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Within the occasion you even half paid consideration to the earlier two Extraordinarily-Path du Mont-Blanc ultra-trail working events in Chamonix, France, you acknowledge that Jim Walmsley and Vincent Bouillard acquired the 2023 and 2024 males’s races, respectively, carrying mushy Hoka path working super sneakers.
Nonetheless there’s so much additional to those discrete black and white sneakers with the attribute built-in above-the-ankle particles collar gaiters that’s hiding in plain sight.
Every Walmsley and Bouillard wore prototypes of the Hoka’s limited-edition Tection X 2.5 sneakers that had been significantly modified to fulfill their match, actually really feel, and journey preferences out on the trail. These slight tweaks are the handiwork of Christophe Aubonnet, a behind-the-scenes craftsman who’s flip into typically referred to as the mannequin’s path working shoe whisperer.
The 54-year-old Frenchman’s shoe-mod tinkering has not solely carried out an unlimited place in athlete effectivity, however it has been moreover instrumental in Hoka’s development of the Tecton X 3, a consumer mannequin of the restricted model Tecton X 2.5 that hit retailers in mid-August after 157 prototype iterations over the earlier two years.
This personalized service is nothing new at Hoka. Really, mounted innovation and iteration has been key to the now billion dollar agency’s success given that very beginning.
“Hoka was born as a tinkering mannequin,” says Colin Ingram, Hoka’s vice chairman of world product. “The thought is that no shoe is right because of the next one is the tinkered, additional superior mannequin, and that is all born from the center of what we do.”
Check out our UTMB Hub for profiles, outcomes, analysis, and far more from our workforce that was on the underside in Chamonix.
The Shoe Whisperer
Aubonnet has been tinkering with working footwear for a few years, first for Salomon inside the late Nineties and early 2000s, then as a co-founder of Hoka, and now as a result of the director of innovation for Deckers Producers, the mom or father agency of Hoka. The shoe enterprise veteran has moreover been a path working race director, a ski racer, and an achieved journey racer and mountain runner—having completed all the races all through UTMB Mont-Blanc week through the years, along with the technical, off-piste 300-kilometer workforce event typically referred to as the PTL.
In his place with Deckers and Hoka, significantly, Aubonnet locations his in depth working shoe info to utilize by altering sneakers—sometimes from his automotive at a trailhead with devices he carries with him all the time—for Hoka athletes like Walmsley, 2024 CCC 100K winner Hayden Hawks, Julien Chorier (eleventh in TDS 148K), and most not too way back, his Hoka colleague Bouillard. (Throughout the days sooner than UTMB, he moreover modified a correct shoe for American adaptive athlete Amy Palmiero-Winters to help clear out her gait and match the prosthetic working blade worn on her left leg.)
Bouillard, who works as a senior supervisor of product engineering with Hoka’s footwear innovation workforce, acquired the 2024 UTMB with what Aubonnet calls “a quiver of sneakers”—semi-custom variations of the limited-edition Tecton X 2.5 and the newly launched Tecton X 3 made in particular for him by Aubonnet—on the ready. Every fashions are based totally off of the first two variations of the Tecton X, the distinctive path working shoe to take advantage of parallel carbon-fiber propulsion plates (instead of a singular plate) to strengthen stability. The model new fashions even have hyper-responsive supercritical foam midsoles and Vibram Megagrip outsoles.
Aubonnet likens himself to a ski race technician who tunes ski edges to match the conditions of a race course. “It’s a racing service,” he says. “It’s tuning the product to make them dedicated to explicit athletes to make [the shoes] truly their very personal.”
After quite a lot of Hoka athletes turned in strong race performances in various events all through UTMB Mont-Blanc week carrying variations of the Tecton X sneakers personalized by Aubonnet, we caught up with him in Chamonix to get all the best way right down to the brass tacks of merely how the strategy works.
RELATED: Full-Time Hoka Shoe Engineer Vincent Bouillard Claims Stunning UTMB Win
A Custom-made Shoe Tinkering Service
Tweaking Hoka shoe fashions to significantly meet the desires of a singular runner started in 2009 with Ludovic Pommeret, thought-about one among Hoka’s distinctive French athletessooner than the mannequin formally launched. Aubonnet has created fairly a couple of semi-custom variations of Hoka sneakers with different-from-factory midsoles and outsoles (deeper lugs for a muddy race, as an illustration) for Pommeret, along with totally different additional nuanced modifications to fulfill his explicit preferences. These tweaks have helped Pommeret win fairly a couple of races, along with UTMB in 2016, Diagonale des Fous in 2021, and the Hardrock 100 in course-record time in July, as correctly aiding him in his fifth-place finish at this 12 months’s UTMB merely six weeks later.
Aubonnet has labored rigorously with Hoka’s skilled athletes to maximise a shoe’s traits to “correspond to their specificities on the foot stage, their biomechanics, their technicity working.”
Aubonnet spends time with the mannequin’s elite runners on path—“in an precise environment,” he says—and inside the Hoka innovation lab in Annecy, France, to adapt provides and geometry, sometimes using a softer or firmer midsole foam, together with deeper lugs to an outsole, making a foot-specific last, or shaving down bits of midsole foam to barely alter the geometry of a shoe. To have the ability to do his modifications, he desires one factor to cut with, he says, along with some glue, and a buffering chance. As such, he has a set of devices with him all the time. “I joke with some of us at Hoka that, ‘Dremel is life,’” he says, referring to the small hand-held mechanized gadget that’s thought-about one among his go-to models for slicing, carving, and sanding.
He says that he typically implements an additional bevel of material or removes one factor from a shoe. “I can change the rocker. There’s a lot which may be completed by hand.”
Usually, Aubonnet changes properties of sneakers in his automotive at trailheads, and has the runner verify the brand-new mannequin correct then and there. Fashions evolve, and typically a runner has various variations of a shoe in his or her quiver for explicit functions.
As an illustration, Walmsley ran in variations of the Hoka Tecton X 2.5, a customized mannequin of the Hoka Tecton X 2, between the 2022 UTMB (the place he accomplished fourth) and the 2023 race, which he acquired. He ran in an similar pair this 12 months, when he led most of the means early inside the race sooner than dropping out on the Courmayeur 51-mile assist station on account of a sore knee. “Realizing that Jim has his explicit stride,” says Aubonnet, who describes Walmsley’s gait as having “quite a lot of flying”—he’s a bouncy runner—“Jim truly likes to have a springy and punchy influence (collectively along with his sneakers), which is evaluated by many alternative excessive athletes to be barely bit an extreme quantity of.”
Aubonnet explains how he thought Walmsley might like a cushier-rather-than-springier pair in his arsenal for late inside the UTMB course, and created a mannequin of the Tecton X 2.5 with the midsole foam above the carbon fiber plate to be barely softer than an unusual pair of Tecton X 2, and the other 2.5 iterations. Aubonnet says he made them “for when his quads could be pretty lifeless and his biomechanics could be damaged.”
Merely days sooner than the 2023 race, Aubonnet insisted that Walmsley’s crew take the secondary pair of two.5s with them to assist stations.
“‘Don’t neglect, put that in your quiver,” Aubonnet recalled telling him. “I don’t inform you (that) it is a should to bounce in, nonetheless that you’ve got this choice that will very nicely be smart, moreover, to presumably to refresh you a bit.’”
Eighty miles into the race on the Champex-Lac assist station, Walmsley switched into the softer, additional accommodating sneakers. Alongside along with his ft and legs feeling barely additional cosy and relaxed, he tracked down then-leader Zach Miller and went on to show into the first American man to win UTMB.
Aubonnet recalled how Germain Grangier, the third-place finisher in 2023, knowledgeable him after the race that he had been working with Walmsley out of that assist station nonetheless that Walmsley seemed to be rejuvenated and he won’t maintain with him. “‘I don’t know what occurred there, if he had each modified the legs or modified the shoe, nonetheless after that, he ran away from me.’ Aubonnet remembers Grangier telling him. “I was so happy.”
RELATED: The Quickest Path Sneakers on the 2024 UTMB
A Psychological Improve
Aubonnet is also giving runners an edge with shoe specificities catered to their explicit individual ft and dealing varieties, like a {{custom}} match (Hawks has a last—the within type of a shoe—explicit to his foot, as an illustration). Nonetheless it’s the psychological revenue that he says probably makes a very powerful distinction.
“To be truly a realist myself, on the shoe stage, by the use of effectivity, they obtain barely little bit of 1 factor, however it’s far more mentally and inside the ideas,” Aubonnet says. “I contribute to make them a step stronger inside the ideas, and to current them the feeling they’ve one factor which is definitely tuned and the simplest for them.”
The small shoe tweaks are one different occasion of how ultra-trail working has continued to up-level on the tip of the spear currently. American path working legend Matt Carpenter was well-known for modifying his private sneakers—trimming off pointless elements and drilling holes inside the outsole to chop again weight—and Brooks made {{custom}} sneakers for Scott Jurek for the Western States 100 once more in 2004.
Totally different producers are little doubt serving to their skilled runners make performance-oriented mods, nonetheless Aubonnet’s outcomes have contributed to major race victories.
“After they watch the other opponents spherical them, they’ve a mindset of, ‘I don’t know what the others placed on, nonetheless I do know that I’m truly, truly optimized,’” Aubonnet says. “A large part of it is psychology. A small half is precise effectivity enchancment.”
PHOTOS: A Look Contained within the 2024 UTMB
Nonetheless, like with Walmsley’s softer mannequin of the Tecton X 2.5, a small tweak in instruments may make an unlimited distinction. Aubonnet likens the shoe change to altering the air stress in mountain bike tires. Anyone who’s carried out with the PSI of their tires—to manage to completely totally different terrain and conditions in a visit or a race—is conscious of how quite a lot of a distinction it’d in all probability make in utilizing comfort, technical acuity, and tempo to barely inflate or deflate bike tires.
Totally different sports activities actions, like biking and ski racing, have technicians working with elite athletes to make alterations to their gear correct up-to-the-minute of opponents. Ultrarunning isn’t pretty there—however. And Hoka isn’t offering up Aubonnet to customize merely anyone’s sneakers.
However, a couple of of Aubonnet’s modifications for sneakers worn by Walmsley, Hawks, and totally different elites have gone on to inform development of fashions dropped on the larger shopper market.
“It’s not so subtle,” Aubonnet says of his work, “however it’s primarily based totally on some experience, quite a lot of points coming from my feeling and as well as the runners’ ideas. The outcomes of that gives [us] one factor truly good.”
