Ever playful, Americans in the summer of 1972 took to the streets. Pushed outside by the race that launched a thousand sports-medicine clinics—Frank Shorter’s startling win in the 1972 Munich Olympic marathon—Americans became runners.
They quickly learned that although our ancestors had loped for miles to chase their food, we moderns are less well adapted to running. Within a month of Shorter’s win, runners’ conversations focused on tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, and other ailments that just months earlier would have sounded like Portuguese to them.
Running’s boom had become medicine’s blessing. America was limping. Why?
For years, the answer appeared obvious. Doctors gave almost every running injury a technical description, such as achilles tendonitis, and the general heading “overuse syndrome.” Runners simply were running too far, too often, too fast.
To reduce the risk of these overuse injuries, experts suggested stretching. Their theory was that stretching loosened and warmed muscles and tendons, which made them less susceptible to injury. Partly because this advice seemed so logical, many runners heeded it. And kept limping.
The running-shoe companies saw an opportunity and responded with “biomechanically designed” shoes based on scientific studies of our feet and legs. Naturally, they charged more for these shoes, a premium runners were willing to pay to keep on their feet.
Now well into the twenty-first century, the sport continues to attract millions, and runners continue to limp—provided their doctor hasn’t insisted that they quit running entirely.
Which brings us to another interesting story about conventional wisdom, expert wisdom, and the reasons we buy what we buy. It’s the story of what causes these injuries.
Researchers recently broke down every potentially relevant variable about runners—their gender, age, height, weight, running surface, miles run per week, average running pace, athletic background. To everyone who knew that injuries were caused by overuse, the studies seemed unnecessary, like the infamous government study that spent months reaching its recommendation for improving bike safety: Add a third wheel.
But the researchers found that the obvious explanation was wrong: Overuse wasn’t the cause. Kooks like this author, who once ran an average of seventeen miles a day, suffered no more injuries than those who ran that much a week.
Was it failure to stretch? More kooks like this author refused to stretch, figuring that a slow start to a run was warm-up enough. These impatient kooks were right. Stretching didn’t hurt, the researchers found, but it didn’t help, either.
Did gender have an influence? Are women the more-injured sex? No.
Surely then—surely—weight figured into the problem. Extra weight must cause more injuries. But again, an obvious cause isn’t a cause at all. Being overweight may be unhealthy, but it doesn’t contribute to injuries.
Running surfaces—were they the explanation? It seems logical that harder running surfaces would produce more injuries and that softer surfaces, such as the bark-chipped Pre’s Trail in Eugene, Oregon, help reduce injuries. But neither is true.
At this point, it might seem that nothing causes injuries. They’re idiopathic—ailments without clear causes.
But at long last, we discover that they’re not idiopathic. The study found the real cause of running injuries: As Mars Blackmon (played by the film director Spike Lee) once said in a memorable Nike ad, “It’s gotta be the shoes!”
It’s the shoes! Of course! Minimally designed shoes with inadequate cushioning and little or no motion control result in more injuries than properly designed shoes!
No. But there is a direct, absolute, and proven correlation between running shoes and running injuries. It’s this: The more expensive the shoe, the more injuries the wearer suffers.
A rebel faction of runners suspected this for years. Running over two thousand miles a year, their bodies and brains gathered plenty of data and made them think that these more-engineered and expensive shoes were hazardous. For many of these rebels, their Aha! moment came in 1979.
That was the year the German-based juggernaut Adidas introduced the ultimate injury-prevention shoe, the startling Adidas TRX. Adidas offered this garish black and yellow hulk after years of testing. Adidas decided that if they could completely stabilize a runner’s heel, it would retard the foot’s inclination to rock inward. By reducing that motion—this entire class of shoes was called motion control shoes—the shoe would reduce the injuries caused by the movement.
Desperate for any shoe that would keep them off rest, ice, and aspirin, many American runners bought TRXs. Out on the roads on the days that followed, these well-protected men and women could be spotted for blocks. It wasn’t just the shoes’ Street Sign Alert black and yellow colors that caught the eyes of passersby; it was their massiveness. A runner in TRXs appeared to be running on twin waffle irons.
This strange sight, however, lasted only a few months on America’s roads. It happened because TRX buyers soon became patients; their knees ached like never before.
The failure of the TRX and the finding that the higher the price, the more hazardous the running shoe seems to lay waste to the common American wisdom “You get what you pay for.” It suggests the possible foolishness of that woman who cooed to us that she spent more on her L’Oréal hair color because she was worth it. It reminds us that our expensive DVD player is worth less to us because we have to spend so much time not really learning how to use it.
We take price tags as quality signals. A bit more is a bit better, a lot more is a lot better, and the only questions are “What can I afford” and “How important is this product to me?”
But is a lot more a lot better? Are running shoes a unique case? It’s unlikely, particularly because of another phenomenon at work in America today: With age comes wisdom.
You see this in the parking lot of outlet stores today. Years ago, the lots of these stores were filled with affordably priced, smaller cars. Today, drive into an Opitz Outlet: Three Mercedes, two Lexuses, a BMW, and a Land Rover leave fewer spaces for humbler cars.
If these spotless luxury cars catch our eyes first, the second thing that surprises us is the crowd. It’s 2:20 p.m. on a chilly Tuesday; it’s not a shopping hour on a shopping day in shopping weather. Plus Opitz’s frequent buyers know that Tuesday is the wrong day to shop because the next day, Wednesday, is new shipment day.
But it doesn’t matter. Americans are learning that if you head off on a treasure hunt, it’s treasure you will find: $167 rich brown leather Rockport boots, fit for a cool night on South Beach in Miami, for $48.
Those Beemers in that lot belong to the Boomers. Over their years, they’ve learned that everything they ever bought at Neiman Marcus or Macy’s was overpriced, at least temporarily. They’ve learned that patience, at least in shopping, is a virtue.
Their big first lesson came with calculators over twenty years ago. One day they cost $300 and could do only math. In what seemed like weeks, they could get a calculator just for opening a new bank account, and the device could calculate Fibonacci sequences. Seeing that, Boomers realized that had they just waited on that calculator back then, they would have saved almost every penny they spent.
This is where we are now. Welcome to the Age of the Great Recession, the Frugalistas, and the Beemers in the Opitz lots. Much like the fellow who submits to his first diet and afterward realizes that he doesn’t really need butter and whole milk, we are apt to bring the habits of the new frugality with us, but our love of the freedom that money brings and our passion for play suggests that we will consume again, just not quite as conspicuously. Conscious consumption seems more likely as we give a new twist to the old L’Oréal saw:
“I paid $119 dollars less for my boots. I’m worth it.”