edit: Good article on dangers of over-cushioning.
This is a little off topic, but don't put much faith in that article. I don't claim to be a running guru, but I did run cross country and track about 11 months a year for four years in high school and that article just seems like the author just sorta woke up one day and sat down at his desk and started typing.
His logic just doesn't always make sense. Here are some examples:
If all this high-tech stuff is supposed to be preventing running injuries by shielding us from impact, why is it that two out of every three runners are sidelined every year because of a running injury?
Believe it or not, there are plenty of accepted reasons for injury out there that can be caused by things other than shoes. For instance, many people do not know how to slowly build up their mileage. If you say to yourself "Wow, I have a race in a month and haven't been training so I better start doing lots of mileage to make up for it," you WILL most likely get injured. If you have piss poor running form and put too much stress on your joints, you WILL most likely get injured. No shoe (or lack there of) is going to make up for poor form and foolish running goals.
Why is it that since the great jogging boom of the mid-seventies, there has been no decrease in the incidence (some authors say there has been an increase) of running injures in spite of yearly 'improvements' in running-shoe technology?
Instead of blaming shoes again, might it be because the percentage of runners who now run competitively (and thus more seriously) has also gone up?
In 1989, Dr. B. Marti published a paper which still makes the throats of footwear executives go dry. He studied 5,038 runners who participated in a 16km race and had them fill out an extensive questionnaire about their running in the year preceding the race. Here's what he found: The incidence of injuries in runners using shoes costing more than $95 was more that twice as great as in runners using shoes costing less than $40. (Note that this result includes correction for other influencing factors such as training mileage and history of previous injury.)
At the end he says that the Doctor included correction for "other influencing factors" but we do not know how exactly he did this. That study has little to no value until you can find out how he made the corrections because it makes complete sense that the people who spent more money on shoes would have more injuries than those who spent less. Serious runners are more likely to be spending more money shoes, and thusly also more likely to incur serious running injuries. It doesn't matter what shoes your wear (or don't wear), the repetition of foot on pavement is going to cause wear and tear.
In summary, almost all this guy does is state correlations. Unfortunately for him, correlations prove absolutely nothing. In a correlation you can't tell if A is acting on B, B is acting on A, or if there is another variable that is unaccounted for. The author of this article seems to just ignore this fact. Now that said, I think there might be something to what he's getting at, I just think that he's blowing it way out of proportion.
(Sorry for the rant, but I've read seen this article elsewhere and think its stupid lol.)
