PAINFUL TRUTH No. 1: The Best Shoes Are the Worst
Runners wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led by Bernard Marti, M.D., a preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland's University of Bern. Dr. Marti's research team analyzed 4,358 runners in the Bern Grand-Prix, a 9.6-mile road race. All the runners filled out an extensive questionnaire that detailed their training habits and footwear for the previous year; as it turned out, 45 percent had been hurt during that time.
But what surprised Dr. Marti, as he pointed out in The American Journal of Sports Medicine in 1989, was the fact that the most common variable among the casualties wasn't training surface, running speed, weekly mileage, or "competitive training motivation." It wasn't even body weight, or a history of previous injury: it was the price of the shoe. Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40. Follow-up studies found similar results, like the 1991 report in Medicine & Science m Sports & Exercise that found that "Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, 'pronation correction') are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40)."
What a cruel joke: for double the price, you get double the pain. Sharp-eyed as ever, Coach Yin Lananna had already spotted the same phenomenon himself back in the early '80S. "I once ordered high-end shoes for the team, and within two weeks, we had more plantar fasciitis and Achilles problems than I'd ever seen. So I sent them back and told them, 'Send me my cheap shoes,' " Lananna says. "Ever since then, I've always ordered the low-end shoes. It's not because I'm cheap. It's because I'm in the business of making athletes run fast and stay healthy."
Christopher McDougal "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" (2009)
