La Sportiva Hits It Out of the Park With New Mandala

I’ll start by saying that, while I always loved La Sportiva’s No Edge technology in the gym, I never really “got” it on rock. Instead of a crisp, 90-degree angle where the rand meets the sole as two discrete panels of rubber, the Italian shoemaker’s No Edge shoes have a toe-scumming patch that rounds over the forefoot-rand to “become” the sole. The shoes in this family—the Futura, Genius, Mantra, and now Mandala—are known for being soft, squishy, and hypersensitive. They have a unique, curvy shape that looks like a bottlenose dolphin and is good for “innie” holds like divots and dishes you can drive your big toe into, deforming the rubber into the pores. On the flip side, you sacrifice precision and edging support.

I used the Futura a fair bit indoors and out, and the Mantra in the gym, where soft shoes excel. Both were good shoes with lots of feedback, but they never felt versatile or durable enough to be great. These one-trick ponies excelled on steeps, boulder problems, and volumes, but lacked the big-toe structure and heft to support all-around use—the kind demanded on rock, where edging matters and your shoes take a battering.

The new Mandala changes all that. It’s an excellent gym and rock shoe that feels stiffer than the other No Edge shoes, which has made it proficient at steep and overhanging edging on stone. It has more weight/heft in the toebox—finally, the “right amount” for big-toe activation on rock. And it looks and feels overbuilt and has stretched very little, so should hold multiple resoles, justifying the $209 price tag.

I loved the Mandala right away in the gym, warmed up to them quickly on rock, and have added them to the steep-sport redpoint quiver for all but the most micro, technical edging. They have that No Edge squish, with its abovementioned advantages, but they also have enough bite for overhanging edges and varied performance climbing.

I’m not a V15 rock climber—more like V 1.5!—but Keenan Takahashi is. He wore the Mandala on his right foot for the first ascent of the mega-highball The Gold Standard at the Buttermilks. Takahashi spent six seasons trying the line, fighting its sunny aspect and sharp, tiny holds. The hardest move is the first, which features a dastardly heel hook on a barely-there patina dish where the Mandala stuck better than any other shoe. You can see it on his right foot throughout the video linked above, while Takahashi wears a stiffer Solution on his left. He sets the right heel, drags it against the dish edge, and spreads the rand out across the glassy quartz monzonite in the modern, activated hooking style. (Granted, Takahashi is a La Sportiva athlete—but it speaks volumes that he chose the Mandala out of the brand’s massive, 30-plus-shoe lineup.)

On a purely technical level, the Mandala has a few features of note, beyond the No Edge design. It has a slingshot rand and a significantly narrower heel cup—almost an hourglass—compared, say, to the Futura; a supple leather insole; a long, irregularly shaped toe-scumming patch that runs halfway up along the shoe; a stretch insert (“tongue”) and microfiber uppers; two generous heel tabs tacked down deeply within the footbed; a 1.1mm midsole (in the No Edge family, all but the Mantra have this); a single-strap closure with a thick strap and big patch for adjustment versatility; and a 3mm XS Grip 2 outsole—a half sole on the forefoot and the same compound on the heel rand—which is Vibram’s softest rubber.

Structurally, the shoes are mildly downturned and mildly asymmetrical, with a broad forefoot that will accommodate wide, high-volume feet, with further give courtesy of the elastic insert. I have big dogs, and was able to get the Mandala on at my usual Sportiva size of 41 (I’m a street shoe 10, or 43.5) with the help of the plastic sheets the first few times, then didn’t need them after that. The shoes are relatively comfortable for performance rigs, but I’m still ripping them off at anchors and between problems, especially on warm days.

Let’s get down to what matters: performance. The Mandala felt truly boss out of the box as I broke them in with some gym bouldering and boarding. Like the Futura and Mantra, they had superb grabbing ability in the bouldering cave, especially on jibs, since you can spread the No Edge toe out on spikes/protuberances and into deformities; this let me traction in over the big toe to bring my hips close to the wall. They were also excellent for boarding, letting me curl my forefoot around the holds like a prehensile tail as well as push hard into the smeary kicker-panel and lower-board feet. (On the Tension Board 2, I sent a crimpy V8, Captain Jack Sparrow, I’d tried two previous days without success; the Mandala dug hard into the tiny starting jibs, letting me stand tall and stick an elusive lockoff.) OK, check, this is what No Edge is meant to do: deform and let you push. Nothing new here—so how about technical face?

Like I wrote above, the Mandala feels heavier in the toebox somehow, almost like little invisible weights are tractioning your big toe down and in. I don’t know that the Mandala is any more built up than the other No Edge shoes; it just feels like there’s more structure at the tip. On thin-face gym climbs with jib feet and powerful edging, I was pleased at how much support I had, with abundant sensitivity (probably my most preferred performance aspect of any shoe) to balance out the reduced precision. The No Edge tech, married with the heavier toe, also let me dig into then rock up over small footholds, rolling the rubber and changing the big toe’s aspect and angle for ideal body positioning. For someone like me who climbs short—with big highsteps—this subtlety let me feel secure on the thin, gently overhanging gym climbs up to mid-5.13 I tested on.

But, you know, lots of shoes shine in the gym, where the footwork can be pretty basic, especially on volumes. So how about on rock? Did that top-tier performance carry over?

I’m pleased to say the Mandala was excellent here as well, and I’ve leaned on the shoe for many recent redpoints. This was primarily on mildly to very overhanging granite and gneiss that demanded a modern blend of vanilla smearing and edging mixed with parkour-style moves like toe-hooks-into-drags, feet-first heel hooks on cave lips, foot jams in steep cracks to get into balance and release a hand (the soft shoes are excellent at spreading into jams and twisting into flared locks), and external heel-toes—varied, complex footwork that not all shoes would be equipped to handle. On these punishing moves, the Mandala stayed locked on my foot—you can really ratchet the strap down—letting me use my feet like hands, much like Takahashi with his high-octane heel hook on The Gold Standard. With zero slippage, I trusted the Mandala to move with me into whatever wild position. The shoe is also, because of its softness, agility, and pointy toe, amazing at activating into high, angled feet to the side of you, as I found out when trying a rising traverse on a striated, 30-degree-overhanging granite wall slashed by diagonal slots.

My only dings with the Mandala are minor. Again, with No Edge, there isn’t enough support for micro-edging—at least not on rock—and so I bailed on using the Mandala after one attempt on a local sandstone project, an overhanging mid-5.14 with terrible, sharp, credit-card-and-smaller feet that you must edge onto laterally, not smedge into or frontpoint on. In heel-toes, the shoes tended to be a little too flexy/squishy, but perhaps I need stronger feet and to do more bouldering. And I had them straight-up slip a few times on basic smears, on one route with glassy-ramp feet sending me for a 15-footer, just 20 feet off the ground, as I pulled up rope to clip—though it was warm out and XS Grip 2 gets sloshy in the heat. (I usually prefer the stiffer compound XS Edge, with which I’ll resole this pair when the original sole wears out.) And another tester, Steve, noted that the narrow heel put pressure on his Achilles, though I did not note this issue—so clearly, it’s a subjective, fit thing.

But these are trifling issues on a shoe that is otherwise a total steep-terrain beast.

For gym climbing, they’re one of the best, most versatile shoes I’ve worn, up there with another La Sportiva shoe, the Theory, which is not a No Edge shoe but, being a single-strap-closure slipper like the Mandala and being coated in rubber, has a similarly squishy, sensitive feel. And on rock, it feels to me like La Sportiva finally came up with a No Edge shoe with enough support to give you what you need on most boulder problems and on almost every sport route from just past vert to very overhanging, with an emphasis on top-tier performance on the steepest angles: they’d be the bomb at the Mother Lode at the Red or Flatanger, Norway. With their vacuum fit, epic grabbing ability, agility, and “good-enough” edging, they keep ending up in my pack, and I used them just yesterday to send a seven-bolt granite route canted 30 degrees overhanging, with a mixture of smearing, edging, smedging, kneebars, and hooks, then finished out my day at the bouldering cave in the gym in the same beloved pair, which has quickly become a key member of the redpoint quiver.

Check out the Mandala on La Sportiva’s website here.

Star ratings (out of five stars)

• Fit/Comfort: *****
• Smearing: ****
• Grabbing: *****
• Sensitivity: *****
• Edging: ***
• Heel Hooking: *****
• Toe Scumming: ****
• Heel-Toe Cams: ***
• Jamming: ****

The post La Sportiva Hits It Out of the Park With New Mandala appeared first on Climbing.