NEVER MISS AN ISSUE OF STUFF! SEE PAGE 94
uck Rogers wants his kicks back.
Ah, you can always count on Stuff
for nice up-to-date references.
While anyone born after 1985
quickly Googles who Buck Rogers is, these
are the Adidas Micropacers – a pair of trainers
that were a good 20 years ahead of their
time. Released to coincide with the Los
Angeles Olympics in 1984, the silver sneakers
had a microsensor in the left toe that could
measure distance and pace, and show you
how many calories you’d burned via a digital
display built into the tongue. The cost to you?
Just over $100.Is that all? My Yeezys cost nearly twice that!
Yes, but this was the era of floppy discs and
Wham!, not AirPods and Ed Sheeran. A ton
was a lot to pay for a pair of shoes back then.
Besides, the tech was some way behind
what we have now. Instead of the almost
impossibly lightweight materials that
high-end running shoes are sculpted
from today, the Micropacers were made
of relatively heavy leather. And the sensors
would only give you approximations – a long
way from the more accurate stats we get
from GPS, accelerometers and heart-ra te
monitors nowadays.Still, genuine trailblazers...
Absolutely. While the reviews at the time
were less than complimentary – with some
criticising their weight and lack of accuracy,
and others wondering who they were
actually for (yuppies, apparently) – it was
a long time before anything similar came
along. The introduction in 2006 of Nike+iPod,
which required a sensor to be attached to
your laces, arguably kickstarted the trend
for personal exercise and health metrics that
now means we have watches that can tell
us how much oxygen is in our blood. And not
even Buck Rogers had one of those.
[ WordsTom Wiggins]Adidas micropacer
B
RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES 1984Toe infinity
and beyond
Adidas has brought the
Micropacers back multiple
times, including a 30th
anniversary pair in 2014.
They were less clunky
but still had that
silvery look.