Blame the Shoes?

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from March 2007.)

Sellers of running shoes love us runners. We’re quick to buy a shoe in the belief that it can make us healthier.

When that doesn’t happen, we instinctively blame that shoe and quickly replace it with a model that we believe will be better. We can run through several different types of shoes each year, not because they wear out but because they don’t live up to our hopes.

The longer we run in a certain shoe, the stronger the attachment to it and the greater the sense of loss when this pair wears out and can’t be replaced. This model often has changed or disappeared before we can buy the original one again.

Our search for elusive, and probably unattainable, perfection resumes. You know you’re a real runner when you have stocked a closet with failed shoes, with hundreds of unrun miles still in them.

The story of my running life has been the search for the perfect shoe. Every time, high hopes sooner or later yield to disappointment.

A year ago I found my almost-perfect shoe. This was an experimental Nike Pegasus that never went into production. It carried me through marathon training and the race itself, without any injury interruptions, for the first time in this century.

Last summer my search took me through three models from two companies (including the latest mass-produced Pegasus) before I landed in the Nike Hayward. While alternating week to week between two pairs, I stayed well – and therefore ran well and quit looking for a better shoe – into the new year.

Then came an injury – actually a pair of identical injuries, on each achilles tendon, for the price of one. This pain was more annoying than serious. It would ease enough to allow near-normal runs, but at other times of day I would stiffen into an embarrassing shuffle of a walk.

Instinctively and instantly I blamed the shoes. Must be the shoes. Time to try others – many others.

In less than a month I tested another four models from three different companies – New Balance, Saucony, Nike. The more shoes I tried, and the longer the achilles pain lingered without any improvement, the more I had to wonder where the blame truly belonged.

Was it really with the shoes? Or was it with the main culprit in running injuries – a flaw in the running routine?

Now I know that the Nike Hayward was guilty by association. The shoe wasn’t the main perpetrator this time. I was, for making a mistake in the running itself for the 99^th time.

The sore tendons wouldn’t get better until I made big changes in my running during recovery, then subtle ones later in the name of prevention. Changing the runs that cause or aggravate an injury is better medicine – cheaper too – than changing the shoes whenever our feet and legs complain of abuse.

UPDATE FROM 2015

I’ve all but stopped searching for the perfect shoe, and also mostly stopped blaming shoes for all that ails me. My usual shoe, the Nike Pegasus, isn’t perfect, but most of its models (they’re up to version 31 as I write) are good enough. My foot and leg health has stayed better since I’ve added more walk breaks to the runs and more walk-only days, and since I quit running races.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]