Friday night my shoes started to disintegrate. Well, the rubber on the soles started cracking and falling apart. At first I thought it was something I stepped on at Jim’s, but there wasn’t anything there to explain it. So, today I went to the New Balance outlet store to get a new pair of shoes. Ended up getting four pairs of different types, and even got a 40% discount on one pair because I “traded-in” the defective pair I had been wearing. Seems that there was a problem with the rubber compound and extreme temperature changes. Considering the shoes were fine in the 70-degree Los Angeles weather, I would imagine that a 40-degree drop in the temperature would constitute “extreme”! So now I have new shoes – yay!