New shoes – Asics Gel GT-2130 (no need for my orthotics!?)

I feel I’ve been making good progress with moving from a heal strike to midfoot strike recently, and my impulsive nature took control of me yesterday as I decided to go to a local Sweatshop to take a look at the Saucony Fastwitch 3 performance shoes. However, the purchase didn’t really end up as I thought it would…

I’ve never been to a Sweatshop before and I have to say as soon as I entered the shop I was impressed. The shop was well stocked and laid out very well, with clearly marked sections for performance, neutral and stability shoes.

They had the Saucony in stock but unfortunately not in my size. I’m normally a 9 and a half to 10 (UK size) but they only had a size 8 and a half. I still tried them on, and although my toes were pushing through the ends they felt outstanding. Before the assistant ordered the correct size from another store I asked if I could go on the treadmill just to see what they were like. This was a very wise decision, as when viewing the run back on the video analysis software it was clear that I was overpronating so much there would be no possible way that I could actually run in the shoes – even if I did have the right size! It didn’t help though that I couldn’t fit my orthotics in to the Saucony’s.

After explaining to the assistant that I wanted a shoe that helped my move on to my forefoot he recommended a few different models of Asics. Now, my first pair of running shoes last year were a neutral Asics, and I really liked them (although these were the shoes I was using when I had my stress fracture).

The next 30 minutes consisted of a lot of running on the treadmill, taking shoes on and off, swapping orthotics from shoe to shoe, and analysing my gait on the video. It soon became clear that my orthotics were not making a blind bit of difference to my gait – the assistance even videod me with my current New Balance shoes and orthotics.

It was soon a choice between a neutral shoe with my orthotics and a stability shoe without the orthotics. With the help of the video I ended up going for the stability Asics Gel GT-2130, and the assistant advised to remove the orthotics to see how I get on. Everything he said seemed to make sense… running with the orthotics would wear them out very quickly, I should still wear them in everyday shoes, I could always go back to using them in the Asics. To be honest when wearing the Asics Gel GT-2130 it almost felt like I had orthotics in them.

So, I went to the shop hoping to buy some stripped down performance shoes to wear with my orthotics, and ended up buying some virtual bricks in comparison, to wear wit no orthotics. It just goes to show how good advice counts when buying shoes. I can’t praise the assistant at Sweatshop enough. He didn’t try to force me down a route, he just laid out the facts and gave good, credible advice.

I’ll see how I get on with them on a run tomorrow.