Want a Better Running Shoe? The LRC Running Shoe Survey Is Here

done

but

when you ask for running shoe width - do you mean is the shoe literally a B or D or EE or are you asking if I have a narrow or wide foot?

all I want from this this, and it would make me so happy, is to click on a button and find a bunch of narrow running shoes.

rucker wrote:

done

but

when you ask for running shoe width - do you mean is the shoe literally a B or D or EE or are you asking if I have a narrow or wide foot?

We mean the technical shoe width, but we left out the letters because they mean different things for men and women.

MEN WOMEN

n/a 2A NARROW

NARROW B STANDARD

STANDARD D WIDE

WIDE 2E EXTRA WIDE

EXTRA WIDE 4E n/a

erik wrote:

We mean the technical shoe width...

But that's one of the many ways this is flawed.

I just filled out the survey for you. From what I told you, I run 50 mpw, have a neutral midfoot stride, and wear the Pegasus. How does that information really help anyone? Others in my club who have the same type of stride and footstrike use the Adidas Boost, the Asics Excel33, the Brooks Glycerin, and the Asics GT-2000 (not even a neutral shoe!).

So you'd have five similar people recommending five different shoes. That's not helpful at all.

zee shoe guy wrote:

erik wrote:

We mean the technical shoe width...

But that's one of the many ways this is flawed.

I just filled out the survey for you. From what I told you, I run 50 mpw, have a neutral midfoot stride, and wear the Pegasus. How does that information really help anyone? Others in my club who have the same type of stride and footstrike use the Adidas Boost, the Asics Excel33, the Brooks Glycerin, and the Asics GT-2000 (not even a neutral shoe!).

So you'd have five similar people recommending five different shoes. That's not helpful at all.

We're rolling this out here so we can get ideas on how to improve the survey before sharing it more widely. So if you have ideas that will definitely help us.

But in response to your concern:

Sure, five answers aren't very helpful. But imagine you're buying a new shoe and you have 500 or 5000 responses from people with similar profiles, and they ran in those same five shoes.

From those responses you can figure out which shoes the similar runners like the most. That's helpful when deciding between two or more similar shoes.

To that end, maybe all those shoes have good ratings. If I go to tripadvisor.com and look up hotels in Chicago and get five similar hotels at similar rates in the same area, rated in similar ways by similar people, my response isn't "this isn't helpful." It's "I can't really go wrong among these hotels, so let's book the cheapest, or the one closest to my conference, or [other personal reason]." We think the logic could be similar with shoes.

That's also not the only way to analyze it. A perennial, annoying problem with finding a good shoe is they get changed or discontinued. We hope this kind of data will let people say "I liked the Pegasus from 2012, what do other people who like this shoe have good experiences with?"

And, of course, people's actual review text will be helpful for people.

Lastly, if we learn that among LRCers who provide data there is little connection between their running profiles and the shoes that work with them, that is also helpful for buyers to know.

Not trying to be defensive, just trying to share a little of the vision we have for the data. We'd like to hear interesting angles/questions/etc. that could make this data potentially more useful.

zee shoe guy wrote:

erik wrote:

We mean the technical shoe width...

But that's one of the many ways this is flawed.

I just filled out the survey for you. From what I told you, I run 50 mpw, have a neutral midfoot stride, and wear the Pegasus. How does that information really help anyone? Others in my club who have the same type of stride and footstrike use the Adidas Boost, the Asics Excel33, the Brooks Glycerin, and the Asics GT-2000 (not even a neutral shoe!).

So you'd have five similar people recommending five different shoes. That's not helpful at all.

This is a work in progress.

If we survey a bunch of people like you and find those running in the X like it better than those running in the Y you might consider switching to the X.

If we have a bunch of people like you in the shoe X (with the same runner's profile) and the Z comes out and the people who switch like it better than the X this might make you want to switch. Also would be helpful when a shoe is discontinued.

Whatever we come up with can't be worse than read a generic shoe review, go into a shoe store, try a couple of pairs of shoes and see which feels best and that is your shoe.

Even if its just pretty simple, people with neutral feet like this shoe best, it is a step in connecting the shoe to the runner.

But you haven't asked about anything like fit, heel height (a big thing nowadays), flexibility, midsole hardness, arch height of the shoe, traction (a concern for trail runners and those running in winter), or any other number of characteristics.

Again, from the data points you asked me for, all a user from me is that the Pegasus might be a good shoe if you run 50 mpw and have a neutral, midfoot strike and have a normal runner's build. My running profile is pretty typical for the users of your site, so you're going to get a lot of different shoes for very similar people.

I would talk to the Shoefitter people (guy who came up with it was a pretty legit runner at CMU) so you can include some fit data with your reviews. Data like flexibility and fit are always somewhat subjective (the numbers in Running Times and Runners World are helpful, but they don't always tell the whole story).

fit! fit! fit!

that's the single most important shoe fact and you left it out

just add a choice - "is this shoe narrow medium or wide"

Presumably folks with narrow feet are going to tend to run in narrow shoes, and so forth.

Ho Hum wrote:

Presumably folks with narrow feet are going to tend to run in narrow shoes, and so forth.

exactly, mi amigo, and this could be a great tool to FIND those narrow shoes. Precisely. Thank you.

I took the survey. Here's some constructive feedback.

For me, the number one consideration before I even try on a shoe is heel to toe lift. Anything over 8mm is eliminated.

Number two consideration is a wide toe box. If there is any pressure at all forcing my toes together, I eliminate that model. I don't have a wide foot in the arch or heel, but I need a wide toe box.

Also, I could be wrong on this, but I think many of us rotate 2 or more pair of shoes, so to focus on one model of shoe is misleading. I rotate 3 pair of road shoes, 3 pair of interval shoes, and one pair of trail shoes. That's extreme, but I am extremely prone to foot injury and I have to rotate shoes to avoid injury.

What's wrong with going to your local running store and asking the knowledgeable sales associate about shoes? I'm fortunate, I guess, to live within several miles of running shoe stores with educated employees.

I wasn't sure what to do about "average training pace." I just put in my easy run pace since I do my workouts in another shoe. What is that supposed to mean? Am I supposed to average my workouts with my easy runs? I do almost no running at 6:50-7:30 pace, only faster or slower.

With email address collection/registration, this feels like a thinly-veiled survey under the auspices of "science". But in reality, could it just be for more targeted marketing & ads? Admittedly, I'm jaded. I hope I'm wrong.

Are you saying we need to ask you about the heel height? Factual data about the shoes can be gotten from the shoe manufacturers themselves.

Our thinking is we don't need to ask how much of a drop the shoe has as that is a factual matter that we can get by you telling us what shoe it is.

How much traction it provides or how hard it feels we could ask but we went for more asking about overall satisfaction.

Same thing. The width of the shoe is a fact that we can figure out.

Maybe we should ask about your foot width as you might have a narrow foot but run in a standard width shoe.

I see how we could rate the shoe on fit, but went for overall satisfaction.

You do not have to register or give an email address to submit the survey. It is optional. There is a lot of value we think in seeing how the same people like various shoes over time. To do that we need you to register.

Ultimately if we can create a better way to find running shoes, that is a lot more valuable, than collecting a few thousand email addresses, but I understand the concern.

Top Banned Posters wrote:

What's wrong with going to your local running store and asking the knowledgeable sales associate about shoes? I'm fortunate, I guess, to live within several miles of running shoe stores with educated employees.

Every time I go to a local running store, they tell me they "don't carry racing flats". I've only gotten blank looks when I've asked about the Streak LT.

Maybe your stores are better, but I refuse to pay $150 for Nike's performance trainer when they have a much better shoe for $75 MSRP-- which for whatever reason is almost never carried by stores.

Top Banned Posters wrote:

What's wrong with going to your local running store and asking the knowledgeable sales associate about shoes? I'm fortunate, I guess, to live within several miles of running shoe stores with educated employees.

Nothing is wrong with it at all, but we'd like to bring more data into the picture.

There are tons of runners and tons of running shoes. Not all running shoe associates are equal. Just like sales associates in any industry.

Adidas supernova glide 5 is not a boost shoe. It started boost at 6.

This does feel like an opportunity to give LRC some selling points when trying to pitch space to advertisers. Nothing wrong with that, though, in my opinion. If that means it attracts advertisers selling the right shoe for many people on this site, then that is a good thing. I highly doubt LRC is going to give away your personally identifiable information, even if you are registered. They wouldn't want to piss off their users.

As for the stated goal, to help people find a better shoe and fix the shoe identifying process (which is highly variable depending on which sales associate and store you walk into), that seems like their guiding principle for this effort that they don't quite know how they will make happen. But they do have a goal, and they are collecting information. I imagine it will be an iterative process with an end result the specifics of which aren't quite envisioned yet.

I say it's a worthy effort! But we know that LRC isn't made up of a group of people who are representative of the general running, shoe buying public. I wonder if they have dreams to go bigger than this community?

The survey uses the incorrect term "Under Pronate". The correct term would be "Supinate". Under pronating means not pronating enough. You can supinate without under pronating.