Running with Moe February 13

Last week I took a pair of my boots down to the shoe repair shop for some new heels. It pays to keep the boots in good repair so they will last longer. The heels wear out on a regular basis. The outside corner of the heel where the foot hits the ground first wears the fastest. The soles of the boot not as much. 

Fortunately most of my boots are hand-stitched, so the sole is easier to be repaired. The shoe repair man told me that the soles of factory made boots were harder to fix — and more expensive to repair.

This reminded me of my running days and trying to repair a running shoe. You can’t take a rubber soled shoe to the repair shop and have it fixed. You would be saving money by buying a new pair of shoes. But, I was a frugal person and tried my best at keeping the shoes in good condition. 

The instructions in the box may tell you that the shoes are good for 1,000 miles, but runners know that most shoes are only good for 300 to 400 miles of wear. That means that for a runner averaging 60 miles per month, his shoes will wear out in five or six months. That has the runner buying two or three pairs of shoes every year, or every couple of months for a serious marathon runner.

With the average cost of shoes now around $125 a pair the cost of buying shoes adds up fast for a regular runner. 

Now add race entry fees, running apparel, and gas for driving to races out of town, and it’s easy to see how running can easily become an expensive hobby.

This is where runner ingenuity and creative attempts to repair shoes come into the picture. Some media sources have some information on the care of shoe, but much of it comes from experimentation and experience over the years.

One easy technique is to buy two or three pairs of shoes. This allows the shoe you wore for the run today to dry out and to let the inner sole of the shoe recover to the original shape. After being compressed with each strike of the foot the inner sole loses some of its ability to absorb shock. The shoe can look in good condition on the outside but the inner sole will break down. A store-bought inner sole can replace the original inner sole and you will be back on the road. If the runner has a second, or third, pair of shoes to run in, the wear and tear of the shoe will last several months longer. I didn’t buy three pairs of shoes at one shopping spree, but rather closer to that 300-mile mark. I took the new pair on longer runs and the worn pair on shorter recovery runs. When I had three pair, I used the new shoes for longer runs, the second pair for middle distance runs, and the most worn out shoe for short recovery runs. And to get more use out of my purchases when you bought that fourth pair to keep the cycle going, the last shoe became a comfortable shoe to mow the grass or wash the car.

As with the boots, the outside corner of my running shoe wore out the fastest. The stores had a tube of ‘Shoe Goo’ that you would put on the worn area and get a few more miles in. The ‘Shoe Goo’ was like a flexible rubber solution that hardened to a mass that was close to the outer hard rubber soles of the shoe. Runners knew that when the hard outer section of the shoe wore out the soft cushion rubber part of the shoe wore out very fast. This resulted in a misaligned foot placement that eventually led to a different gait and some sort of injury to the feet, knees, or hip area. The ‘Shoe Goo’ was a very temporary solution and had to be replaced almost every week.

On one run along a county, road I spotted a piece of a car or truck tire that was laying alongside the road. The tire must have blown out and shredded into several pieces. My thinking was that the rubber on a car tire was good for over several thousand miles. Why wouldn’t that car tire work on a running shoe? I picked up a piece small enough to carry with me the rest of my run. I took a sharp knife and cut a patch about the size of a nickel out of the tire. I glued it to the worn part on the outside edge of my heel and then smoothed it out with ‘Shoe Goo’ so it wouldn’t catch an edge. I let the patch dry for a day to make sure it would hold.

This makeshift repair worked much better, and much longer, than the ‘Shoe Goo’ alone. Eventually the tire patch wore out also. But, if each piece only needed to be the size of a nickel, I could get a large number of patches out of that tire. When the better parts of the car tire were gone before I started looking for replacements alongside the road again. I found it amazing that finding car tire pieces was fairly easy after a few runs.

The upper part of the shoe usually lasted longer than the sole. The problem area for me was that I needed a high toe box in the front of the shoe. A low toe box had my big toe wearing a hole in the top of the shoe. With the hole in the top of the shoe open, it was not long before your toenail started to catch on the tear. Repair was necessary. A stiff piece of cloth covering the hole and attached with ‘Shoe Goo’ worked very well.

Let’s face it, with running shoes being made of mere cloth fabric and soft rubber soles, they’re not shoes that are made to last. However, you can make temporary repairs and get a few more miles out of them before the inevitable occurs. Maintenance repair also makes good “health” sense, as worn shoes lead to wrong foot placement, an altered gait, and eventually an injury. A patch work is cheap, and helps keep money in your pocket.