Why should you stop running in shoes that are old, yet still plush? Let's say a plush shoe has lost most of its responsiveness, but you don't care beacause it is a shoe for easy miles. Why stop if they still protect the foot with lots of foam underneath and you feel fine?
Run6556 wrote:
Why should you stop running in shoes that are old, yet still plush?
I don't throw away old shoes (>500 miles) that are in good condition. I have a pair of Nike Tempo Next% with 1,800 miles on them. They're about done now, but have held up very well, much beyond the 500 mile "limit." The foam continued to feel thick and responsive enough that my foot has continued to feel well protected. I've had other shoes fall apart far short of 500 miles. I think it all comes down to the shoe, the terrain you run on and probably form, weight and footstrike of the runner.
In my personal opinion, throwing away perfectly good shoes because you hit some arbitrary mileage number mostly benefits the shoe companies, as long as they're in good condition, and your feet agree. On the other hand, if you've got the money and just like trying new shoes often, that's cool, too.
I throw them away when they don't work the way they once did, and that is almost always because of wear differential. The soles wear out more on one side than the other, or more on the heel than at the ball of the foot, and hence running mechanics change,
I can try to stretch this beyond a certain point, but it almost always leads to injury or running pains when I do.
Pushing a shoe beyond it life-span is a recipe for disaster, from my experience.
Run6556 wrote:
Why should you stop running in shoes that are old, yet still plush? Let's say a plush shoe has lost most of its responsiveness, but you don't care beacause it is a shoe for easy miles. Why stop if they still protect the foot with lots of foam underneath and you feel fine?
I have sought a compelling answer to this question many times and have found only one: some runners start to feel niggles or injuries when a shoe hits a certain mileage, which for a particular shoe model may be 300, 500, 800 or whatever. Performance doesn’t matter for easy miles, so if they don’t bother you, there’s no reason not to use them.
I have a pair of ASICS that are like over 12 years old. I’d only used them for gym wear and maybe occasional jogs back when I wasn’t a regular runner. It’s bottom still has grooves intact and there was no damage to the top. They of course didn’t look new but there just was no good reason to chuck them, but they also don’t look nice enough to wear casually. So I tried running in them and found that I started getting high hip pain at the top of the my left ileum. Running in other newer shoes healed that injury. So now I don’t use them for running because I have a mental association with iliac pain with them.