We’ll be publishing a few select gear reviews moving forward. It’s not business as usual for FS or readers: we are posting gear reviews as a brief respite from grim news. We know minds are on more serious Coronavirus related issues.
The sock drawer: part no-person’s land, part nod to orderliness with pairs folded using techniques like the roll & tuck, the fold over, the konmai, and part Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds kaleidoscope with mismatched socks paired together. Honestly, if you are like most outdoor folks that are hard on gear, you’ve probably got 30 percent of your sock stock as single sock one-offs — that’s due to many socks simply lacking durability. Drilling down further, my guess is that 50 percent of my socks from SockGuy, DeFeet, and Pearlizumi don’t last a season of biking/running, or rollerskiing. The ailment? Holes in the heel, or holes in the toe region. Thus, the sock mash-up in my dresser.
I’ve got an older child with a part-time gig at a local biking/xc ski store. He began coming home with socks from Swiftwick. No five-finger-discounts here, he paid for them. Anyhow, in the course of two years, he went from a U.S. size 8 to a size 13. Let’s say we are sock rich in the house – I’m roughly a men’s large and his growth spurt meant more socks for me. In particular, socks from Swiftwick. Swiftwick crafts, made in the U.S., burly socks. They last. They breathe. They offer stylee designs and more traditional looks like a straight-up black sport sock.
With that multi-paragraph backstory, we’re here to review Swiftwick’s Flite XT sock. (Samples were provided by Swiftwick.) The Flite XT comes in a Zero, meaning no cuff, and Five, with a five-inch cuff. We tested the Five. Swiftwick markets the Flite XT as an athletic sock for activities like running. We’ve run in the socks, cross-country skied in the socks, backcountry skied in the socks, and last weekend, I gardened in them. Two months of abuse — no obvious fabric distress. Not in the cuff, not in the heel, not in the toes.
