Don’t have a few grand for a pair of custom carbon cycling shoes? Maybe Crocs will do the trick

My wife thinks I am a snob.

I know down to the millisecond when she’s going to accuse me. I have learned to prepare for the onslaught.

Nope, it’s not when I buy wine. I am a cheapskate: a box red is just fine.

It’s not about who I choose to hang out with. I’ve got friends from many walks of life, from Mrs. Lee down the street who spends her days combing the neighbourhood with her dog, filling the bags propped in her baby stroller with empty beer cans, to Alan in chichi Westmount who pilots his own plane.

It’s when I make a derogatory comment about Crocs.

Those molded foam slippers are everywhere: on the street, on Hollywood red carpets, scattered on the beach at the starting line of triathlons around the globe.

Maybe my inner Canadian nationalist should cheer that those foamy slippers were invented in Quebec City, that “Ugly Can Be Beautiful,” as their first advertisements boldly shouted.

When the first Crocs hit the market in 2002, did we really need more ugliness anywhere?

Did we need to be flooded with hundreds of millions of pairs of pink and green and purple footwear made from unprocessed plastic polymers and closed-cell foam?

Children wearing Crocs were kept off Japanese escalators because their small mushy soles got caught in the vice-grip of the revolving steel steps. Footsore nurses everywhere loved them, but many hospitals banned them – and not just because of the holes in the shoe top and the risk of a dropped needle. Some models were prohibited in Swedish hospitals because they generated such high voltage electricity that they interfered with electronic medical equipment.

An experience like no other: explaining a world championship in Finland

Which brings me to enthusiastic triathlete and restaurant chef Efraim Manzano.

Manzano found his Crocs so comfortable in his long hours in the kitchen that he began wearing them on training runs. He had them on when he raced his first 70.3 in 2007.

A couple of years later, he rigged up the soles of a second pair with pedal cleats.

Before long he’d qualified for the Ironman World Championship in Kona, finishing in a respectable 7:22:29 on the bike and 5:15:38 on the run.

Manzano has completed more than 25 full and 70.3 Ironman races, run a 3:17 marathon and a 100-mile ultra wearing those … fashion catastrophes.

He swears by the Bistro Pro model which sells for 60 bucks.

Efraim told fixingyourfeet.com that Crocs are “the best and the most comfy running/cycling shoes in the world.”

But I bet Efraim hasn’t yet tried on a pair of the latest in cycling shoes.

The LoreOne is humbly billed as the “world’s most powerful road cycling shoe.” Don’t rush out the door yet: you can’t buy these bike shoes in a store.

You have to place your order online.

Your “purchase triggers an invitation to digitally scan your feet using an iPhone in conjunction with the Morphic digital print platform.”

Once that 3D scan arrives in California, LoreOne says, “the quest for perfection” begins. A 3D robot printer begins spewing out short carbon fibres, around and around and around. The outside and inside of the shoe and the sole are manufactured precisely to fit your foot by “the first moldless carbon monocoque ever built on earth.”

LoreOne promises you’ll get extra watts on every pedal stroke and “higher pedaling efficiency scores” because their shoes “blur the line between spirit, body and bicycle.”

So how much for that poetry?

With import duties and taxes, a pair of LoreOne will cost you C$4,176.17.

And what do they look like?

Well, sort of like Crocs that have been wrapped in flat egg noodles. Never-ending strands of shiny black egg noodles with a big dial on top to tighten them up.

I think I should go and apologize to my wife.

Maybe she and Efraim are onto something.

David Gutnick is a triathlete and former CBC journalist from Montreal. This story originally appeared in the 2024 Triathlon Magazine Buyer’s Guide.