Horses and Humans Rock On: MBT Shoes

You are looking at the profile of the must-have human shoe around the Boston area these days.
Does it remind you of anything?
These MBT "physiological" shoes from Switzerland are a high-tech hoofwear dream: no less than five layers of sole activate unused muscles and simulate the blissful barefoot state. They don't use the horseshoe terms "rocker toe" and "air wedge heel" in human shoe-speak but the tech behind these shoes is intriguing and oddly familiar.
Has anyone out there tried them yet?

New "TracMe" Therapeutic Horseshoe Hits Its Stride at Hoof Conference

The new "TracMe" aluminum wedge/roller horseshoe was unveiled today at the International Hoof Care Summit meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The new shoes are sized like raceplates and look like therapeutic shoes. The larger sizes have wider (some would say onion-esque) heels and optional clips.

Trac Me is the project of metals manufacturing pro Mary Lovejoy of Versailles, Kentucky. A few years ago, her mare Zena developed laminitis and was a patient at Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital’s podiatry unit, under the care of Dr. Scott Morrison and farrier Manfred Ecker.

Mary became intrigued with the clinic's display of aluminum shoes made by Manfred, or offered by different manufacturers. And she thought she could do better. When Zena recovered, she became determined to bring her metal trades background to the farrier world, and TracMe shoes became a full-fledged business plan.

The preliminary shoes were designed by Manfred Ecker and tested by top farriers like Dr. Scott Morrison, Mike Wildenstein (Cornell University), Jay Thomlinson (Virginia) and James Gilchrist (Palm Beach Equine Clinic).

Aluminum milling has been a state of the art process for making shoes for almost ten years now. The demand for aluminum egg-bar shoes sent GE Forge and Tool’s KB shoe line to the top of the class when GE’s Bob Garner went high-tech and mastered the aluminum extrusion and computerized milling process. The result was a streamlined horseshoe that didn’t break because (in a nutshell) the aluminum “flowed” around the form of the shoe instead of across the form. Major improvement!

TracMe shoes retail for $36 a pair and up.

Learn more at http://www.tracmeshoes.com or call Mary Lovejoy at
847-247-1121 or 859-873-6402.

© Hoofcare Publishing 2007

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