New Running Shoes
So yesterday I went to pick up some new running shoes from A Snail's Pace in Brea. This store is awesome, becuase they fit you real meticulously and pay attention to your running style and what you're looking for in a shoe. There's a treadmill in the store, where they video the way you run in various shoes and analyze whether those shoes are the ones for you.
For the past 4 years or so, the ONLY shoes I have worn (for work, home, running, and gym) are minimalist/barefoot shoes. However, the top of my foot was starting to feel strained and painful after runs and long walks, so I decided to look for something that still enabled "natural running" (midfoot/forefoot strikes vs heel strikes) but had more padding. So basically I was looking for 0-drop shoe (heel to toe drop).
I went there a week or so ago and wasn't happy with what I settled on, which ended up being a clunky shoe with a large drop, so when I went in yesterday I was determined to come out with shoes only if I was 100% happy.
The sales associate observed some pronation in my right foot when I ran in most of the shoes, so she suggested I might want to get one that was a bit more stabilizing, but not as extremely different from 0-drop neutral shoes as the pair I almost ended up with from the last time I was there. I was about to get these Saucony Isoseries Hurricanes (8mm drop), but then I remembered in my recent reading that a lot of runners looking for the same things I was looking for were pleasantly surprised by the Hoka One One Bondis. These shoes have a HUGE bottom and look very strange, but they have a 0-4mm drop and definitely offer the padding that I was looking for. I asked the sales associate about them and she said that they actually had a large selection of Hoka One Ones, but she doesn't normally even offer them up because they look so weird that most customers won't consider them.
I tried the Bondi 4s on, and I had absolutely no pronation in them, even though the shoes aren't stabilizing. The sales associate said that it was probably because of the wide foot bed. The width of it itself was stabilizing. I then tried the more responsive Huakas on, and the little bit of pronation returned. The Bondi 4s felt like magic on my feet. It's like running on clouds. I went on my first run in them today, and I haven't run that well in a long time. I had abosolutely no foot or knee pain. Now I just need to build my stamina back up to match how far my legs and feet can go! Oh and these shoes claim to have 1,000 miles of life on them. That is an absurdly huge claim! If I can get even 500 miles out of them, though, I'll be happy. I'm keeping a log so I know how many miles they've made it through. Only 2 miles so far, LOL.
These shoes were developed by ultra runners, who run for incredibly long distances. I wish I was an ultra runner, actually. After reading the book Born To Run - A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen - by Christopher McDougall, it's planted that seed in me. It also was what contributed to my adoption of minimalist shoes. I highly recommend that book, by the way, even if you're not currently interested in running. It's awesome. These shoes are far from minimalist, but the cushioning is really going to help the strain on my joints, and they still enable me to hit my natural mid-foot strike.
I really love these things:
