22nd
The idea of running shoes has often baffled me. The logical side of my mind says that people have been running for thousands of years, putting on far more miles than any of us would ever put on a pair of shoes, and they did it either barefoot, or with really cheap leather sandals that would prevent really sharp things from hurting their foot. The geeky side of me says, “oooooooh, sparkles!” As I start to check out the various technobabble around running shoes with their air padding, gel padding, torsion bars, etc.
I usually fall into the flow of doing research ad nauseam and going to stores to find out more information. As a result, I found all sorts of web sites that told me how to find out how high my arch was, and to figure out whether I pronate, over-pronate or under-pronate. In the back of my mind I hear, “this is some complicated stuff”. After days of research, I ended up going to Zappos, fully convinced I knew what I was getting and ordered a pair of Nike Free 5.0 shoes (here is what I got specifically: this-is-how-i-roll ).
What I didn’t know at that time was that these are kind of “revolutionary” in the fact that they really don’t do crap for you. They’re a nice light shell that wraps around your foot and keeps a rubber sole attached to your foot so that you don’t step on something that hurts. That’s about it. The interesting part here is that I haven’t had any running related injuries since switching to these shoes from an old pair of completely worn out running shoes I got from my Dad back a few years ago. This is only interesting because the other times I’ve run (trying out for track/cross country back in Junior High, and various times to try and get in shape for soccer) I’ve always injured myself somehow either through shin splints or heel problems.
This article is interesting in a couple of ways. First, it points out a bunch of things that have been found in a somewhat research-y way (I wouldn’t call this article real scientific research) that a lot of the claims of running shoes don’t really add up. The interesting thing to me was that there was a high correlation of expensive running shoes and injury. The part of me versed in science says, that correlation could be any sort of thing, such as picking the wrong shoe, running in a shoe too long, being a far more inexperienced runner, etc, etc. The natural born skeptic in me says, “perhaps there is a base premises that we should be looking at on the basis of running shoes in general.”
As for me, I’m going to be sticking with my Nike Free 5.0s and loving them, because they are comfortable. I might start to get crazy and go for even less in the shoe department in the future, but we’ll see how my body holds up in the long run.
