When should you replace your running shoes?

This comes up in clinic most weeks, usually from somebody who has started to get pain and is hoping a new pair will solve it. The honest answer is that shoes matter, but not as much as the running shop would like, and far less than how quickly you increased your mileage.

Is there a mileage limit?

The figure most often quoted is somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred kilometres, which is a wide enough range to tell you that nobody really knows. It depends on your weight, your running pattern, the surfaces you run on and how the shoe was built in the first place. A light runner on grass will get far more out of a pair than a heavier runner on pavements.

Rather than counting, look at the shoe. The midsole is the part that matters, and it is the part people ignore in favour of the tread. Press your thumb into it. If it feels firm and dead rather than springy, it has lost what you paid for. Stand the pair on a table at eye level and look from behind. If the heels lean noticeably inwards or outwards, the midsole has collapsed unevenly and the shoe is now steering your foot.

Creasing across the forefoot, a worn through heel counter, and the sense that a run leaves your legs more tired than it used to are all reasonable signs. If your shoes are old, compressed and visibly worn on one side, they are contributing to whatever is hurting.

Does the type of shoe matter?

Less than the marketing implies. The research on matching shoe types to foot types has been disappointing for years, and there is no strong evidence that choosing a shoe by the shape of your arch prevents injury.

What does seem to matter is comfort. Runners who choose the shoe that feels best to run in tend to do better than those who choose by category. That is a more useful test than any in-store video of you jogging for twenty seconds.

The other thing that matters is change. Switching abruptly to a very different shoe, particularly one with a much lower heel or much less cushioning, moves load from one structure to another. The calf and Achilles take more in a low heeled shoe, and the front of the foot takes more in a minimal one. If you want to change, change gradually, over several weeks, keeping the old pair for longer runs in the meantime.

The more likely explanation

If you have developed pain during a training block, the shoes are rarely the cause on their own. Load is. An increase in miles, a new hill route, a switch to faster sessions, or simply more running than the tissue has had time to adapt to, will produce pain in a perfectly good pair of shoes. Our article on training for a spring marathon goes through how that happens and what to change.

Persistent heel pain in particular tends to be blamed on footwear when it is usually about load and calf flexibility, though the shoe is genuinely part of the management.

When to get assessed rather than shopping

If the same problem keeps returning in every new pair, the shoe is not the variable. If pain has lasted more than a couple of weeks despite reducing your running, or if you are wearing one side of every pair out dramatically faster than the other, there is something happening in how you load the foot that is worth looking at properly.

A biomechanical assessment examines how your foot behaves against the ground, and a running assessment adds watching you run rather than walk, which is where most of the useful detail is. Where a genuine biomechanical factor is driving the injury, custom orthotics can change the forces going through the foot, and we make bespoke insoles on site in Haslemere.

Our podiatry team will also tell you plainly when new shoes are all you need, which saves everybody time.