The Mad Rock Redlines harken back to the old days—the old days when concubine sex slaves used to have their feet bound so that they couldn’t leave their prone positions on the bed. The sensation of donning this shoe for the first time is akin to wearing a Dutch wooden clog that’s been shrunken, petrified and fashioned into the shape of a banana. The Red Line sports one of the most aggressive, down-turned lasts on the market, yet it achieves that form through one of the stiffest platforms you can find outside of the world of plastic ice-climbing boots. Indeed, the only reason I was able to climb in these shoes was because I have experience front-pointing crampons on mixed routes. If you’re a really, really heavy climber, who has trouble finding stiff-enough shoes, and also wants a really aggressive, down-turned shoe for steep routes, or if you’re Reinhold Messner and you’ve lost all your toes to frostbite and need some extra support on the steep routes,  the Redline might be it.