Before we begin, there are a couple of important disclosures to make. The first, is that I did not pay for these shoes. Many readers will be familiar with the concept of contra and also that of marketing. The shoes arriving on my desk are a result of both, in which a brand (ASICS), wishing to promote its new product (GEL KAYANO 31) gives some away to journalists (me), in the hope (or sometimes expectation) of coverage in the media (Inside Sport). A story. In which the writer, me, sings for their supper – or shoes as it were in this case. I apologise if that’s something you already knew, but it seemed important to note.

The second thing I would like to say before we start the shoe review is that there was no imperative or external pressure to write this story, even with the delivery of the shoes. Not from ASICS, not from the publicist and not from the Inside Sport audience. There is no advertising component at play here, just the aforementioned contra. With or without this story the GEL KAYANO 31 will, I am sure, sell well. Inside Sport, while a wonderful masthead, is just one of many media outlets that have and will report on the shoe. In addition, many brands these days choose to promote their new products mainly via social-media influencers, which I am most assuredly not.

The email offering shoes to consider for review was one of many such messages that arrive in my (very fortunate) inbox every week, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred I politely decline. So why did I respond to this one? Why am I writing about these shoes?

In all honesty, it was mostly curiosity. I was curious to see what time and technology had done to the running shoe over the last ten years and I thought the Inside Sport reader might enjoy a comparison between then and now. You see, these are not my first pair of ASICS GEL KAYANOs. And the first two pairs I paid for with my own money. Because you see, I used to run.

When I say I used to run, I don’t mean I used to run well. Even in my mid-to-late twenties I had back problems. I am an unreformed heel-striker. I run like I am dragging myself along the path. It is not graceful, but it is how I (used to) run.

When I began to run with others I realised that this was not the case for everyone. My brother is a very capable triathlete and runs as if he is gliding. My dad has completed multiple marathons. A former colleague is an elite level long distance runner. When I made the mistake (once!) of joining her on a lunchtime jog, (long before she started taking running seriously) I saw the back of her heels about five hundred metres into a 7-kilometre burn and that was the last I saw of her until I stumbled panting back into the carpark forty minutes later.

My first pair of ASICS GEL KAYANOs were a navy and bright orange pair of KAYANO 23s. Time in shoe-land is not strictly regular and that ‘23’ does not mean that these shoes came out in 2023, or that they came out eight years ago relative to the ‘31’s. My patchy memory informs me that I purchased them around ten or eleven years ago and they were the first pair of serious running shoes I had ever bought. I say serious because for me, any shoe costing more than a couple of hundred dollars better be a little serious.

One more disclosure, the current generation GEL KAYANO 31 has an “RRP” of $280, which while a fairly normal price in both the cool-sneaker and hobbyist athlete space, is still what I consider a decent chunk of change. This is just a fact. Most people, myself included, will call that a considered purchase.

When I bought my 23s it was a big deal for me, a bit of an investment, and I bought them for a couple of reasons.

The first was I wanted to get faster.

I was never going to be fast-fast, I knew that from the outset, but like most runners I had my own goals and I wanted to get there. For me, the ambition was to run sub-four-minute kilometres for ten kilometre races. There is a track, near where I live, known as the Bay Run. It’s around about 6.6, or call it 7 kilometres around and my goal was to get around it in under 28 minutes. The all-time record for the Bay Run, sits just over 20 minutes, meaning truly elite athletes can run over a full-minute quicker than my dream, per kilometre! The reason I mention this is to say that my dream was reasonably realistic at the time and my GEL KAYANO 23s were going to help me get there.

The other reason I chose GEL KAYANOs is because a friend, who owned a shoe store, diagnosed me with horrible over-pronation. He recommended the KAYANO as a sturdy-soled shoe that would stabilise me and help counteract, to some extent, my awful style. My feet rolled inward as I ran, the torque and weight putting pressure on my ACL and my meniscus. The KAYANO would mitigate that somewhat and so I chose a navy and orange colourway, in honour of my Dutch grandparents and I began to run.

A note here on colourways. My current pair of GEL KAYANOs (27s), or the most recent pair I owned before ASICS kindly sent me these new ones, are black, grey and white. As I mentioned, my first pair were an eye-catching combination but as I have aged a little more I have observed in myself a strange desire to not stand out. Apparently there are ten colours of the GEL KAYANO 31 available. These days my shoe colours are chosen to be largely inoffensive and designed to blend with office-wear. Given a choice, I probably would have asked for black. This is almost certainly why the pair ASICS sent, a sort of lemon and fluro blend they call Cool Matcha/Celadon, have been so exciting to behold. I LOVE that I did not choose this colour. I LOVE that it is almost obnoxiously bright. I would NEVER have chosen it, and perhaps that is why I think it is so cool. But that’s enough about colours, for now.

A hard confession. I never managed to get around the Bay Run sub-28 minutes. The shoes obviously, were not the problem. In fact, the KAYANOs did exactly what they were supposed to and I found my back pain a little eased and the stresses on my knees a touch reduced and I liked looking down and seeing the navy and orange sparkle as I pounded the pavement. This is not a cute euphemism or a lazy cliché. I pounded that pavement like it owed me money and it is probably that relentless assault on my shoes and my meniscus that would first lead to my second pair of KAYANOs and eventually the injuries that would stop me running altogether.

The trouble with my running extended beyond technique. The truth was that perhaps I just didn’t love it enough.

My favourite things about running are as follows. The final 100m before the end where you realise you have made it. The feeling after the run where you realise you can eat pretty much whatever you want for the rest of the day (not technically true, but fun). I did not grow up running. I was a soccer player, and most often a goalkeeper at that. I did taekwondo. I was a swimmer and a mountain biker. At uni, briefly, I did some weird mixed martial arts. And my long-term sporting love was boxing, mostly pad-work and a little sparring, but whatever else - I was not born to run. Running for me was suffering but I loved the goal setting and the slight measurable improvements and I loved Strava. I liked cool shoes and I liked that the equipment barrier to running is far lower than many other activities and so, against the wishes of my body I continued to run.

I ran those 23s to pieces. Literal pieces. They remain my favourite, most-loved pair of runners ever, because they accompanied me through my running glory days. I did the Blackmores running festival, the Bridge Run, the Bay Run, the Mother’s Day Run and the Harbour Run and I loved it. I ran across the Harbour Bridge one day, and on another, I ran into the Olympic Stadium at Homebush and imagined what it might have been like to do it in front of a crowd. Now that I write about it, maybe I liked more about running than the burger afterwards. Maybe.

Like many of you reading this, the pandemic had a big impact on my health. In 2020, the navy and orange KAYANOs had been consigned to the great running track in the sky and I now owned the fairly nondescript pair of GEL KAYANO 27s I mentioned earlier. I still own them. They have a plain black upper, some silvery grey detailing and white sole and they bear the scars of much use.

I have, embarrassingly, worn through the big-toe part on the left one and tried (and failed) to repair it with a variety of patches and super-glue. The soles bear the shameful one-sided wearing of my terrible gait and my pronation is as obvious as bullet casings at a crime scene and as ever, the victim is my lower back.

Unfortunately, as age and increasingly sedentary work have taken their toll, other parts of my body have begun to raise their voices in complaint too. I will save my left knee, which has the most embarrassing story of all, for telling in a moment and focus instead on my shoulder and my hand. Please permit me the quick detour?

Covid hit, the boxing gym closed, I got lazy. That’s it in a nutshell but the two kickers were my busted right hand and my busted right shoulder.

I have been boxing on and off for twenty years, and I love it and I am unquestionably not very good at it.

As with most activities, my back was my weakness and every time I would build up my fitness and confidence and begin sparring, I would catch a set-back and an injury. I also had woeful defence and would get hit far too often, occasionally ending up with a concussion (something I had collected a few times playing soccer too). The thing with concussions is that the more you get, the more you get, and so being hit in the head becomes an even worse idea, the more you do it.

The trouble is that sparring, despite my not being good at it, was something I enjoyed. A reason to get fitter, and stronger. A reason to learn more. In my experience you have to have a goal to get better at something. A target. Running that sub-four-minute kilometre.

When Covid hit, there was no sparring anyway. It was all pad-work, all the time. All pent-up frustration and the stresses we all lived through. I hit the pads hard. Too hard. The tendon on my right hand exploded (not literally), my hand swelled up to the size of an orange (literally) and I could not hit anything for six months without an electrifying agony running up through my hand, wrist and arm. I bough ludicrously expensive gloves designed to help with the pain and when we were allowed back to the gym I worked the water-bag instead of the heavy one, but even so I developed bursitis in my shoulder and then eventually, I could not punch any more.

I apologise for the laundry list of injuries. I know there is nothing more boring than some not-old person listing their ailments but there is a purpose to this and it will circle back to being a shoe review eventually. Those brand-new, enticingly lurid GEL KAYANO 31s are there looking at me, and there is a reason they are here. A reason other than my curiosity about how far shoe-tech has come in the last decade.

After I stopped boxing, I stopped doing much of anything. My bad shoulder meant not even swimming was on the table. Covid and the ensuing fragmentation of routine and social networks meant listlessness and there was no reason I could see not to eat a whole pizza and drink a bottle of wine. Your future is contained in your daily habits and mine were not good.

The weight stacked on and I did not really care. The thing was though that my joints DID care, and they were preparing to protest.

There is no cool or slick way to tell this part. It is mortifying. I hope it is at least amusing.

I was wearing my black GEL KAYANO 27s. I walked to a VERY good bakery near my house and bought a box of VERY good hot-cross buns. I crouched down so my wife could take a photo of me holding the baked goods in front of the bakery sign. I posed. When I tried to stand back up my knee popped. Instant agony. I fell awkwardly, saving the buns.

Undone by baked goods. Please tell me it has happened to some of you? Please?

My meniscus, under the strain of my carelessly acquired kilos and my even more careless squat, was torn. It was an instant failure, though I had no idea what the pain meant. Let me be crystal clear, it had nothing to do with the shoes. 

The thing I learned much later, after multiple ultrasounds and physio sessions, is that meniscuses (meniscii?) do not repair themselves. Unless I have surgery it will not repair. Even then it is dicey and may not stay fixed.

The immediate pain lasted perhaps a week and because I had no idea what I had done, I then laced up my battered 27s and decided to go for a lunch-time run. I made it approximately a kilometre before the agony in my knee pulled me up.

I will say this for myself, I have a decent pain tolerance. I had all four wisdom teeth pulled and was back at work the next day. I have dental work done with the bare minimum of anaesthetic because I don’t like drooling for a whole day. I have had broken bones, torn cartilage, chipped teeth, stitches in my face and brutally crash-landed a parachute but there was no way I was running any further that day. This pain was awful. I limped back to the office, this was two years ago, and I have not laced up a shoe in anger, since. Until now.

There was sadness when I realised that I might not run again but let me put this in (and be grateful for) the context. We are not talking here about a mobility-ending injury. This is not even in the same realm as people who have to endure and respond to an accident or illness that fundamentally changes their ability to get around. We are talking here about a middle-aged man who will probably never again scale the mediocre heights of his very average running abilities. Boo-fucking-hoo.

I won’t lie though. There is still sadness. This is my body, the only one I have. I only really know it, and its limitations and its graces. Each of us only really knows what it is like to be ourselves. Some of us are lucky, some of us have great trials. I am thinking with humility of friends, family and strangers who must walk, run, crawl, swim, roll and navigate often difficult paths. It is an inevitable, though not-nice part of life, that limitations will come upon us. I am reminded that aging is a privilege because the alternative is…well…

Wasn’t this a shoe review?

The GEL KAYANO 31 arrives on my desk like a Christmas present. I am immediately in love with the yellow-green colour. Cool Matcha/Celadon. I can tell you, my falling-apart black 27s are not long for this world. Vale. I am ready to stand out a bit, again.

When I try the 31s on I can feel that technology has, in fact, come a very long way. They are not paying me to say this. I owned two iterations of this shoe that I bought for myself. I put a couple of thousand kilometres on both pairs. I put a couple of thousand kilometres on my knees. I thought I didn’t really like running until I realised I might not be able to do it again.

The GEL KAYANO 31s are very firm and a little tight, which I like in a running shoe. The cuff and the upper structure are far more supportive that the 23s or 27s and I feel a curious heel-to-toe roll when I take them for a spin, as if they are somehow propelling me forward. It is magical. They feel like they are made for me. I feel like these shoes would give me a shot at the doing the Bay Run in under 28 minutes.

Without surgery there is no way to recover from a meniscus tear. The synovial fluid that fills and lubricates the shock absorber in your knee (that is what I understand a meniscus to be) bulges out into a cyst. The ultimate salt in my wound, it is known as a Baker’s cyst. At least they were good hot-cross buns, I suppose. The cyst can, and I can attest does, cause immense pain in the back of the knee when running.

The solution, my medical friends tell me, is to build up the muscles and structure around the knee so the shock absorber has less work to do. And so, for the first time in my life I have begun to take resistance training and leg-day seriously and I will say, so far, there are positive results. I can walk, mostly without pain. I have taken up the elliptical, and the bike. I have lost some weight and done my poor joints a small favour. My hand and shoulder (with a cortisone shot to help) are feeling better and I will box again soon. I am going for another run, even if it’s a short distance, and I will wear these beautiful, crazy-bright ASICS again and be grateful. It is a privilege to get older, even with the aches and pains, a goddamn privilege.

The GEL KAYANO 31 is, in my humble opinion, a hell of a shoe. It has surpassed the feats of its ancestors. It is loaded with technology that might help improve your running and protect your body. They tell me it is manufactured with a greatly reduced carbon footprint, which is a very good thing. The recommended retail price is $280. For that amount it is still what most people I know would call a considered purchase and I am very lucky to have been given them to review. But now I see it was more than curiosity that made me put my hand up and request a pair. It was hope.