The London Marathon 2018: Do expensive running shoes really make a difference?
The Sunday Times,
I am 42½ years old and my knees have gone. They shouldn’t have gone. I’m relatively fit. I’m relatively healthy. I’ve been a relatively enthusiastic Sunday jogger for most of my adult life. But they’ve definitely gone. Pop, one of them went, last year, two days after a probably ill-advised triathlon.
It got better, I started running again. I started thinking that I should do a marathon. Everyone else is doing a marathon. I should, too. And then, pop. The other one. And ever since then I’ve been trapped in a cycle of injury and recovery and exercise and repeat.
A few weeks ago, I went to see the physio. She said I might have a cartilage tear. She asked what type of shoes I ran in. The very latest, the most expensive, I said proudly. The physio frowned.
“Too much cushioning might be the problem,” she said. “Or too much bounce.”
If she was right, it means I’ve been running with the wrong type of shoes for three decades. No wonder my knees have gone.
One in five of us goes for a jog at least four times a year. According to the most recent figures from Sport England, more than 2m over-14s in the UK run at least once a week. That’s up 73% over the past decade. Right about now, more than 40,000 of them are tramping the streets of London. Tomorrow, despite the fact that scores of physios are drafted in to nurse ailing marathoners, there will be a lot of sore knees. According to researchers at the University of Exeter, “about three-quarters of runners typically get injured each year”. What are we all doing wrong?
Last year, a collector paid $11,200 for a pair of running shoes on eBay. Of course, these were no ordinary running shoes. These were prototypes, hand-cobbled, the logo stitched on with fishing line, the soles moulded in a waffle iron in the back of an Oregon garage. Only 12 pairs of these so-called Moon Shoes were made and handed out to American athletes at the 1972 Olympic trials.
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The man who ruined his wife’s waffle iron was Bill Bowerman, head coach for the US track and field team. Later that summer, the small start-up he co-founded released its first commercial running shoe. It was called the Cortez, the start-up was Nike and the modern running industry was born. As with all great inventions, timing was everything. That summer in Munich, the marathon runner Frank Shorter won Olympic gold. He was the first American to take gold in the longest race since 1908 and, all of a sudden, everyone wanted to go jogging. The Nike Cortez was a sellout, and by the end of the decade, 25m Americans, including Jimmy Carter, had embraced the concept. And where America jogs, we follow.
Over the ensuing decades, the marketing departments of the world’s big running-shoe conglomerates have convinced us to part with billions of pounds in return for a cupboard full of increasingly hi-tech trainers. And for a long time hi-tech meant cushioning. The more cushioning, the better.
In 1977, for example, Brooks mass-produced the Vantage, a shoe with an ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) midsole and a “varus” wedge, no less. The EVA created cushioning and support, while the wedge reduced the amount the foot rolled through the stride. It stopped overpronation. Because too much pronation is bad. Too little pronation is also bad. You want just the right amount.
The response from Nike came out of thin air. An aerospace engineer approached Bowerman in 1979 with the idea of putting pockets of air inside the soles of his shoes. Nike ran with the idea, launching its proprietary Air technology, first for elite athletes and eventually for anyone who thought $100 was a sensible amount to splash on trainers.
After Air came the Air Max 1, a shoe with a little window to see the pocket of air. Nike launched it with a TV campaign using the Beatles’ song Revolution. In truth, a little window looked more like a gimmick than a revolution, but it turned out we liked gimmicks in our running shoes. So, the gimmick race began. In 1986, Adidas launched the APS, a trainer that came with a key to adjust the spacing of rods in the midsole in order to soften or harden the cushioning. Reebok came up with honeycomb cushioning. Asics went with gel cushioning. Saucony went with grid cushioning.
On and on it went — gel, air, liquid, honeycombs, grid, pro-grid, waves, helium. As a feat of marketing over common sense, it was rivalled only by the number of blades the shaving industry could convince us we needed on a razor. Sports stars were enlisted to seal the deal (Nike, alone, has paid for 11 of the 15 most lucrative endorsement deals in history). Running shoes were no longer just shoes to run in. They were gadgets that could make you a better runner.
Then, in the 2000s, came the “barefoot revolution”. The idea that running au naturel might be a good idea was popularised with Born to Run, Christopher McDougall’s 2009 account of a tribe of ultra-runners in northwest Mexico. Shoe manufacturers responded by reversing the innovations of the last half century. Running shoes that mimicked the bare foot became all the rage. The less cushioning the better.
Today, it’s a minefield out there. You can buy partial barefoots, full minimalists, modified high-cushioned trainers, partial cushioned trainers and trainers with springs or coils in the heels to help you bounce. There are shoes for “normal” feet, flat feet and high-arched feet. And there are shoes for forefoot runners, midfoot runners and heel runners, the underpronated and the overpronated. If none of that means anything to you, you can go to any number of specialist running stores and have your gait analysed prior to a bespoke fitting.
For many millennia, people managed to run about without having their gait analysed. Now, an entire industry relies on our belief that there is such a thing as the right running shoe. There’s only one problem with all this. A great deal of scientific evidence suggests it might not be the case.
The inconvenient truth is that despite all the advances in running shoes over the past 50-odd years, they appear to have had little or no impact on injury rates. The percentage of runners carrying injuries today is more or less the same as it was in the 1970s. The American specialist magazine Runner’s World surveyed its readers in the mid-1970s and found that 60% of them had reported chronic problems. When they repeated the survey in 2009, the figure was 66%. There are many other studies, with wildly varying results ranging from 15% to 85%, but the key factor is that, despite the technological race, there is no clear trend downwards over time.
An analysis by the University of Calgary pointed out that running populations have changed dramatically since the early 1970s. Then, the runners were “dedicated ... aiming to win and skinny”. Today, they are “primarily recreational runners who run to finish ... some are overweight and most are involved in cross-training activities”. In other words, the reason injury rates have not come down is because there are more flappers, sloggers and wobblers pounding the pavements today.
That may well be true, but many of us sloggers, flappers and wobblers, nudged along by the marketeers, think there is an intrinsic link between expensive running shoes and injury-free running. So much so that in 2014, Vibram USA, the company that makes FiveFingers “natural” running shoes, agreed to settle a class action that claimed the company had made unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of its products.
In a recent study, Dr Hannah Rice, a lecturer in biomechanics at the University of Exeter, looked at the impact of different types of running shoes on injury rates. “Footwear is easily modifiable, but many runners are misguided when it comes to buying new trainers,” she says. “Our research shows that running in minimal shoes and landing on the balls of your feet reduces loading rates and may therefore reduce the risk of injury.”
Runners who use cushioned footwear tend to land on their heels, which creates “an abrupt vertical impact force each time the foot lands on the ground”.
This is what I do. I land on my heels. I create an abrupt impact force. That’s why my knees went pop. Or it might be. Rice is reluctant to make generalisations. The science, when it comes to running, is just as subjective as the marketing. She does, however, point me to a 2007 study carried out by Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee, which compared cheap trainers with expensive ones. It found cost made no difference. “I do not believe there is any evidence to date to suggest that more expensive footwear would be beneficial in terms of reduced injury risk,” Rice concludes.
Roger Kerry, associate professor in physiotherapy at the University of Nottingham, puts it more bluntly. “The type of shoe you run in is a distraction from the real issues,” he says. “As long as it’s comfortable, it doesn’t matter how much you spend. There are other, far more important factors for runners to consider, such as cadence [the number of strides per minute], stride length and muscle conditioning.
“At any one time, 40% of runners are carrying injuries,” Kerry adds. “That’s comparable to injury rates in contact sports.” He attributes this to us runners, not our running shoes. “People seem to give something like running one chance. When it goes wrong, they’re put off for life. Combine that with our culture of wanting things to happen quickly and it’s a recipe for disaster. Suddenly launching yourself into an intense running schedule might be good for your cardiovascular system, but your musculoskeletal system needs much more time to adapt.”
Bear this in mind as you watch the marathon from the comfort of your sofa today. Be careful with that little voice in your head, saying, “You can do that, my precious.” Start slow. Build up the distance gradually. Don’t sign up for the Berlin Marathon in September. Way. Too. Soon.
Kerry is a keen runner, but he chooses to wear a cheap pair of Aldi trainers. Why? Because they’re comfortable. Would he ever go to a running shop to have his gait analysed?
“A proper biomechanical analysis of pelvic and hip control would be good, but that’s not what they do in running shops,” he says. “They just look at the feet, which is pointless. Just concentrate on comfort. You might find that your perfect shoe is expensive or you might not. For me, I’m happy with my Aldis.”
None of which will be music to the ears of high-end shoe floggers. Last year, Nike launched its $720 HyperAdapt 1.0, a shoe that does up its own laces. Or, in Nike parlance, marks “a meta moment akin to the dawn of 1984 or the earthly passing of 2001”. Ideal if they came in toddler size, but, frankly, if you need help doing your own laces, you probably shouldn’t be running. In February, the company released its Epic React Flyknit shoe, which comes with the “most complete foam ever”.
“With Nike React, we’re able to deliver an experience that is both soft and responsive, lightweight and durable,” says Brett Holts, vice-president of Nike Running Footwear. “Never before have we been able to deliver all four of these characteristics in one single foam.” When asked if cushioning is good or bad for a runner, Holts says: “Every runner is different ... we try to offer a variety of options to suit everyone. As technology evolves, we’re able to offer many more types of cushioning to suit a wide variety of preferences.” It’s an exciting time, he adds, what with the “leveraging of computational design” and “pressure-map algorithms ... We’re finally able to deliver on what so many of our runners are asking for.”
Matthias Amm, senior product director for Adidas Running (which, by the way, almost doubled its market share last year), is also full of the joys of new technology. His Boost shoe’s midsole is “composed of thousands of small energy capsules” that offer “unrivalled comfort, cushioning and energy-return with each step”. On the daunting task of finding the right running shoe, he too points out that every runner is different. You should consider the terrain you’re training on, your gait and your running goals, he says. Naturally, Adidas has a shoe to cater for every one of those variables.
As the business continues to expand (in 2017 the global athletic footwear market was valued at $64.3bn), Adidas and Nike, Under Armour, Reebok, Brooks, Saucony, New Balance et al will all continue to release running shoes with ever flashier materials. “It’s just more of the same,” says Kerry in his 30-quid Aldis. “All these things are nice ideas, but non-essential. There are more important things to worry about.”
Of course, that’s easy to say, but jog into any running-shoe shop and announce, “I just want to be comfortable when I run.” You’ll leave an hour later, clutching the latest pair of super-bouncy, super-unbouncy, super-firm, super-soft super-sneakers. Will they stop your knees from going pop? Maybe. Maybe not.
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