Sanuk Donny Primo Shoe Review

"Being down in the open air -
Living life like we just don't care -
Just doing what we want to do -
Not doing what we're supposed to do -
It's gonna be a lovely day ... "
- Donavon Frankenreiter, "Lovely Day" (video after post)


Many parenting couples have a dynamic that goes something like this: one parent is the responsible one, who keeps things in line and sees that things get done when they’re supposed to. The other is more of a free spirit, equal parts playful and forgetful, who tries to keep day to day life from being mundane or predictable.

(Before you ask … yes, my own relationship is like this, and the intro quote should be all the evidence you need to guess which role I play.)

In an ideal world, the children of these couples acquire a nice combination of their parents’ personalities; they know how to mind their manners when it’s expected, but they’re able to cut loose and have a good time when the occasion presents itself.

Sanuk Donny Primo

What does any of this have to do with shoes? Think of Sanuk’s Donny Primo as the offspring of exactly the same parenting arrangement. The responsible one is Sanuk’s Boardroom, a super comfy and lightweight leather “sidewalk surfer” (to use Sanuk’s term) with a leather upper that’s stylish enough to pass muster in all but the most formal office settings. The free spirit is Sanuk’s flagship Donny, made for surfer / chill musician Donavon Frankenreiter, which has a laid-back beach vibe from top to bottom. Mama brings home the paycheck, and daddy blows it building a half-pipe in the backyard – or something like that.

Donny Primo on left, original Donny on right

Hybrid construction is most apparent in the Donny Primo uppers, which are made from stylish suede, but retain a bit of the artistic surfer flair. There’s a thin canvas lining that makes the uppers fairly comfortable against bare skin, and also adds a bit of insulation. Temperature regulation for the Donny Primo falls in the middle of the parental spectrum, as the suede uppers are less breathable and more insulating than the thin canvas Donnys, but more breathable and less insulating than the leather Boardroom.

Like all Sanuk sidewalk surfers, the midsole of the Donny Primo is a soft EVA with a standing height of approximately 15mm in the heel and 10mm in the forefoot. The bottom of your foot feels like it’s wearing a flip-flop, while the top of it is ready to go to a nice restaurant.

Elastic stretch panels on either side of the vamp (panel on top of the foot) make getting the Donny Primo on and off nearly as easy as slipping into a pair of thong sandals as well.

The midsole height is higher and has more heel-to-toe drop than I typically like in everyday shoes, but I’ve found that there’s significant settling of the midsole material after extended use, so that after a couple of months the functional position of your foot is much flatter and closer to the ground than when you first try them on.

Considering how much hype the natural footwear movement has generated over the past year, I’m actually kind of disappointed that Sanuk hasn’t become a bigger player in this category. The Donny Primo is completely flexible, very lightweight at just under 7oz, and wide enough through the forefoot to allow your toes to spread out and function almost as if they were shoeless.

Really, the only drawback I have about the Donny Primo is outsole traction, although you can’t really blame it, since neither of its parents have outstanding traction either. The Happy U grid is fine for dry conditions, but if it’s wet outside or if you’re on any sort of loose dirt or gravel, the traction can certainly be a bit lacking. I’d love to see Sanuk experiment with a slightly more grooved outsole or a grippier rubber compound, which shouldn’t detract too much from the beach sandal ground feel.

Overall, the Donny Primo is a shoe that should make its Mom and Dad proud: it maintains the mellow and fun feel of the Donny, with the class and dressiness of the Boardroom. It’s not currently available on the Sanuk website, but it retails for $60 from Amazon.com.

**
Finally, a song by the shoe's namesake certainly seems in order ... but if you're stuck someplace that gets real winter weather, my apologies for this song; it's one of those that makes me want to do nothing more than head to the beach and watch the waves roll in. If you don't happen to live in California or someplace similar, this might make summer seem very far away.

Donavon Frankenreiter, "Lovely Day" (click to play):



*Product provided by Sanuk
**See other product reviews on sidebar at right. If you have a product you’d like reviewed, contact me at info@runningandrambling.com.



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Sanuk Donny Shoe Review

“I'm looking for life, love and laughter -
Everything in between and what happens after -
I'm looking for life, looking for love, looking for laughter.”
- Donavon Frankenreiter, “Life, Love, and Laughter” (video after post)

**
You’d be hard pressed to find a footwear company that gives off better vibes than Sanuk.


The company name is a Thai word for happiness and balance. One of their company mottos is “Smile! Pass it on.” And the goal of their business is to make your feet feel like they’re spending a day at the beach.

Sanuk was started in 1997 by a dude named Jeff Kelley, who thought he’d try making sandals out of inner tubes and indoor-outdoor carpet. While that prototype doesn’t sound particularly comfortable, he eventually developed a smooth, stylish, durable flip-flop and started attracting the most chill group of partners and consultants imaginable to promote and advance his product line.

From Outside magazine

Today, Team Sanuk consists of twelve charismatic athletes, all of whom are either professional surfers or extreme rock climbers. You’ve probably seen their crazy ads in outdoor magazines, which highlight both the products and the company’s unique brand culture. Their spokespeople are also a group who firmly believe in the importance of allowing the foot to perform without restrictions.

Think about it: what two groups of athletes are more reliant on optimal foot performance than surfers or rock climbers? If you want to carve a tight bottom turn or avoid making a barn door out of a dyno, you need as much natural foot strength and flexibility as possible. That same philosophy also determines what these athletes put on their feet after exiting the water or belaying down the rock face.

Doesn't have anything to do with footwear ... but I found this photo on the Sanuk site, and I like it: Team Sanuk member Alana Blanchard. Good vibes, indeed.

Sanuk footwear – referred to as sidewalk surfers – is built with the premise that the foot should function naturally. Or, as their website states: We think that nature has endowed us with a nice set of functional feet...they worked well for eons. Our guess is that the first shoes were designed to protect from the elements, but many societies stuck with sandals. Why? Because they are the closest things to walking barefoot.

One of Sanuk’s advertising tag lines is “They're not shoes, they’re sandals.” There are no rigid boards or shanks, and the thin flexible footbeds enable your feet to bend naturally when you walk. Imagine a lightweight canvas upper sewn onto a thong flip-flop bottom, and you get the idea. They call this approach Barefoot Un-Technology, which allows all the muscles in your feet to work as if they’re bare.

Yet another crazy Sanuk ad

The cool surfer attitude of the company founders is evident in every model in the Sanuk line. Per the company philosophy page, they strive to make products that are as much about funk as they are about function. That eclectic style is clearly apparent in the model I tested, called the Donny.

(I pretty much had to pick that one, didn’t I? Although the name isn’t short for Donald, but Donavon – as in Donavon Frankenreiter, the professional surfer and chill music badass whose music I’ve embedded on this site before. I mean, if you’re offering a barefoot shoe model that’s practically named after me, that promises happiness and balance, and is inspired by a dude who happens to be one of my biggest role models … you have me at hello.)

He can pretty much play guitar anywhere: Donavon Frankenreiter, from the Sanuk website.

The styling of this shoe is remarkably cool, both from a color standpoint and the way it looks like a well-worn beach shoe right out of the box. The canvas upper is very thin and immediately comfortable without any breaking-in period.

The Donny

Sanuk’s soft molded EVA footbed is just thick enough (at 22mm) to provide your feet with killer comfort, but maintains a lot of the ground feel you have from purely barefoot shoes like Vivo Barefoot or Feelmax. Given the beach theme, the footbed reminded me of walking on the firm sand of the ocean’s edge, where there’s a little bit of support underneath, but your feet are still doing most of the work.

On the other side of the footbed, Sanuk makes a rubberized EVA “Happy-U” sole. The traction of it isn’t super – about the same as you would have in a pair of flip-flops – but there’s one point worth a closer look:


Lots of little happy faces! I guess that’s why it’s called Happy U.

Truthfully, a lot of things about this shoe make me happy – an extremely comfortable fit, a ‘very close to barefoot’ feel, and a classic surf dog design. It will definitely be my number one choice for casual outings when I can’t get away with going barefoot, but still want to channel my inner beach bum. If there’s a shoe equivalent of enjoying life, love, and laughter, it would have to be Sanuk.

The Sanuk Donny retails for $60 from Amazon.com.
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*Product provided by Sanuk
** See other product reviews on sidebar at right. If you have a product you’d like reviewed, contact me at info@runningandrambling.com.

**
Donavon Frankenreiter, "Life, Love, and Laughter" (click to play):

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The Barefoot Files: Training Update #1

* Series note: For this barefoot running series, my plan is to provide training updates like the one that follows at least every couple of weeks – I’m hoping that if I do them somewhat frequently, they won’t be quite as lengthy as this one. Additionally, since writing the introductory post, I’ve arranged for gear reviews of Nike Free and Vivo Barefoot shoes in addition to the Vibram Five Fingers. There’s lots more of this topic to come, obviously.

**
“Free – ee – ee –
(Dontcha want to be) free – ee – ee
(From time to time a little) free – ee – ee
(Feels so good to be) free – ee – ee”
- Donavon Frankenreiter, “Free” (video after post)

If the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step, making that journey while barefoot would start with an extremely tiny baby step.

That’s the mindset with which I’m treading into the world of barefoot running right now – and the intent of these training posts is to chronicle the buildup in case anyone else is intrigued enough to follow. Longtime readers here can attest that I almost never detail my daily workouts, weekly mileage, or other “raw data” from training – but The Barefoot Files will be the exception that proves the rule.

There’s an ulterior motive for this policy change as well: I’m terrified of screwing something up. I don’t want to force the progress too rapidly and end up injured and frustrated and wondering why the heck I even bothered trying this. Hopefully, being publicly accountable will prevent such a situation from developing. I don’t ever mind making an example of myself, but I generally prefer that it’s for the act of doing something correctly.

"It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others" - in this case, I hope not.

Without exception, the most common piece of advice that I’ve heard is to build up to barefoot running in very small doses; the activity is a shock that your musculoskeletal system is initially unprepared to deal with for more than a few minutes at a time. In light of that, and for the other reasons above, I’m doing something else that I gave up more than 10 years ago: keeping a training log of sorts.

I’m still not tracking my overall mileage or individual workouts, but I’m logging the amount of time I spend barefoot, and on what surfaces. If it works out well, feel free to copy the model for yourself. If it doesn’t … you can thank me later for the warning.

On that note, here’s what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks:


Week 1: 3 barefoot sessions: twice for 5-min each on asphalt, once for 5 minutes on dirt.

Each of these came after my regularly scheduled run; as soon as I finished, I stripped off my shoes and socks, and kept on going. The main goal was just to get a feel for being barefoot, see what my running pattern would feel like, and how the pain tolerance on the soles of my feet would be. I also started purposely walking barefoot around the house and yard more often, instead of instinctively slipping into sandals after work in the evening.

It’s almost shocking how immediately and thoroughly your running pattern changes once you kick off your shoes: Your foot strike flattens, your knees and hips flex to absorb more impact, and your stride length becomes ridiculously short. These are the baby steps that eventually turn you into a barefoot runner, but during those first few sessions, it will feel like you’re barely making forward progress.

Which brings up another point worth mentioning if you’re going to start running barefoot: you have to accept running slowly. Embarrassingly slow, in fact. So slow that, if you were to watch yourself from a distance, your altered gait pattern and minimal forward displacement wouldn’t resemble running as much as a Native American rain dance. Throw some feathers on your head, and chances are that nobody could tell the difference.


Week 2: 4 barefoot sessions: twice for 5 minutes on asphalt, once for 8 minutes on dirt, once for 3 minutes on asphalt.

This is the period when I almost overdid it: since we were on vacation in the Sierras, I figured that I’d tried to stay barefoot for entire days at a time. With my running, I did the same routine as above, tacking a few minutes onto the end of each run. (If you’re keeping track at home, the dirt session followed the run in Big Trees park from this post.)


Predictably, I developed some sore spots on my feet: not blisters, but mild pain at some pressure spots on the underside of my foot – primarily along the line of metatarsal heads (where the base of the toes connect with the rest of the foot). The discomfort was bad enough to make me cut the 4th run a few minutes shorter than I intended, and it got me back into a pair of sandals for most of the day again.

The good news is that after a few days off, I was able to resume without problems the next week. Which brings us to …


Week 3: 4 sessions: 8 minutes on asphalt, 20 minutes on grass, 10 minutes in Vibram Five Fingers, 5 minutes on dirt.

The asphalt run was the first after the layoff, and all seemed well again. I can feel the skin on my feet becoming calloused, but right now it’s still in the stage where those formative calluses are painful – so I was seeking a little more comfort for the next two runs.

Luckily, I live close to this place:

That’s Toro County Park, which I’ve detailed in two separate posts (see photo tours on right sidebar). There’s a grassly inlet at the entrance to the park almost a half-mile long; ironically, for years this has been the area that I dismissively skirt around on my way to the dirt trails on either side of the grass, heading toward the big hills beyond. Now I see myself logging a lot of time here over the next few months. During my first barefoot run here, I only had to double back twice to log 20 minutes.

Week 3 also saw my first run in Vibram Five Fingers, a protective coating which basically allows you to run barefoot without the pain of overly sensitive soles. I’m going to do an entire post devoted to this product; for now, suffice it to say that they’re amazing.

These last two runs – one in the grass, and one with the Vibram Five Fingers - also emphasized the element of barefoot training that I’m already finding intoxicating: the feeling of absolute freedom that you get by running around with nothing on your feet. The simplistic pleasure of leaving my shoes behind never fails to make me feel like a child – and by extension, it makes exercise feel like playtime. This phenomenon will also be the subject of its own post at some point.

In the meantime, I’ll summarize this first update by reporting that after three weeks, my progress is coming along nicely, and it feels quite good to be free.

**
Music note: this song and its video sometimes make me question my decision to do the marriage-career-kids thing so early in life. Sometimes I really wish I had just smuggled myself onboard a ship to Hawaii and lived as a surf bum for five or ten years. Clearly, that time has passed ... but it still feels nice to get lost in music like this every now and then.

Donavon Frankenreiter, “Free” (click to play):

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