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Are expensive running shoes a waste of money?
- enum 17y agoMy experience with motion-control running shoes quite different from what the article reports. My knees stopped hurting once I switched to them.
- gaius 17y agoSame for me. The thing that matters is where you buy your shoes. Go to a running store like Runner's Need where they do gait analysis first, not to Nike Town where you buy whatever Shaq is wearing this week.
- ulf 17y agoAny problems should disappear wearing his size 16 running shoes. Of course so would movement faster than 1mph.
- pingswept 17y agoThere is no need to read this article. These are clearly the words of a madman: "No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same."
- lethain 17y agoHe's basing that statement on a study performed on a number of runners which tried to identify factors that would make someone likely to have an injury over a year, and the only one that was statistically significant was price of running shoe. Certainly one study doesn't provide a definitive answer, but decrying the article because he is inconsistent with common sense, which is he is explicitly saying is wrong, seems a bit unfair.
- pingswept 17y agoNo. The sentence I quoted is in the 8th paragraph, above the first photo in the article. The part you're mentioning is in the addendum, "Painful Truth No 1." I stand by my claim. It is ridiculous to say that we all have the same chance of getting hurt, which is what he says. He also says much later and in an unrelated part of the article that, as you note, you're more likely to get hurt in expensive shoes than cheap ones, according to one study. There is no mention of "Remember that stuff I said at the beginning-- that was wrong." Maybe "madman" is going too far-- perhaps "inconsistent and unreasonable person" would be more accurate.
- gregwebs 17y ago"inconsistent and unreasonable person", like "madman" is still stating your disagreement at the lowest intellectual levels. See http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html You need to remove the personal attack ("person") and just point out that the ideas are inconsistent. Refuting one sentence is useful, but does not refute the central point.
- pingswept 17y agoI agree that I am stating my argument at a relatively low intellectual level (but maybe not "the lowest"), and I also agree with you and PG that in general we ought to avoid personal attacks as a form of disagreement. However, I think you've mistaken my intent. I don't agree or disagree with the article. Honestly, I have only skimmed the article, and I don't plan to read it carefully, because I am convinced that the writing is sloppy, and that makes the article, in my judgment, not worth reading. I would presume you feel differently. I had hoped to spare fellow readers the disappointment that I experienced, clicking on the article, hoping to find insightful commentary on running shoes, but instead finding writing that appeared to me to be unexceptional. It certainly seems this has been ineffective. I don't know; maybe you all loved the article, and I'm the one missing out. I'll stick with the heuristic of "Articles that lead with unreasonable claims are not worth finishing."
- 17y ago
- biohacker42 17y agoMy anecdote: I run with a pair of very old flat shoes, with no cushioning or bounce in them what so ever. Then one day I decide to try a pair of fancy expensive sneakers. It was amazing, I was running A LOT faster with no extra effort! And then the next day my knees were in a lot of pain. A few days later I put the new shoes on again to go for a run, and I kept thinking about how much faster I ran, it must have been the bounce. So I start hopping with the shoes, but they don't bounce, they dampen! That intrigued me, and I started playing around to make sure the shoes were dampeners, and they were. But then they should have made me slower! The only explanation I have is they fooled my brain into pounding the pavement a lot harder, hence the knee pain. Now I'm back to my old crappy shoes, no pain with them.
- evilneanderthal 17y agoyour legs were an inch longer or more due to the increased shoe cushioning. hence you experienced a slight increase in speed.
- diN0bot 17y agoi don't know why this was downvoted. Leg length is a reasonable hypothesis. Taller musco-skeleton structure helps with long runs (for the average runner). This also makes sense when combined with the heel-landing technique, which lengthens the stride, whereas the ball-landing technique is more compressed and piston like. I think both the dampening and stride lengthening effects cause faster speeds but at a greater detriment to the body.
- unexpected 17y agoleg length is really not that important. The most important thing for a runner is weight. The lighter you are, generally the faster you can run. Sammy Wanjiru, the guy who won the olympic marathon, is 5'4" and 112 lbs! When you have longer legs it also takes you more energy to move them. Running long distances is all about running as efficiently as possible. Weight also matters in sprinting. If you looked at the NFL combine results, for the 40 yard dash times, the most factor tends to be weight- the lighter you are, the faster your times are. This is why it's such an anomaly to find someone that's really big that can run extremely fast. (BC's BJ Raji for example). It's been estimated that for every lb you use lose, you can lose about 2 lbs on your mile time. Want to improve your mile time by 20 seconds? Lose 10 lbs!
- listic 17y agoWhen I started running, I bought myself a pair of Dinamo trainers (very simplistic trainers of old Soviet design)(http://www.fsidinamo.org/details.php?id=16 http://www.fsidinamo.org/details.php?id=16) by the advice of an old runner. By the same advice I 'modded' them by putting a piece of porous resin inside, under the heel. I use them for running, 5 km daily, all year round; and also for hiking. I get ironic grins when I mention that I run in them, because these are supposedly definitely obsolete and uncool, but I don't care. I don't have any problems. What am I doing wrong?
- Hates_ 17y agoJust to point out, this was previously submited to HN and for some reason, unknown to me, became dead. There is a good load of comments on there still: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571447 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571447
- Maro 17y agoFind something (shoes, stretching routine, etc) that works and stick with it. If you're an amateur, the bottleneck is you, your weight, etc. anyways, not the equipment. Eg. last year when I did the Ironman I was 80kg, now I'm up to 90kg, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to optimize the weight of my bike.
- gregwebs 17y agoWe need to make science based decisions, not marketing based decisions. This article is dead on. In the absence of science (and sometimes in its presence) we should look to history. What we find in indigenous cultures, besides just the Tarahuma runners is barefoot or minimal shoe wearing people with very few feet problems. Wearing a cast around your foot all day is not a good idea! Personally, I recommend a mixture of barefoot and the vibram five fingers or other minimal shoes.
- glymor 17y agoIt's a tautology to say that people who could run before running shoes were invented didn't need running shoes, it ignores the possible runners that dropped out. Running is a mechanical process. If there is something wrong with your feet, say your arches are too low or too high, or if one of yours legs is longer than the other, you will have problems with your gait that will likely increase your chance of injury. I don't see how history plays into it.
- gregwebs 17y agoThe point is people didn't need to "drop out" because they weren't getting hurt. History gives us knowledge we can apply to even mechanical concepts. We don't need to reinvent the steam engine, we can just look it up in a text book. Likewise, we don't need to try to reinvent running or the human foot when our inventions are not as good as the original.
- glymor 17y agoThe point is people didn't need to "drop out" because they weren't getting hurt. You have no evidence for this statement. The Lore of Running is a good reference if you're a runner I suggest getting it. One of the things the author deals with was the introduction of running shoes to the existing athletes at the time. It did make much difference and for some it caused problems. But there are now athletes who couldn't compete without them. As an example how would you deal with flat-feet historically? Looking at how armies have handled it just excludes you from fighting.
- mapleoin 17y agohow about classic Converse shoes? Those have a flat and thin sole. I wonder why they weren't mentioned in the article, since the brand is quite famous..
- jws 17y agoInteresting data point: On a $/mile basis, my friends who run spend more on running shoes than I spend on gasoline for my car.
- kajecounterhack 17y ago$90 for 500 miles. Hmm...yeah.
- ALee 17y agowhen I was in high school, I loved my track shoes, they were just this sculpted shoe wth no padding almost like a slipper and we would put our screws into them. I felt like I could fly when I wore them.
- glymor 17y agoand footwear for the previous year; as it turned out, 45 per cent had been hurt during that time. But what surprised Dr Marti was the fact that the most common variable [...] shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40. When the runners are free to choose their shoes you would expect correlation between runners with more expensive shoes and those more prone to injures. Presenting the results this way can only be viewed as disingenuous but then again this is The Daily Mail.
- intranation 17y agoThis is coming from the Daily Mail, one of the most populist and generally poorly-researched papers in the UK (which has a glut of populist and poorly-researched papers). I'm not inclined to believe this article for a second.
- kajecounterhack 17y agoI'm a distance runner. When I had injuries, better shoes fixed them. I spend ~$400/yr on shoes. If you run enough mileage, they help. If you don't, they aren't worth your investment. Also, sprinters seem not to require as much cusioning as they require stability.
- TwoBit 17y agoThey should make journalists take classes in critical thinking before they write stuff like this. Of course shoe manufacturers aren't going to respond with injury data. Because as soon as they do then somebody is going to sue them as a result of this data being taken to be a product claim. It's the same reason manufacturers sell devices and then say right on the box that the device isn't supposed to be used for what it is intended. Also, just because injury rates haven't gone down doesn't mean the shoes aren't helping. What the shoes may well be doing is allowing people to run harder and longer on hard surfaces. Of course those Mexicans can run barefoot: they're running on dirt. Also, these cushioned shoes are also allowing people who aren't full-time runners be able run where otherwise their unconditioned feet might not be able to. There's a lot more I could say, but it's not worth the effort.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]