Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard’s philosophy on gear was ingrained in him by his father. “He taught me that when you buy a tool, you buy the absolute best tool you can get and keep it for the rest of your life,” Chouinard recounts in David Gelles’s recent biography, Dirtbag Billionaire. “That’s much better than buying a cheap tool and having it break, buying another one, having that break.”
That philosophy makes perfect sense in theory, and corresponds exactly with the advice my mother always gave me. But as a frugal guy, I’ve always found it challenging to execute in practice. The sticker shock on high-quality gear is real! And in many cases, you can get away with merely good gear. I do most of my running in free race T-shirts I accumulated a decade or two ago; the old shirts are comfortable, and the newest running shirts aren’t enough of an improvement to make me open my wallet.
Still, there are times when it makes sense to pay for quality. An eye-opening moment for me was when I got an Arc’teryx Beta SL rain jacket for Christmas almost 20 years ago, which (as Maggie Slepian lamented recently) goes for $500 these days. Paying that much for a rain jacket seemed crazy to me—until the first time I wore it during a rainstorm in the backcountry. That pattern has recurred over the years: I’m too cheap to buy the good stuff myself, only to discover that it’s totally worth it after receiving it as a gift. Here are some examples of great gear I’ve trusted over the years and will happily pay retail for.
The post The Running and Outdoors Gear Our Sweat Science Columnist Swears By appeared first on Outside Online.
