Qualifying for marathons is a good reason to care. If these shoes could make the difference between me qualifying for Boston, and me not qualifying for Boston (or same for NYC, Tokyo, London, etc etc), $250 would be cheap if that's a big goal for me.
edit: really, $130 or so since my shoes _already_ cost $120
If you're enthusiastic about something, I think it's quite natural to want to do it to the best of your ability. It's also quite natural to covet shiny toys. You can't buy youth or good genes, but you can buy a little bit of speed, a little bit of prestige, a little bit of the aura that surrounds professional athletes.
People that run in shoes not fit for running or in wore down shoes put their health at risk as well as making it a hell of a lot harder for themselves.
Also there is a psychological factor if you feel that you are improving you might be more likely to keep running instead of giving up.
You don't have to be elite to want to run faster. Keep in mind there seems to be no good reason to exercise more than 30 min 3-4 times a week, but many runners choose to do a lot more than that.
For that matter, there's no good reason for most of the things people buy or time they spend on the hobbies and other leisure activities they pursue.
I can assure you, they will not need to focus their marketing efforts on convincing people to care about going faster. A great number of amateur runners already do. (Not all, different runners are motivated by different things.)
> “Any type of shoe used [in competition] must be reasonably available to all in the spirit of the universality of athletics.”
https://www.outsideonline.com/2325366/track-and-field-iaaf-s...
It seems to me that enthusiasts are the perfect market for it. People with serious hobbies are often fairly comfortably well off and also may have neither the time nor ambition to train harder. Poor people often can't afford to be enthusiasts. They are too busy scrambling to survive and too tired to do anything other than stare at the TV or something like that when they aren't desperately trying to make their life work.
Given that you can apparently make money playing video games by grinding for items other people value and selling them for real money to players who have more money than time, I don't see why you couldn't sell pricey shoes to running enthusiasts.
Other options are bad knees (unlikely, honestly. Not many people have knees that are so genuinely shot that they can't run, unless they're former paratroopers or are very years old)
Or, if you're carrying a lot of extra weight (backpack full of water? I don't know, people do whatever they do), that'll hurt.
Since you're talking about running in the woods, it's almost definitely not the sidewalk, but, some people need to build up their muscles and tendons by going from softer surfaces (not so soft like sand, but grass) to ashphalt, to concrete.
Instead, they're focusing on the athletic performance aspect, to the point that, near as I can tell, they're outright fanning the flames of controversy around the idea that these shoes are unfairly fast.
The study itself says:
> This was an observational study where people chose whether or not they wanted to run; therefore there is always the possibility that people stopped running because they had knee pain.
That's a pretty big flaw in their study.
> > This was an observational study where people chose whether or not they wanted to run; therefore there is always the possibility that people stopped running because they had knee pain.
> That's a pretty big flaw in their study.
How do you figure? These people are accounted for in the data. Regardless of why people stopped running, they have better outcomes than never-runners. E.g.:
> Any history of running was associated with less frequent knee pain (table 2) in the unadjusted and adjusted models compared to those who never ran.
All runners who run regularly will eventually develop knee or ankle pain. It's sort of normal for semi-serious distance runners to own a pair of crutches. I'm not saying all of them, but, if you need a pair of crutches, ask your friends who run and one of them will have a pair.
But, your knee can hurt for a while without it turning into joint problems.
> This was an observational study where people chose whether or not they wanted to run; therefore there is always the possibility that people stopped running because they had knee pain. As such, we cannot comment upon the influence of compulsory running on overall knee health.
so... forced running might cause osteoarthritis. But, if you feel like going for a run and it doesn't hurt, it's not going to cause joint problems.
> Our study findings add to the existing literature by including a large sample within which we were able to assess the influence of running in people who participated in running for shorter amounts of time and perhaps stopped running in a cohort that had high quality of assessments of symptoms and standardized radiographs. We found that runners in this group were not at a higher risk for symptomatic knee OA.
Overuse injuries got a bunch of people I knew. They'd use crutches to speed recovery up a bit, or to get around if it was bad enough.
There are exercises, stretches and techniques you can learn, as well as products you can buy that you aren't going to find at a Foot Locker.
Also, it's not uncommon for a runner to spend $50 per pair of shorts and $30 on a shirt, and you need about 5 of each if you train for a marathon because you're going to be running 5 days a week. Not to mention socks. Many if not most runners these days also have a GPS watch, and those usually go for $200 for a basic model.
And then of course, a lot of runners travel to other cities to run marathons. So you might spend $250 on airfare and another $250 on staying in a hotel the night before and after the race. Of course, the race itself charges a fee (lots of logistics to close 26.2 miles of road, time people, provide food, etc.), which is typically around $100 to $150.
So spending an extra $150 on a pair of shoes for the race isn't really going to radically alter the total budget.
Some amateur runners definitely spend $250 on shoes, either because they have so much money that $250 is basically the same as $70 to them or because they are very serious amateurs.
Suunto just released a $650 GPS watch.
Running has so few accessories - it should be a cheap sport to pursue but, a fool and their money...
While I can see a competitive athlete reaching for whatever legal means they can to try and buy themselves a victory or podium or some other high-profile result that buys them sponsorships, there's just no good reason why amateur runners should care — you don't magically become a fitter, better runner by posting faster numbers through fancier shoes. Selling people on to the idea that they _should_ care about this is, depending on perspective marketing at either its finest or at its worst.