I’ll never run in a super shoe. Here’s why.

Are there any over pronators out there who wear super shoes? How have they worked out?

I train in moderate stability shoes and for a long time have raced in the Asics DS Trainer, which has a medial post for some support. Running in neutral shoes has never worked well for me. Does anyone have a similar foot and had good experiences with the super shoes?

For most people, running is a very personal activity where they are just trying to put the effort in to personally improve. There is great personal satisfaction when they put in the miles, eat right, do the tough workouts and get the desired results such as a new personal best time.

For most people that race, they are not so much competing against other runners but competing against themselves.

So it's totally logical that that those runners would view wearing supershoes as cheating. Supershoes would be seen as a shortcut to personal improvement. They would view wearing supershoes as cheating themselves. Similar to cutting corners on a certified course, taking performance enhancing drugs, traveling to a race with a huge net elevation drop to set a personal best time.

For those runners wearing supershoes would be cheating themselves out of the personal satisfaction of knowing that any personal improvement was the results of their own efforts.

I run minimalist except I also compete (multiple top-10 finishes in capital city marathons/halfs in the last year). I always get comments at the start line but I really dont care. My reasoning isnt the same as OP - for me I dont like what they do to my running mechanics and just could never adjust to them (plus they load my achilles like crazy because ive run minimalist for 10+ years).

Thing is i just dont care what anyone else does. My competitors all wear carbon fiber on the roads and I acknowledge and accept that. My decision has nothing to do with them. I will never give up until I win. And it wont be with carbon fiber.

thank you. cheater shoes are ruining the sport. we need more fast athletes refusing to wear them. i will never wear them either.

Wearing any shoes is cheating, you straight up fa-egg.

Just imagine if the great Jim Ryun, probably the most talented high school runner ever, had access to super shoes, Maurten gels and modern nutrition and training techniques. The HS record for the mile would be under 3:50, while the world record would be under 3:40. But I don't pay attention to the sport much anymore. The technology has taken over the human element.

Same here dude. I really don't get how so many minimalists switched to 40 mm drop shoes at the flick of a switch. My attempts to train in super shoes saw me quickly develop calf injuries or pain. Its weird because in my college days a lot of guys said they wore the streak xc for all training. How do you go from that to a 40 mm stack height shoe, no issues. I've never figured out how to make that transition work, I can't even run in something with "only" 30 mm stack heght.

Superstores are for slowpokes who can't break 15.

Or maybe the real reason is that you're too slow for them to benefit you.

I like supershoes, but it would be interesting to have races on dirt tracks with old school spikes where sprinters have to dig holes to create their starting blocks.

Or barefoot races.

Such a boring debate to have in 2025. Wear or don't wear whatever you want, but the shoes are here to stay, and you're not better than anyone else just because you choose to handicap yourself.

I think that even at the height of the minimalist movement the percentage of people running in them was probably pretty small. And I suspect that a lot of people who switched to minimalist shoes switched back to something more conventional fairly quickly so maybe there haven't been that many minimalists who switched to 40mm drop shoes at the flick of a switch. But yeah, for people who really found that minimalist shoes worked really well for them I wonder the same thing.

I can't use super shoes but luckily I have a huge stash of minimalist or basic shoes that at my age should last the rest of my life, which is an idea that's simultaneously cheering and depressing. There have been threads here at times from people who did very well in minimal shoes lamenting their disappearance from the market and looking for alternatives. It would be interesting to see how this has played out in Japan. Japanese runners as a group always ran in what would have been called minimalist shoes and from what I can tell now they've all stampeded to super shoes.

i'm a borderline subelite guy who flat out refuses to wear cheater shoes because i have no interest in lying to myself and disrespecting the guys who came before me. it's probably cost me a very small amount of prize money at some regional road races. it's definitely cost me several places at big events. even conservatively, cheater shoes take off 20-30 seconds in a 10k - and maybe closer to a minute if it's on the road. an 18 second difference at a recent major 10k i ran would've taken me from 12th to 2nd overall. i don't give 2 @#%@s about the prize money, but it is extremely annoying when i see dudes bouncing their way to a 29:50 hilly road 10k, dudes whose track PR was over 31:00 as of early 2021. what i really hate is when old time venerated course or meet records from the 80s or 90s, set by some true legend, pro, olympian etc, is broken by a cheater shoe dude - a dude who was significantly slower and less accomplished until the shoes came along. just be honest with yourself and record separate PRs and course records for cheater shoes and regular shoes. i don't even really care that much if you wear them. just be honest about what they're doing. it's kinda contrary to the whole nature of our sport and you look like a huge tool bragging about your fake time.

sure. just as long as you are honest with yourself that you're not better than runners that came before you. your records don't count. your times aren't real times. if you want to be a grownup and actually run real track and real road racing, and not some WWE equivalent, put on a pair of racing flats and see what your body is capable of. otherwise why not just hop on a bike.

I like them very much, love the feel and comfort.

Shoes have evolved throughout the history of the sport. Look at the shoes in the 1950s vs the shoes in the 1990s. Those changes and advances in technology undoubtedly influenced race times.

They still sell the Asics sortie and mizuno wave cruise in Japan. New Balance hanzo might be sold there too. I don't know.

Japan doesn't have size 10.5 US though. Its super frustrating because it looks like the Japanese shoes would work for me if I could just get my size. In running shoes, a little bit off the right fit is too much. Also a lot of their shoes are 2E. I found a mizuno shoe with 23 mm stack height a few months ago and after buying it realized its 2E and only sold in 2E. If you are used to D - and shoes that are listed as D that fit kind of tight really, 2E is not comfortable.

But as for Japan as a whole, they seem to be mostly racing in the super shoes, but transitioned to them at a slower rate than westerners.

Is this guy implying that switching from a cinder track to a new state-of-the-art one wouldn't yield a step-wise improvement "overnight"? Is there some sort of ramp up period that's required to fully realize the advantages of that technology?