Confused about Shoes

One of the things that can divide my wife and me is shoes.

This is not the cliché where the woman has an obsession with new shoes and a couple of cupboards filled with all the styles and colours needed to match any type of outfit. No its me with the problem. The area under our stairs is cluttered with too many pairs of trainers and the mess is a cause of distress.

There are two pairs of off-road shoes (one for trail, one for mud), a pair of lightweights, two road pairs and a couple of pairs that are past their running date but can be used for messing about. Some runners have far more shoes, others have fewer. My attitude is however fairly male in that I see them as tools. I like the idea of tools for specific jobs and I get a sensory pleasure from the feel of something well balanced, that does a job easily and efficiently - like a good kitchen knife.

The problem is I am yet to find a pair of running shoes that give me that pleasure - none of them are perfect. They are good in some areas and not so good in others. Some are perfect for one foot but hurt the other, some feel a bit clumpy, others are not flexible enough, whilst others rub the foot in all the wrong places. All my trainers are OK but I am still searching for a pair I can love. Like some deluded romantic I am longing for something that just right. I know this is illogical but that is how it is.

My wife also knows it is illogical but doesn't see that as an excuse.

I was thinking about this when I was reading 'The paradox of Choice'about why what should make us happier (almost infinite choice) causes anxiety and dissatisfaction. One of the chapters talks about the difference between maximisers and satisficers, between those who always think there is something better and that one has to find the best, and those who are happy when they find something that is good enough and they can make a clean decision. The first group are much more unhappy, living in a perpetual state of anxiety or regret about the choices they make. It can be a form of paralysis, even over the most trivial of things. Have you ever stopped, staring at the supermarket shelves puzzling over which of the 100 shampoos you should buy, whilst also knowing that it did not make a great deal of difference?

The thing is that you are not necessarily one or the other. You can be a maximiser about some things but a satisficer about others. I am a tremendous mixture and usually for the bigger things I am quite clear, for example I almost chose my bike because I like
Max Wall and have been very happy with it. However for running shoes I am a maximiser and that doesn't really do me a great deal of good.

90% Half Mental

Here is something to get librarians very excited as it shows the power of classification. If you classify cleaning as exercise, instead of drudgery, then it not only has an effect on the mind it also has physical implications and can cause o weight loss.

This is rather startling as I have always been a believer in the rather austere school of weight management, i.e. it is purely a matter of calories consumed against calories expended, with an underlying assumption that there is a fairly standard tariff for energy burning i.e. if you did a certain activity you would expend set amount of calories. But this does not seem to be totally the case.

Perhaps I should not been surprised because the power of the placebo effect is well known. This is a variation without pills or pseudo interventions where you do yourself good by thinking that you are doing yourself good.

I think it is important that it is not a conscious cause and effect but rather it is the subconscious effect of real belief that you are doing exercise. If you directly tried to think yourself thin I don't think it would work because there would always be a part of your brain that knew it was a bit artificial - and this would ruin the effect. However if you can see what you do in a new light everything changes

It is the same with running. I don't think I can just tell myself I am a better at running and then expect to see an improvement. However I do believe that if I followed a coach or training schedule I had faith in, then that placebo variant would kick-in. There would be the physiological effect of doing the exercise but it would be amplified by the belief I was doing the right thing.

I almost believe that any method works - as long as it provides a structure and an explanation so that there is also a rational explanation for what is happening. Almost from the beginning of time there have been arguments about training regimes, especially between those who believe in lots of mile and those who emphasise speed and intensity. There has never been any resolution because different approaches have been successful for different athletes. It will probably always be so because the most important thing is that the athlete believes that their training regime is right for them. In other words, if the mind is right the body will follow.


I always liked the famous Yogi Berra quote that "baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical". My variant for running is that it is 90% half mental.