It looks a little like something a ’60s superhero would wear, but hey, all those brightly-colored skin suits were popular with caped vigilantes for a reason—many runners report that the Nathan Speed 2R Auto-Cant is one of the most comfortable belts they’ve encountered.
The secret to extreme comfort is to be found upon examining the circular device located between the two bottles. This is the the patented Auto-Cant disk, and the locus of motion when you’re wearing the belt on a run. There’s no apostrophe missing in the word cant, here—in this context, of course, it’s a word that means “an inclination from a horizontal or vertical line; a slope or bevel; a tilt” (Webster’s Unabridged, 1913). The Auto-Cant can cant on its own, and this cant can automatically improve your running-with-waterbottles-strapped-on experience.
Here’s how it works: the fabric loops that intersect with the disk rotate freely around its circumference, in a manner perfectly matching the rotation of your hips. Bouncing is one of the biggest problems in the world of running belts, reported by unhappy athletes, minimized by savvy designers and denied by all advertisers worth their salt. But excessive movement isn’t really the problem—the real problem is not moving enough. The inferior belt heeds the laws of Newton too religiously, and while your body is jiggling and rotating it thinks the right thing to do is stay as immobile as possible. And that’s when it starts to chafe. With the Speed 2R Auto-Cant, however, the bottles follow your hips in their rotation, and thus, while the bottles full of water are wiggling all over from the point of view the causal observer whom you happen to run past down the trail, you can’t feel a thing.
Proceeding in our examination of the belt outward and around front, the next item of business are the bottles themselves. The SpeedFit holsters (yes, it seems every part of every belt has a copyrighted camelback-capitalized compound christening) are angled in such a way to maximize the ease of one-handed withdrawal while minimizing the risk of bumping the bottles with your arms as they swing. The asymmetric shape of the bottles makes hydration a cinch, and almost everybody finds the caps leak-proof.
The belt material itself is constructed from 20% stretch monofilament (another comfort) and joins in the front with a velcro clasp. Over the closure you’ll find a pocket advertised as being of “featherweight fabrication.” Its size matches its weight, unfortunately—it’ll fit an iPhone fine, but you won’t fit anything else in simultaneously beyond a single gel and a single key. And both the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and Note 3 are too large.
The belt can be purchased at several real-world retailers, from the company, and from numerous online stores.
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