Objects of Our Time: ASICS NOVABLAST™ 6, or What a Running Shoe Can Tell Us About Wellness Culture
From the sculpted heel and thick midsole, you’d imagine a heavier shoe. The first glance at a successful design, however, is often deceptive. The bulk of the midsole is composed of a lightweight cushioning foam, while the forefoot contains a trampoline pod designed to provide a more responsive, spring-like sensation. This is a soft-feeling shoe for a hardcore routine.
The shoe under consideration is the ASICS NOVABLAST™ 6—an emblematic object of our culture’s discourses around wellness, physical activity, and the optimal routine. Ever since the founder Kihachiro Onitsuka workshopped the company’s first pair of basketball shoes back in 1950, ASICS has envisioned products that sustain the athlete’s commitment to their daily craft. In line with the tradition, the ASICS NOVABLAST™ 6 are designed to energize every kind of run that can fit in a dedicated routine. The ecstatic run. The golden-hour run. The ugly-cry run. The marathon-prep run. The I-just-got-home-from-work-and-I-have-to-make-myself run. Motions of everyday life.
ASICS has thus built a reputation with its focus on the basics. Its philosophy might be distilled to the Latin phrase of its acronym: Anima sana in corpore sano. The line itself, recommended to Onitsuka by his prefecture’s Director of Health and Physical Education, is adapted from the tenth satire of the Roman poet Juvenal, who urges his readers to abstain from prayer for wealth, beauty, and influence. Instead Juvenal recommends that one strive for a sound mind in a sound body—something that everyone has the ability to cultivate.
Juvenal, as well as the company he inspired through Onitsuka, stand at odds with our current culture of wellness, with its ingrained obsession with optimizing one’s health. Everything about our zeitgeist communicates an askant variant on the ASICS proverb, namely that a sound body comes at the price of a sound mind. To keep up with the developments in exercise science that are advertised, each with more urgency than the last, one must have the crackpot vigilance of a conspiracy theorist, or the free time of the financially well-endowed. In a world where the promise of physical health has never seemed so corrosive to one’s mental state, ASICS has mapped an alternative path for hardcore wellness, prioritizing the natural simplicity of movement over the insanity of workout minutiae.
The phenomenon of wellness is essentially Juvenal’s art of distinguishing between positive and negative wants. “A sound mind in a sound body” is a desirable wish, because everyone has the ability to achieve it of their own accord. In its commitment to crafting materials for the ideal day-in, day-out run, ASICS stands for the natural benefit to body and mind that one gets by staying physically active. Call it hardcore wellness: want what you can give to yourself.
Read more on the history of ASICS footwear in Shane Anderson's interview with the designer Toshikazu Kayano.