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Monday, November 01, 2010

Not all Shoes are created equal


Take a look at the 3 shoes above. On the left is the Adidas Exerta. In the middle is the Nike Lunarglide and finally on the right is the Saucony Fastwitch. Look at the condition of the soles. Looking at the state of the sole, it would look like the latter has been used helluva a lot as the sole is almost bald. See the patch of grey right in the middle.

Yet, surprisingly, the mileage for each pair of shoes are 375km; 383km and 374km respectively. Can you believe it! The shoe with the lowest mileage got the most wear and that is made worse by the fact that the  Adidas Exerta is a trail shoes and used exclusively for trail runs and in that type of rough terrain should suffer more damages but did not. The LunarGlide is my current favourite pair of shoes and reserved for races and longer runs and the Fastwitch is used for shorter runs and shorter races.So it proves one thing. Not all shoes are created equally so relying on the time tested 6 months or 500km to 600 km is not good enough. Need to look at the condition of the shoes and replace accordingly.

So what should I get?

2 comments:

  1. I think it is also possible that the pace of the run may have an impact on the rate of wear and tear of the shoes. My thinking is that when we run faster, there is more force in between leaps and landings, causing more frictions, much the same case with tires when we accelerate our cars.

    If that reasoning is true at all, then perhaps it could be argued that shoes worn for shorter runs tend to wear off slightly faster because during shorter runs, there is that tendency to run faster; or at least faster than the pace of the long runs.

    Just a possible alternative explanation.

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  2. Hi Cornelius, actually I omitted some critical info from the post - the S Fastwitch is a racer and comes with a very much thinner sole so naturally it doesn't last that long.

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