My Vibram Five Finger Shoe Site

One night I decided to try to wear my Vibram Five Finger Shoes into a club.  I mean they are technically shoes, but I thought the bouncer might view them as socks or even barefeet.  As I showed the bouncer my ID, he didn’t even glance down and see my awesome five finger shoes.

Oh well, into the club I go.  And really, I didn’t expect people to see them in a dark club at all.  I just wanted to wear them around.  A few hours go by and nobody is feelin my shoes but now I gotta pee.  And this is when these shoes sort of felt really weird.

I am sure that none of you would walk into a restaurant or bar bathroom barefoot.  I mean the floor is wet and filled with undesirables.  But I knew that my shoes were fine.  My barefeet would not be touching any of that crap.  However, you can’t erase 30 years of filthy bathrooms in a second.

This is what happened.  With these shoes, you “feel” like you are walking barefoot.  As you step into the bathroom, you can feel the uneven tiles under your feet, you can see the floor is nasty, you know your feet aren’t touching the floor but you also know that there is a super thin layer of rubber between your feet and the floor.  There is no thick padding, followed by an air cushion and then a thick rubber sole.  You might as well walk into the bathroom with a plastic bag on your feet.  So I had to calm down and just do my business and leave.  As I left the bathroom I really felt like I needed to wash the bottom of the shoes.

You see, the shoes make you feel barefoot, hence you treat the bottoms like they are your soles.  It’s hard to step into mud with them, because it’s like putting your foot into the mud.  You can feel the mud squeeze up between your toes.

The first day I got my shoes I decided to wear them out the entire day.  Mine fit like a glove on my foot.  All my toes slid in perfectly.  When I backed out of my car, I felt like I was driving barefoot.  It did take a second to get used to pressing the gas pedal and brake with them.  I met my friend John for lunch at a local cafe.  Walking around barefoot, or at least feeling like I was barefoot was odd, but it also felt great or liberating to my toes.  Actually, after about 1/2 hour of having them on, I totally forgot about them.

I was eating lunch and the cute blond waitress came up to me and said, “those are cool shoes.  Where did you get those?”  She went on to ask me about how they feel and what I use them for.  Of course, I’ve only had them on for less than an hour but it dawned on me, I can pick up girls with these shoes!  Ok maybe not.  But they sure can start a conversation!

I read Tim Ferris’s blog about the Four Hour Workweek all the time, but for some reason I missed his post about these shoes.  One night around 2am I was doing some online work when my friend Bill IM’d me about these shoes that he was buying.  He sent me a link and I thought they were some goofy looking but also cool shoes.

That night Bill and I went looking for a Blue Camo pair size 42 and we found out that they were out of stock everywhere.  I happened to like the gray ones and while searching for his, I found a single pair in stock in my size.  After spending about an hour looking for shoes for Bill, I thought to myself, why not?  I paid $85 and I purchased a pair of the Vibram KSO shoes in Grey Palm color.

When I originally saw these shoes upclose I thought that they were a cooling looking novelty shoe. I thought that they would be different and just a casual shoe not really meant for any type of hard athletic exercise.

I’m FiveFingersWillie and I decided to start this site after buying and wearing my Vibram Five Finger KSO Shoes for a few months.  These are the coolest shoes I’ve seen in a long time and they have helped my posture alot in the last 4 months.  So much so, that I decided to make a site about them.  I hope you enjoy the site and feel free to comment about the shoes.  I get comments on them all the time still!