A shoe for high achievers
Footwear brand Scarpa picked a special athlete to help it develop its latest trail-running shoe, the Spin Planet.
Veneto-based outdoor footwear group Scarpa has a new style of footwear in its spring-summer 2023 collection that it describes as its most eco-friendly long-distance trail-running shoe ever. Part of the Planet range, the new Spin Planet is a shoe with high enough levels of performance and durability to meet the needs of even the most seasoned competitors.It has an upper that is constructed from 100% recycled fibres, while the ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) midsole contains 45% recycled material and the rubber outer sole 30%. Scarpa says the midsole is thick enough to absorb impact and protect the foot and provide comfort throughout long-distance runs, especially in summer.Record-breaker
Scarpa worked on the design of this shoe with Hillary Gerardi, an athlete who knows more than most about the need for high-performance footwear for an endurance trail-running event on rocky terrain and in challenging conditions (even in summer). Originally from Vermont in the US, Ms Gerardi now has her base in the Alps. She has an impressive list of recent wins in sky-running and long-distance events to her name, including the Tromso Skyline race in Norway, the Trofeo Kima in Italy and the Glencoe Skyline in Scotland.
In 2021, running with friend and fellow athlete Valerie Fabre, she established a new record time for the ultra-marathon Haute Route course from Chamonix to Zermatt, completing, by skiing and running, the challenging 110-kilometre Alpine route, with its elevation gain of more than 8,000 metres, in 26 hours and 21 minutes. A new record implies that there was an existing record to beat, but there was none for women; it could be that women had completed the ski-traverse before, but there was no official time for this until 2021.
This feat features in a documentary called ‘The Traverse’, made by film-makers Ben Tibbetts and Jake Holland, which has been well received at mountain festivals in different parts of the world in the months that followed.
On foot
Hillary Gerardi co-designed the Spin Planet shoe with Scarpa and is an official ambassador for the brand and for this new product. She talks often, as in a recent episode of a podcast called ‘Go Mountain Goats’, of her love of the mountains and of climbing and says that “not running” is what she likes best about the running events in which she excels. She even says that it took her a long time to describe herself as a runner.
She points out that what we describe as trail-running covers a multitude of different specialisms: mountain-running, fell-running, 10-13-kilometre events, 20-kilometre events, 50-kilometre, 100-kilometre on a huge range of trails. She also remarks on the difference between traversing these courses on foot rather than “hitching a lift up” and then skiing back down as an alpinist. On foot, you have time to see fully how the landscape changes, (valley, deciduous forest, coniferous forest, shrubland, grassland, rocky terrain, then ice) and what risks each stage might present.
Responsibility at heart
Alpinism is far from without serious risks of its own, of course, as Ms Gerardi knows only too well, having suffered a potentially serious accident some years ago owing to a binding malfunction. She escaped significant injury that day, but says now that the incident forced her to change her way “of looking at the mountains and of being in the mountains”. Her opinion now is that trail-running is more conducive to forcing people to be more independent during these events, to take responsibility for where they are and for what they are doing.
Responsibility is close to her heart, too, which is why she engaged enthusiastically with Scarpa on the Spin Planet project. Before becoming a full-time athlete in 2022, she worked for a research organisation focused on monitoring the impact of global warming on mountain environments. At a hands-on level, she has long been a champion of ‘plogging’, the practice of picking up litter from the pathways while jogging, for years. She says she has long been an admirer of Scarpa precisely because it is a company that has “its DNA rooted in the mountains”.
She says that when she began working with the footwear brand on the Spin Planet shoe, she found great willingness among members of the Scarpa team to engage with her in dialogue about durability and reducing impact on the environment from the shoe’s manufacture. She declares herself delighted to have been involved in the process of creating a shoe that uses recycled materials extensively and still meets strict technical requirements while remaining lightweight (the shoe weighs 520 grammes in women’s size 38). “The shoe is very innovative,” she concludes.
Specialist skyrunner Hillary Gerardi worked with Scarpa on the development of the Spin Planet shoe.
Credits: José Miguel Munoze/SCARPA
