Why Altra boots kinda suck but I ❤️ them - Olympus 5

all right let's do it these look so cool this is for sure the coolest Pacific Northwest boo of all [Music] time so how did Ultra change the running shoe industry well in 1998 golden Harper and Brian Beckstead both met in their sophomore year of high school on the first day of Cross Country Practice in orm Utah shout out to the utans and these two boys were obsessed with running shoes and running in general they said we ran cross country and track we practiced hard we worked at The Running Store and we just totally became shoe nerds but golden had noticed something peculiar while working at The Running Store cuz he noticed that the stride in the gate of barefoot Runners changed as soon as they wore traditional running shoes and to try to figure out why he started cutting apart running shoes in true rose Anvil's fashion and noticed how much higher the heel was than the forfoot on basically every single running shoe and so he thought there was some correlation there so to test this hypothesis he frankensteined these shoes by removing the padding from the heel and using a toaster to heat up the glue and gluing them back together and something clicked and that spark of Frankenstein life occurred bringing to life would eventually become Ultra shoes and golden said for the first time in my life I'm wearing a normal feeling running shoe I don't feel like the shoe is messing with the way I'm running and he surmised that the design allowed for a more natural running experience with the footfalls in the mid to 4T area instead of the more typical heel strike and Harper called this design zero drop which gained notoriety in the local running SC seen and now obviously is a lot more popular and after some initial concepting by the local Runners and store employees they commissioned a local cobbler to make a thousand pairs of these zero drop wide toeach shoes and they sold out fast which led him to pitch the idea of this type of Footwear to Footwear companies but nobody was interested at all in the concept which in hindsight might have been the best thing to happen to ultra because this led to the idea of being pitched to venture capitalist and former Nike designers which quickly took the company from this back room operation here in Utah to an established brand with International production and then by 2011 Ultra was acquired by icon health and fitness a large manufacturer of sports related equipment up in Logan Utah the city of my alma moer USU soon after entering the North American Market they won Runners World Magazine 2012 Best debut award and each year since 2011 Ultra doubled its sales and by 2013 they're at 300% growth with over 1,500 retailers selling selling their zero drop wide toebox shoes and thanks to bespoke post for sponsoring today's video if you don't know bespoke post is a monthly membership club that delivers a box of awesome straight to your front door and 90% of their products come from small Brands many of which are based here in the United States and each month thepoke post introduces new cool products like clothes and stuff for your house camping cooking gear basically anything you'd want and they base it off of your preferences after you fill out a little quiz to see what you like and what you don't like and now they're offering new membership programs where you can access good deals all year round I'm 30% off so now let's see what I actually got cuz I've been waiting on boxies this is the one I'm really excited for cuz these are the nomadic little bags you got your large Cube bag got a little shoe bag here to keep all the junk that's on the bottom of your shoes away from all your other stuff if you're traveling with shoes smaller version of The Big Cube just a little more rectangular next box we have here check this out so this is a little mini camera look how tiny that thing is here's the film and a little leather strap for it so each month you get a customized selection just for you sh either one you can keep it two you can swap it out for different products or you can skip that month entirely and they don't charge you and you only pay for what you want and right now to get a free mystery box on your first membership purchase click the link in the description and enter the code Ros gift to checkout or go to bespokepost.com Ros to check that out because it is really cool stuff to check them out below and around this time young 20s Weston was sitting in the entrepreneurship speaker series at USU where Harper presented in front of like a thousand of us students about his brand and what they're doing to change the Footwear industry and this was a huge inspiration to me as an entrepreneur and really piqu my interest even further in the Footwear industry because it made me realize not everything is what it seems and there's plenty of room for growth in the Footwear industry so even though I'm kind of all over this this product it had an impact on me it was pivotal for this whole Channel this whole career because it made me realize there's plenty of holes in this industry even though it's been around since humans were putting leather on their feet then over the next few years they contined to grow and test their Footwear with the help of the local college kids that got paid out to walk on treadmills for hours and hours a day including my little brother and my my roommates in 2018 Ultra continued its growth Trend and was acquired by Umbrella company VF which is parent companies of Vans Northface Timberland Supreme and a bunch more Brands and due to this new acquisition and the extended reach and the Deep corporate Pockets today you can find ultas basically any retailer especially in the outdoor industry and they single-handedly shifted the Footwear industry just a few by making shoes more anatomically correct with innumerable Brands popping up selling this style of shoe including some of the brands that we've covered and even some of the big players like some of the bigname brands so then what happened to this boot well let's start figuring out first what is this boot well the brand is ultra the style is the Olympus five hike mid GTX they weigh 1B 2 oz they retail for $220 they're made in Vietnam and the way that they position this product is hit the trails all day in this lightweight waterproof hiker designed for high cushion comfort and traction on technical terrain what's it feel like to hike all day in suppor of waterproof pillows find out with the Olympus 5 Hike mid GTX move the way you were designed to with a roomiest toe box and plenty of room for your toes to move freely space through the midfoot and zero drop if you want a pair of these be sure to check them out via Link in the description so what happened with this but what's going on with it well let's start with the upper cuz the upper is a pretty standard upper for this affordable foam based hiking series that we're doing it has plenty of synthetic material some overlays to to reinforce some areas has a this really unique little pole tab on the back has a little rubber toe bumper but the leather on thing is less than standard because this leather is a pretty thin 1.2 mm uh newbu leather and if you don't know 1.2 mm is about what you see in thicknesses on the lower end of sneakers for most boots we see anywhere from 2 to 2.5 and then maybe 3 mm at the thickest and since it's a new Buck they do sand it down to get that uh microfiber look to it the problem with this we cut a little cross-section out of it and they sanded a lot of that grain down and that brain is that really tight fiber structure that holds all those loose suede fibers together the result of that is all these little spots that it creases over and over and over it increases the likelihood of this leather splitting and cracking and falling apart sooner than a thicker leather but at the same time it performed really really well on the puncture test cuz it took 161 lbs to puncture through one thing that really sucks about this boot with not a lot of excuses is the lining cuz this lining is basically just the gortex lining you know because it's most the time you see the gortex lining between the outer layer and the inner lining but the lining is the gortex layer with just a tiny thin layer of fabric over top and the problem with that is as soon as you wear through that at all you've worn through the waterproofing and now your boots no longer waterproof and we did do the waterproof test it passed with flying colors even with the amount of wear that I had in this that probably less than 100 miles hiked but that but that's not even the biggest complaint I have with the lining because right here at the top of the gusset it bunches up really bad and it's sewn in a weird way and and it's super uncomfortable it kind of pokes the top of your foot really hard you know and I I broke these in a good amount and it still was bothering me and I think over time when when they're really broken in it's not going to be a big deal but that combined with basically the gortex lining being the lining of the boot not great but one thing I really love about this boot is the Comfort Under Foot this thing is so freaking Comfort they they were not lying about it it feel like you're walking on pillows or clouds it's so comfortable and it's because it's just a huge thick midsole and they they use what they call in flex msle and it's comprised of a grid-like Groove designed to provide flexibility and movement and extra Squish and we'll see what that really looks like when we get it cut in half they don't have that same energy return feel of the Boost Foams from the Trix boot that we reviewed from this series and it also doesn't have that same walking in quick sand feeling that the under armors did and that's partly because the foam is a 30 Shore a compared to the the Under Armour that was around 20 so it's a little bit more rigid but it feels way softer because of that grid system on the inside but there is a downside to this midsole and that's the fact that the majority of the out soole is the midsole we did the bar drop test it bounced up 6 in about the middle of the pack the puncture test took 73 lb the quarter like the bottom quarter of all results kind of reinforcing that idea that it's just not very durable outsole because this is the Vibra Mega grip outsole it's supposed to be durable sticky outsole for fierce Trails according to Vibram but the actual rubber is really really sparse all of this dark blue material you see especially through right here that's just the midsole foam and you like I said I only walked in these less than 100 miles and you can see how much it's already fallen apart and degrading and chunks falling off because even though this is like a nice foam it's not a really Durable foam because it's foam and the other aspect of that is because it's so soft these really don't grip as well as a full rubber outsole or even a majority rubber outsole because that foam just is never going to grip as well as any of these lugs will but even that and everything that we just described that I don't love is not the main reason why these kind of suck so let's cut these in half and I'll show you exactly why Ultra this brand that changed the running shoe industry their hiking boot kind of sucks all right we got a cut in half and if you're not subscribed consider just taking the mouth and hitting that subscribe button it's free YouTube rarely shows you what you're subscribed to anyway and it helps us out a ton and if you are subscribed thanks for subscribing and all your support so let's see what's inside [Music] so that's why these things are so stinking comfortable cuz they use a slightly harder foam but it feels way softer because you have this really unique grid system on the inside and and I've really never seen this done inside of a shoe or boot before you know we've seen columns and it's the same principle but nothing structured quite like that before but at the same time it's not glued very well you know it's not really glued at all the problem with that with that is as you wear these those two layers move independently and it can wear out the phone and especially where you have less surface area because of those cutouts it could leave lead to premature wear and especially when you factor in all the premature issues that we saw across the board with the leather the lining the foam out soole and this uncemented midsole but for a really easy groom Trail a Sunday afternoon hike these are ridiculously comfortable and and I'm hoping the next version of these will solve some of these issues because it could be a really really good hiking boot for really like medium to low uh difficulty hikes but right now it just has so many of these other little teeny problems that make it a little bit harder for me to buy but at the same time this is one of the only zero drop barefoot shoes that isn't just a single layer of 5 mm rubber underneath your foot actually has a good amount of foam it's going to be comfortable and right now it doesn't seem like there's anything else out there that beats this so even though I think it's pretty flawed and it's maybe not even close to being a really good intense hiking boot it still is unbeatable as far as we've seen for this specific style and on that note how does this rank on our affordable foam based hiking boot board I'd put it right below Adidas and above Under Armour cuz the under armors were even worse than these and let me know what other foam affordable hiking boots you want us to cover in this series and sorry Ultra for on your boot thank you guys for all your support and everything that you do and supporting this Channel The Rose Anvil 2 Channel our handmade leather goods it's the only way we're able to do this and cut apart brand new stuff every single week so thank you guys see you Ultra Ultra Al Ultra not Ultra Ultra Ultra what

Channel: Rose Anvil

Views: 46,378

Keywords: Altra, Altra Hiking, Best hiking boot, Hiking 2024, Best boot, Altra olympus, altraolympus 5, altra olympus 5 hiker, olympus 5 hike boot review, altra hiking, Altra olympus hiking boot, Trail running, Hiking boots 2024, Utah brand, Altra trail running, Altra running, Altra hiking, Hiking Altra boots, outdoors, outdoor, outdoor hiking, outdoor hiking boot, best hiking boot, wide toe box, wide toe shoes, wide toe hiking boot, zero drop shoes, altra zero drop hiking boot

Id: GpWteT-cP5I

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024