1. a real heel
2. rubber over the big toe knuckle

i’m psyched on the fact that the speedster is built on the same last as the muira/cobra with the same heel… which for me, personally, is super bomber save for the delamination that i sometimes experience on grevious heel grappling. more than the heel, however, the last itself should power up the toe box much better than the venom, which was floppy for me.

i’ve always thought that a soft shoe should be able to flex when you try to make a “fist” with your foot [which gives you the supreme feel for the rock], but should be built to resist flattening out via a rand-tension system. the venom didn’t resist upward flex of the toes very well, which made it fantastic for toe hooking and super comfy, but left it weaker than even the mantra for edging and front pointing whjen you had to.

bottom line: seems like both competitors have improved upon sportivas’ original concept.

i’ll be psyched to get a pair of speedsters and battle with the narc on the techy details!

as far as soft shoes on slabs, check out sonnie trotter’s blog for a discussion on soft v. stiff for slabby stuff.

i’d like to hook up the project and the speedster to a rockem sockem robots game and have them battle it out to the death.