They're like little ferrari's for your feet
Written: Dec 14 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Unrivaled edging capabilities, tight fit, fairly comfortable
Cons: Cheap laces, too stiff and flat for effective use on overhanging routes
The Bottom Line: If you want a shoe that edges on damn near anything, this is what you're looking for.
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| misterduck's Full Review: Five Ten Anasazi Lace Up |
To be brutally honest, I avoided these shoes like the plague because they have such a retro-look to them, and I've never been too keen on laceups. To a young punk like myself, they seemed a bit old and fuddy duddy, and the shoe has been mostly unchanged and unrevised for several years now. If anything, this has been an excellent exercise to prove that looks are often deceiving.
The Five-ten Anasazi Laceups are essentially edging monsters; their stiff midsole and tight fit, combined with some of the stickiest rubber I've ever encountered (Five-ten's trademark "C4" rubber, which I still swear by) enables you to stand on some of the most ridiculous footholds imaginable. Forget the geezer old-school style, because these are NOT your grandma's shoe--in the hands of a professional, these laceups offer edging capabilities beyond your wildest dreams.
The shoe is fairly narrow, so people with wide feet might want to take that into account. The heel was quite snug on my feet even though I have a fairly small heel; much to my surprise, the shoe ended up heel hooking better than a lot of my "benchmark" shoes that I thought heel hooked well. This is a direct consequence of the heel being wrapped in the sticky rubber and also the tight fit of the shoe. The toebox was "just right" to me, and kept my toes well positioned although not enough so to cut off circulation.
Out of the box, the shoes were a bit stiff and unresponsive. They didn't have good sensitivity, or so I thought initially. After a few climbing sessions, they softened up a bit (but not too much) and sensitivity was excellent. The shoes gave me good life; climbing three to four times a week with fairly heavy use, I got about four months out of them before blowing the toe out. They were responsive and brutally precise all the way up to the bitter end. They also smeared fairly well, although due to their stiff nature they were a bit limited in that department.
Some quirks I had - the laces are utter crap, and I broke both of them. To people buying this shoe: replace them. To Five-Ten: duh. Fix the laces with something that doesn't resemble twine.
Well, I'm sure that this review sounds exceptionally positive so far, but the bottom line for picking out ANY climbing shoe is that you should buy a shoe suited to what you want to do while climbing. You would want a comfortable, forgiving shoe for traditional climbing, a shoe with high heels for crack climbing, a lightweight shoe with little support and lots of flexibility for bouldering, and a well supported shoe that is *fairly* comfortable for sport climbing. This shoe is primarily for sport climbing, and for "slab" to "gently overhanging" routes. Due to the flat and extremely rigid midsole, the shoe doesn't bend well to steep angles; it does, however, work miracles on vertical walls where your feet begin to resemble the proverbial "ferrari" of climbing.
Can you use it bouldering? Yes, I did--and it worked decently, but it's not flexible or agressive enough to really be effective. The Anasazi's don't want to bend; they want to point and shoot.
Sport climbing, on a dead vertical 100 ft. 5.12? Support, power, and finesse. Just what you want if this is the type of climbing that blows your skirt up.
It all comes down to what you want to do--and if your answer is sport climbing and it's not *all* forty five degrees overhanging, then this is the shoe for you.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
misterduck
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Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 3 members
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