Michael Miller reviews the Olympus 2.0 from Altra
This is it.
This is the shoe the Olympus was meant to be.
As a useful trail shoe, the first two iterations of the Altra Olympus were a bust.
There just wasn’t enough traction in either version ~ though I did get hundreds of miles out of them as a very good, cushy road shoe.
The folks at Altra weren’t messing around this time.
The tread on the Olympus 2.0 is built by Vibram, and it’s a burly beast on the trails. On the first few rainy, muddy runs through Discovery Park, the shoe gripped everything ~ from wet stairs and bridges, to rocks and driftwood on the beach, to steep up-and-downs on pavement. My confidence in them grew with every step, and they didn’t once send me sliding.
The max-cushion stack height on the new Olympus is still 36mm, but even with the new luggy sole, this shoe weighs in about 10% (1.2 ounces) lighter than its predecessor.
Maybe this is due to what Altra calls “Trail Specific Sticky Rubber,” or maybe it’s the better-fitting upper that wraps around your foot like a, uh, thing that wraps around feet. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the new Olympus will be my go-to shoe for the Deception Pass 50K, as well as ongoing training for the Gorge Waterfalls 100K in early April.
If these early results are any indication, this will be the first of many Olympus’s’s’s to join my Altra collection.
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