“I’ve been lacing shoes a special way like this for 23 years,” Brian Beckstead, Altra co-founder and de facto shoe-tying guru, told me. Beckstead, I learned, had not only made a career of ...

You have to consider that the factory worker who laced up your sneakers is tasked with lacing hundreds of shoes in a row, so some degree of sloppiness is bound to happen. There are an endless ...