Adventures in Onionism

It's not that gross, but heads up: blister pic. I generally think that you should mix up shoe brands and styles to keep your muscles guessing and avoid injury. For the past few years I've typically used maximal shoes for longer races: Hoka Challenger ATR for mellower trails, Hoka Stinson ATR for steep or rocky stuff and the La Sportiva Akasha recently. I felt like I wanted these more maximal shoes for the sake of my feet not feeling like hamburger at the end of a long race, but lately both the Stinsons and the Akashas are giving me a weird side-heel blister (as shown). It starts as a deep tic-tac sized blister at the edge of  the thick pad (the white part), and it spreads up the side as a regular thin watery blister you're used to. Most maximal cushion shoes do this now So what's up with the heel cups in maximally cushioned shoes? Is the foam compressing and pinching/rubbing? This doesn't happen in more moderately cushioned shoes. I assume this post is tot

I'm just a few days out from my first Hardrock. It's probably the hardest non-Barkley 100-miler, with 33,000 feet of climbing. Wasatch used to have 26 or 27,000, I think, before a private property issue forced them to get rid of a climb towards the end. Most other hard 100's I've done have from 18-21,000. They also aren't at 11,000 feet elevation. Tahoe 200 only had 34,000 over 200 miles, so Hardrock is definitely hard. The Lottery It's also very difficult to get into because 70% of the fewer than 150 spots are reserved for people who have already run it. (Lottery system described here --basically, there's a never bucket, a 5-time veteran bucket, and everyone else.) I'm biased since I haven't run it before, but I think this system is absurd. Obviously the race directors can do whatever they want, as evidenced by the fact that they are , but the more important question is whether they should . Should a race on public land be largely limited to the