Keep Running

Two determined guys got the idea that they could shove their way into the running-shoe business -- never mind that the industry is locked up by international giants or that these two had never manufactured a thing. Their company, Newton Running, has made impressive strides. Now, where the heck is that finish line?

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Danny Abshire likes to run long distances. Very long. Like, 100 miles long, at altitude, across the rocky terrain of Colorado. Ultra running is a crazy sport, determination manifest. To finish events such as the Leadville Trail 100, which Abshire has done twice, is to progress toward a goal ceaselessly, painfully, no matter how absurd the goal might seem to less obsessed people. Running for as many as 30 hours in a row is tough on the body, naturally, leaving blisters and depleted muscles and aching everything. Ultra running affects the psyche, too. Some of the thoughts that have wobbled through Abshire's exhausted brain are personal. Should he contact his father, whom he never knew as a child? (He should, he concluded, and has.) Other thoughts are professional. It may be fair to wonder about his state of mind when he decided, as a career option, to start a running-shoe company. From scratch. With no experience manufacturing anything, and with a partner who had also never built a product of any kind, and who prior to starting the shoe company was Abshire's landlord.

For about a year and a half now, the company, Boulder, Colorado-based Newton Running, has produced and sold some of the most talked-about shoes to hit the running world in years. Newton shoes -- the charter line includes four basic models each for men and women -- are neon-colored, shockingly light, and sold with the seductive claim that they can make almost anybody a faster, injury-free runner.

The shoes aren't cheap. Not even close. At up to $175 a pair, Newton came out of the gate with very nearly the most expensive running shoes on the market. They are not for everyone, as I would learn personally. Nor is it in any way clear the shoes deliver on the miraculous promises. That doesn't temper what Newton has accomplished. Two guys -- a former ski bum and a real estate developer -- launched an international, high-end running-shoe company from the ground up. Not a company selling microbrewed beer or homemade chocolates or something small and boutiquey. Running shoes. Running shoes.

Newton shoes help runners go faster. That's the claim. That's why they're generating the buzz. The shoes are said to encourage and reward a "barefoot" running style. Runners wearing Newtons are supposed to land on the balls of their feet instead of the heels. For most people that isn't natural, but some of the fastest distance runners in history, including current American marathoner Mike Hall, who wears the Asics brand, and Olympic gold medalist Frank Shorter, who endorses New Balance, are forefoot strikers. These elite runners could go even faster in Newtons, it follows, because Newtons incorporate a set of "actuator lugs" in the forefoot, raised rubber rectangles that supposedly work like trampolines to spring runners -- forefoot strikers specifically -- forward with every step. A triathlete paid to endorse the Newton brand, Natascha Badmann, set a world record in June 2007 at a race in Maryland, wearing the company's neon-green Distance model racing flat. For his Top 10 list of the best athletic and adventure equipment of 2007, Stephen Regenold, author of a syndicated column called The Gear Junkie, ranked the Newton Gravity shoe No. 1.

Neither of the founders of Newton Running, Danny Abshire and Jerry Lee, had plans to go into the shoe business until, basically, they were told they couldn't pull it off. When I met them for the first time, last November, they were moving the Newton offices from a warehouse in Boulder to a showcase on the first floor of the landmark Colorado Building, just off the Pearl Street pedestrian mall. Unpacked boxes crowded Abshire's desk. The fluorescent yellows and oranges seen on Newton shoes colored the walls and carpeting. I spotted only two other people, sitting at desks, talking on the phone. The entire company consists of just nine people.

Abshire and Lee led me into a sitting room where the current Newton models were on display, along with a slew of the prototypes that came in the 12 years before Newton opened for business in March 2007. The most striking was the Bri-tek, an early prototype. It's a clunky blue shoe that looks almost like a cleat, held together with black adhesive and named after a man named Brian Russell.

It was Russell who started what eventually became Newton. He is a full-time inventor based in Littleton, Colorado. Thinking up new products is his calling. His brain has conjured up a wind-powered electromagnetic turbine, which he has yet to patent, and a wheel that he says will double a car's fuel efficiency. (That new wheel is patented, though it's not yet something he wants to talk about publicly.) The ideas that led to Newton came to Russell while he was running, something he has been doing for 40 years, logging 60 miles a week. All that time on the road made him think about the biomechanics of the foot. Which bones land first and why? How exactly does the ankle rotate and why? What is the optimal stride? He would run along a grassy median barefoot, monitoring how his feet struck the soft ground. He would take his bare feet over to asphalt to grasp how they responded to hard surfaces.

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