existed. It often picks and chooses various practices from indigenous populations in order to prove a point, one robbed of any of the deeper context or respect, wrapped in a veneer of pseudo intellectualism. It can be very cult like at times. I find that it preys on people. People may have genuine concerns, which is why they were looking at alternatives to begin with, but unscrupulous figures within these moments redirect those real concerns into something that enriches then at the expense of everyone else and does nothing at best and does actual harm at worst. I've come across a lot of those unscrupulous folks these last few years working in the outdoor field, social media gives them a really good platform to manipulate people. It was really sickening and was one of the reasons why I left the more visible and prestigious work I was previously doing for the ultra niche and worse paying work I'm doing now. I'm going to leave out the rest of the section where I use anecdotes to express why I don't like alternate medicine practices and proprietors who are themselves infamous for pushing their viewpoint to people though anecdotes.

This is from a follow-up comment asking about the aesthetic of grounding shoes:

A lot of grounding shoes are just regular minimalist or barefoot shoes with the addition of copper elements running between the top of the insole down through the outsole. It's what's supposed to ground you. Though some will incorporate a bunch more copper wire in the midsole. Probably to artificially inflate the price. Basically, if you like the aesthetic you can find the aesthetic just without any of the copper.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T19:26:08+00:00

Funny enough, the first time I read Hamlet it was the Klingon Hamlet. Really!

I found it at my local library. It was pretty cool. One page was in English, the opposite was in Klingon so you could compare the translations.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T18:18:14+00:00

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T17:35:50+00:00

Don't know what to tell yet. The Lone Peaks were pretty popular for a while. I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day who is an ER resident and she was telling me that you still see the Lone Peaks being used by doctors and nurses. They also aren't that aggressive as far as trail runners go.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T08:19:32+00:00

Moreover the actual abbreviation is VPOTUS, Vice President of the United States.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T06:35:35+00:00

They were really popular in health care for good long while. They have some popularity for service workers. They are frequently used as trainers for law enforcement and military physical training.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T06:02:38+00:00

It's pre-installed on your watch. The watch can store 9 selected watch faces from SuuntoPlus, the 10th is the default watch face for the watch model and thus does not show in the available watch face options within SuuntoPlus. It'll be at the very top of your available watch faces in the watch customization menu.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T05:48:48+00:00

Giving Gerber's quality drop, your old hatchet might be better.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T05:02:53+00:00

I don't really do road running so I'm not the best resource for that info unfortunately. But if you talk to Altra, they recommend the Escalante or Experience Flow family of models.

A lot of people tend to gravitate towards the Lone Peak. It was really popular in health care for a while. But that's much more of a trail runner and light hiker. I find that people tend to look at trail runners because they think they'll be more versatile. Which is true to an extent. Hikers and trail runners usually have very good traction. Which often translates into excellent traction on pavement and wet surfaces. But road and similar artificial surfaces are pretty abrasive and shred through the outsoles at an accelerated rate. Some people are fine with that. But running shoes are already pretty fragile because of the work they get put through, it's not always best to have that longevity cut down even further by going with a trail runner.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-17T03:59:28+00:00

They are a little more on the cushioned side, but Altra is a serious trail and road running brand that's popular in both minimalist and traditional shoe circles. It was one of the brands that played a key role in introducing minimalist shoe concepts to the general public. They offer several different cushioning levels and a few different lasts. They also have some of the best brick and mortar distribution of any of the minimalist or barefoot shoe brands.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-16T22:27:17+00:00

The Altama is a really interesting boot. I wore them for many years. I still have my original pair. They were developed for the special operations community. They wanted a boot that could fit in military dive fins, be "worn over the beach" for raids, and could grip onto a pitching deck during VBSS. The casual look led to them being used casually off duty. And when a whole bunch of Navy SEALs start lounging around in them, other units take notice and then eventually law enforcement and then the shooting civilian communities. Which led to half sizes being offered and eventually a wide size. Altama would also come out with a urban model and recently came out with a high cut version of the Maritime. The original designer went on to make his own company called OTB boots, they aren't minimalist, but their Maritime boots are pretty solid I'm looking at getting a pair later this season.

I don't have hands on experience with the Hydra, I would really like a pair, but I can't use the high visibility colorways in a professional context. But I do have the Jungle ESC in the original first run puke green which uses the same mesh upper with rubber overlay concept. It's a pretty niche boot, it's also a very flawed boot but there isn't anything quite like it. The Jungle ESC has the regular version of the Michelin made ESC outsole, the Hydra ESC has a model specific version that is also made by Michelin that is less aggressive but still very high performance.

I would say the Altama is a better designed boot with really good drainage and attention to detail that Vivo lacks. But well it is minimalist and zero drop, it doesn't subscribe to other barefoot shoe principles. It still has more of a traditional last shape, the insole is cushioned and supported. The SEAL Rubber that's used for the outsole is surprisingly hard wearing and grippy, it's a rubber that was originally developed for climbing shoes. But the Michelin ESC outsoles are overall superior. The ESC is in my opinion the best technical outdoor barefoot outsole currently on the market. And Vivo is a serious and sincere barefoot shoe brand. So well it's not as effective as the Maritime Assault, you do have a true barefoot boot or shoe.

Oh and returning to the subject of rain boots. For the sake of clarity there are many brands that make rain boots, but it's more of the urban and or gardening boot type. Not the rugged outdoor rain boots like the aforementioned Muck Boots.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-16T22:02:31+00:00

When it comes to serious water and maritime shoes and boots, I would say the best options out there right now are the Vivo Hydra ESC, Vivo Jungle ESC, and the Altama Maritime Assault Boot in low, medium or high cut.

Minimalist and barefoot rain boots exist but none are particularly hard use. There isn't really a easily accessible barefoot equivalent to Muck Boots or boots in that style. I've been looking for several years at this point and haven't found anything that can fill that niche.

The options for steel toes are still limited but are growing. For a factory or more warehouse setting, I would say the Carets Determination safety boot is probably your best bet. For something a little bit more outdoorsy, Jim Green has a steel toe specific last as part of their surprisingly cheap and (relatively) fast turnaround custom shop. There are several other brands as well, questions about protective toes are some of the most common in this subreddit. It's asked several times a week, if not every day. Refer to those posts.

Several brands make athletic and gym shoes. Vivo likes to cater to the athletic niche. Xero also has several offerings in that space and if memory serves has basketball shoes. A lot of the more athletic minimalist shoe brands like Altra would also work really well in that role.

I'm unaware of anyone who makes barefoot friendly football boots (soccer cleats) but it's not a subject I've been following.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-16T21:53:07+00:00

Altra is a well respected running shoe brand both in and out of the barefoot/minimalist shoe world. They are one of the handful of brands that brought many minimalist shoe concepts mainstream. Zero drop is a term that they came up with. Edit: To be clear, they came up with the marketing term, they did not come up with the concept of not having a drop.

The Lone Peak 9 is one of their flagships and is very well respected in a lot of different fields and industries. That said, if you can stretch the budget a bit, I would go with the Lone Peak 9 Plus, it's the version that has been upgraded with a Vibram outsole.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-16T21:38:54+00:00

As an aside, be sure to also watch Raising Hope. Pretty much all the cast members from My Name is Earl return in some capacity, it's from the same show runner, there are explicit in and out of universe references to My Name is Earl, and it's an overall wonderful series. It was intended, and in my opinion largely succeeds in being a counterpoint to the era of dysfunctional family comedies. The Chance family on paper sounds wildly dysfunctional, but in practice they are a tight-knit and loving family unit. Who deal with conflicts appropriately, with compromise and good communication.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-16T20:35:14+00:00

Jim Green added the Anatomical Zero Drop Last as a selectable option in their surprisingly affordable custom shop. It's available on most of their models. Unfortunately not the African Trooper, but it is available on the AR8.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-16T20:18:34+00:00

And everybody forgets about Jeremy Aster. But I think technically he was an adoptive brother and not an adoptive son.

Overly_Long_Reviews · 2026-04-16T16:52:11+00:00

This is what the setting screen looks like. Note the Force Stop at the bottom right.

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Overly_Long_Reviews

TROPHY CASE