They were the first running shoe I ever urgently coveted, and they're also the last. They were taken off the market after my first year of cross-country running, in the early 1990s as a sophomore in high school, and they've been gone ever since.
Actually they did come back, briefly and once, in 2000. I was in the Navy by then, in San Diego, and I must have covered the entire southern coast of California in those shoes that summer. There's never been anything like them. They fit like a literal glove, with that sock-like upper that conformed, slipper-like, to your foot. They did this without sacrificing anything in stability, in either the bottom of the foot or the heel, where there was that strap wrapped from midfoot to up around the Achilles.
They were lightweight and aesthetically idiosyncratic. They were also atavistic as hell, in their conception and design, while also taking advantage of what modern shoe technology had wrought. Their very name says it all--Huarache, from the Mexican sandal. With all the wisdom-of-the-ancients fervor that's recently been inspired by the Born to Run movement, you'd think the shoes might be primed for a comeback. Maybe they are. They certainly should be.
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