Review: Adidas 5.10 NIAD climbing shoes

This was to be a two-phase test. Here in Catalunya, the indoor climbing gym culture is massive. Where I live in Torelló among the foothills of the Pyrenees, we have at least five climbing gyms within a 30-minute drive of the house. Some of them are large and super posh and some of them smaller and a little more personal.

There’s a lot of rock climbing here too of course and so they complement one another. Train indoors during the week, then hit the mountains at the weekend.

For the first part of this test, I took the shoes to La Farinera, a cosy climbing gym near Vic. I wanted to bend them in a bit before spending time on the rock. Climbing shoes always stretch a little when they’re new and indoors was the best place to do this. This is the first time that I had used climbing shoes with laces. It felt good to be able to pull the shoes in nice and tight all the way from toe to the top of the foot and they actually stayed tight as we worked our way through the routes that evening. The extended rubber which covers the top of the big toe is fantastic and something that my other pairs of shoes don’t have. It’s a perfect detail for moves on over hanging routes. I felt, my foot wasn’t going to slip out of a hold.

With the laces versus Velcro question still in my mind finding the base of the route, I knew that once on the wall the shoes would stay on until the rappel off it. I imagine when embarking on single pitch sport climbing routes with lace ups, I may find myself whimpering for that quick relief that the Velcro option gives me.

Off we went to Huesca for a weekend in the van. We chose a 6-pitch shady north facing 270 metre line, just outside of the Pyrenean town of Benasque and above the village of Cerler.  Grade wise it was to be quite straight forward. Nothing harder than 5+ but some of the pitches were 50 metres long and involved a couple of slightly confusing, yet exciting traverses. At the top of the heels, these NIADs have two generous sturdy tabs to pull them on, which I think every climbing shoe should be made with.

Although the rock was is of excellent quality and certainly not polished, I found myself on several occasions having to move on just my toes. The shoes held me on the wall superbly and I felt like I could trust their rubber all day. In fact, the rubber at the heel extends all the way to the top where the tabs are.

New climbing shoes tend to feel a bit pointy at first in any event and their newness helped me once moving in those more delicate situations. The STEALTH rubber sole held me when I needed to smear and the rubber upper toe element that I like so much from the off kept me wedged in those cracks along the traverses. The laces held the shoes tight to my foot for the entire four hours or so that we spent on the wall. I kind of expected them to work a little loose, but experienced no such issues on that front.