Wear Test Completed

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve been ‘wear testing’ a pair of running shoes for a running shoe company. The shoes are lightweight trainers that have held up well. The wear testing protocol is pretty simple: when they have a new shoe they are planning to introduce, they send you a sample pair and you run in them as exclusively as possible for the duration of the wear test period. In my case, the wear test period has been 6 weeks. During this time, they ask you to fill out three surveys online: an initial survey, a 1-week survey, and a final survey after the 6 week period. Finally at the end you mail the shoes back to the shoe company (pre-addressed mailing label provided) so they can analyze the wear on the shoe. Maybe they’ll send me a t-shirt or something after all’s said and done?

In any case, the process of being part of this wear test has been interesting and has had its benefits.

Primarily, being part of this process has motivated me to get out there and run, run, run – to put as many miles as possible on the shoes to provide the best data and feedback for the running shoe company. When I started running in these shoes, I was just ramping up in my training, but I incremented extra miles in the vein of putting more wear on them.

Secondarily, shoes being a consumable product, the general rule of thumb is that you’re supposed to run anywhere between 300-500 miles on a pair of shoes, then stop running in them due to the compression, wear in traction and loss of cushioning of the material. So instead of wearing down my own shoes, I put in some ‘free miles’ on another pair. Except for two short 5k races, I ran all my miles for the past six weeks on these wear test shoes.

So, my weekly mileage on these shoes for the past six weeks of wear testing went as follows: 25, 18, 32, 20, 28, 37 for a total of 160 miles in six weeks, an average of 26.6 miles per week, a little over the distance of a marathon (26.2 mi) per week. These last two weeks were a bit quick a jump of mileage, perhaps too much – a general rule of thumb is to increase your week-to-week mileage by no more than 10%, so clearly I broke that rule by quite a bit – not shockingly, I’ve been feeling achy in my lower leg/shins so have to be careful to avoid overtraining (doing too much, too soon).

These last two weeks I’ve been running a lot in my Yak Trax traction, and so with all that said, I’m looking forward to getting back to running in my usual training shoes – Asics Gel Trabuco trail runners, which more naturally should provide extra traction on the snow and ice, guess I’ll find out quickly since the snow and ice aren’t going anywhere anytime soon…

Thanks for reading!