#1 is here, if you’re wondering. I’m trying to make this a regular thing.
I bought new running shoes. They haven’t arrived yet. I bought them yesterday after the type of internal mental waffling that could make a person go insane. These are what I chose:
The “Best Budget Shoe” according to Runner’s World. They retail at $100 but are 40% off right now; I guess $100 is “budget” for the running world. I know, I know, you should never cheap out on shoes. The ones I bought before, the Saucony Glide 14s, were $80 but I think they were on sale on Amazon too. Before that, my Brooks Whatever-They-Were-Called were $120; that was 2011, today they would be worth about $164. Proper running shoe prices!
Anyway, Nike. I’m buying them because I have made the Head and Heart decision that my current shoes are the cause of my knee and leg pain. My hypothesis is this: in 2011, my Brooks shoes offered stability on the inside to offset overpronation. This is what the salesperson at Fit Right NW suggested I buy. I didn’t know what overpronation was but I was like, fine, whatever. I bought them and wore them and ran in them for many years, more years than I should’ve! I wore the outside of the shoe out, so much so that in the later years I felt like I was running with my feet at opposing 45° angles. But I never felt any significant pain with them, probably because I was strength training a lot back then, doing lots of heavy squats and deadlifts, which is good for your knees overall (if you do them with correct form, of course).
Cut to: now. A decade later. I am a big slob of a man, sedentary To The Max and still picking up the pieces of my mental health post-the-first-two-years-of-the-pandemic.1Tangent: I wish we had a name for 2020/2021 covid times. The argument over whether covid is still a pandemic or if it’s now endemic is one for 2022 onwards, I think, so “post-pandemic” makes sense to me, but I don’t want to alienate people for whom covid is still very much a danger to them presently. And I think we can all agree except for weird MAGA people that 2020 and 2021 were the worst years of the pandemic. I’d say “lockdown” but that sadly only describes a few months in the U.S. Let’s get a name going, people. I started walking again and decided it would be a good idea to walk in my Converse; that is, to walk flat footed and build my foot strength. I think this was a good idea? It never really hurt, other than the general aches of walking long distances. I’m not turning into a Vibrams guy or anything, I promise.
Eventually I thought it would be good to walk fast enough that it would become a run, and I knew I needed shoes for that. Since my first shoes had stability in them, I decided that I needed stability shoes now, because to me, overpronation was a thing that I just had, like one has wisdom teeth or an extra finger on each hand. So I bought these Saucony shoes, which have been nice, but the more I run in them the more I see the signs of my Brooks shoes; namely, the extra wear on the outside of the shoe. That, plus the stiffness of the stability on the inside of the shoe, made me realize that overpronation is a thing that can be fixed, and that those years of running with the Brooks shoes likely helped my overpronation (if I ever really had it to begin with!) to the point where, now, ten years later, I don’t need them.
What I’m saying is that I’m pretty sure that my Saucony shoes are directly responsible for my knee and leg pain. Because if the IT band rubbing up against your thigh bone is what causes IT band pain, wearing shoes that make your feet roll outward too much probably causes your knee to also move outward, making it easier for your IT band to rub up against your thigh bone. This is my overarching theory that may be total bullshit. We’re going to find out!
The moreover problem isn’t the running so much as the walking. I think the walking is what is causing this issue, because perhaps the stability helps me when I’m running, but when I have to walk around the stability and do that for a few miles, it adds up. I want my shoes to be versatile, for now at least, until I can afford to buy a nice pair of walking shoes. Walking shoes, daily trainers, race shoes, and trail shoes. One of these days, I’ll own all of them, plus some Crocs, I’m sure.
Today I’m going for a walk and a bit of a run to test out the legs. Probably just a mile of running, nothing more. Slow and steady. If it feels good I’ll probably run/walk parkrun on Saturday. The Couve Clover Run is on Sunday and I’m going to do it as best as I can. Then, the new shoes arrive next week, which is good because it’ll give me enough time to break them in before the Lacamas Hop Hop (god I hate that name). April is going to be my wildest month as I have a 5k every other week for three weeks (Lacamas, Lilac Run, and Cinco de Mayo, which is killing me because it’s on the 6th, not the 5th), before about a month off before the Starlight Run. That is a fun run at night, but THEN a month after THAT is my first 10k, which I desperately need to start train for without hurting myself.
It’s going to be a wild spring and summer, folks.
- 1Tangent: I wish we had a name for 2020/2021 covid times. The argument over whether covid is still a pandemic or if it’s now endemic is one for 2022 onwards, I think, so “post-pandemic” makes sense to me, but I don’t want to alienate people for whom covid is still very much a danger to them presently. And I think we can all agree except for weird MAGA people that 2020 and 2021 were the worst years of the pandemic. I’d say “lockdown” but that sadly only describes a few months in the U.S. Let’s get a name going, people.
