A great product with a couple notable deficiencies. First, I bought my first pair of these, significantly discounted, from another retailer. I liked them enough I bought another pair here direct. Second, sizing with La Sportiva is wonky. I do appreciate that they can accommodate my wide, hobbit-y feet, but I wear a size 44.5 in these, 43.5 in low-top TX4, and 44 in mid-top TX4. Be aware. Third, let's deal with the downsides. Of which there are a handful. Those include: A) The laces. Please, for the love of whatever deity is currently in vogue in Italy, supply better laces with all La Sportiva shoes. Laces breaking is ubiquitous to the point that you'll be able to tell your own pair of TX4's apart from the others not by color or style but by what color of laces. I didn't do harsh canyon-y things with the Bushidos, but yep, still broke laces. Which brings me to: B) The lacing system/"grommets". This is also a problem across all the La Sportiva system. As soon as you replace the laces with something tougher (I used Kevlar laces), now you're going to chew through the lace holders / grommets. And this is a shoe-killer when it happens. La Sportiva: Please just make a "Southwest" version of your most popular shoes that has metal grommets and proper laces and you'd fix about 90% of the complaints people have about these. C) The smell. Get these shoes wet and it's like you'll always have a damp dog with bad breath on a run with you. D) The wear. Note that the front of these shoes, particularly, wears fast - mine have holes in them from doing fairly limited maneuvering on sandstone. Okay, now that we have those complaints out of the way, these shoes are great for moderate-mileage days on rocks or heavy-mileage days on uneven terrain. I've taken mine on a variety of Wasatch scrambles, including Olympus and Pfeifferhorn; they're also the shoes I ran R2R2R in, a 42-mile day, as well as Buckskin Gulch, a 23-mile day in water, mud, rock, and sand. The soles are not as grippy as TX4/TX3's (which is fine; I don't know that I'd want them to be). They're good trail running shoes in that they're moderate in all things- grippiness is somewhere between Altra LP's and TX4's; comfort is less than a padded track shoe (What's all the rage these days) and a flat shoe. My first outing with these was an 11-mile run + scramble and it left the soles of my feet a little achey (which was a surprise; I run barefoot plenty and it takes a lot for my feet to feel something). Since then, though, I've reached for these for anything that didn't require Class 5 scrambling or walking on slickrock. What should you buy these shoes for? What it says on the box. Non-technical, uneven terrain outside. For more technical terrain, use a TX4 or TX3. For a regular track, use a regular shoe. I liked 'em enough that I bought another pair. I think I've got something like 400 or 500 miles on these (probably more)
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