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With world records falling right and left and many voices saying it’s got to be the shoes, it’s no surprise that super shoes are appearing in high school races, particularly among students seeking to catch the attention of college recruiters. Even middle school runners are looking for shoe magic to help them achieve fast times. But is young runners in super shoes a good idea?
Creating Inequality
To call the issue controversial is a vast understatement. One expert adamantly opposed to super shoes and youth runners is Jay Dicharry, a physical therapist in Bend, Oregon, and author of Running Rewired. “Super shoes should be BANNED from middle and high school competition at ALL levels,” he wrote in an email. The reasons, he later explained in a Zoom meeting, are twofold. First is equity.
“People always say running is supposed to be a sport anybody can do,” he said. “[It’s] supposed to be about developing a love for sport, a lifelong skill, and improving your body. If we start making this about just winning, the person who can spend $400 on a pair of shoes gets an advantage.”
Steve Sexton, head cross-country and track coach at Parkrose High School in Portland, Oregon, agrees that the high-price-tag racing shoes create an uneven playing field. “Most kids at our school can’t afford super shoes,” he says. In fact, many of his runners come from lower-income neighborhoods and rely on used shoes donated by running clubs and college teams.
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Young Runners and Super Shoes: Arresting Development
Dicharry’s second concern is about how young runners in super shoes can affect the development of the foot and ankle. The problem, he says, is that the shoe does a lot of the work that should be going into developing strong, stable feet.
His own daughter is a high school runner and he doesn’t let her wear bouncy, plated racing shoes. “She has won several races, but that’s not what really matters. I care that she’s still doing what she wants, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, or fifty years in the future,” he says.
Two-time Olympian Kara Goucher agrees. There is no way she is going to let her middle-school-age son run in super shoes, no matter how much he wants them, she said on her podcast Nobody Asked Us with co-host Des Linden (Episode 6, February 28). “I’m like, ‘You’re too young,’” she said. “‘This short circuits what your leg needs to do.’”
Eugene, Oregon, coach Bob Williams, who has spent decades working with a mix of adult elites and high school runners, takes it one step further. “Shoe companies should have a disclaimer on the shoebox telling parents the company does not know how the shoes might affect young runners,” Williams says.
Finding Balance
Others are a bit more lenient. “For training, it’s probably not best for developing runners [or] young athletes,” says Dathan Ritzenhein, head coach of On Athletics Club in Boulder, Colorado, “but there is no denying the effects on race-day performance.”
His solution? Have a good training shoe rotation and smart (meaning limited and goal-focused) use of the super shoes in training and racing. “Balancing performance with development is always one of the hardest things for athletes and coaches,” he says.
Goucher’s podcast co-host Des Linden agrees. “What you said is exactly true,” she told Goucher, “[but] maybe there’s an element of bringing them in occasionally. If it keeps a kid in the sport, and they’re like ‘I don’t want to do this if I don’t have cool stuff,’ alright, fine, whatever.”
Masking Fatigue
Scott Christensen, who for years coached one of Minnesota’s best high school teams while also serving as a high-level USA Track and Field instructor, also seeks a middle ground. He agrees that there are drawbacks to letting younger runners use them. Of particular concern, he says, is that younger runners have less experience in assessing fatigue after hard workouts.
Historically, he says, the main indicator of fatigue was muscle soreness, but with super shoes, that may be reduced, even though other types of fatigue and potential overtraining may still be occurring. That’s a problem for younger runners who do not yet have the “training IQ” to interpret the more subtle signs of what their bodies are telling them. “With super shoes you are not getting clear messages as to how you truly feel,” he says.
“Everything we do has a cost/benefit ratio,” Christensen adds. “This includes the use of super shoes with high school runners. It has been my position to encourage their use for my more serious and faster runners while not making a big thing about them to my novice and emerging runners.”
As Christensen hints, the runner’s age does make a difference. There is definitely a difference between putting a high school senior in super shoes and giving them to a freshman or middle school runner.
Changing the Rules
There is, of course, another option, the one originally proposed by Dicharry: create a hard-and-fast answer by banning them from high school and middle school competition. “I raced road bikes as a kid,” Dicharry says. “We had gear restrictions because there was a concern [about] having too big a gear when you’re younger and developing your joints.” There are also special rules for safety gear for youth football, he says. “This is not new.”
But given their ubiquitous use at other levels of the sport, banning the shoes for young runners seems unlikely. For the foreseeable future, it will remain up to coaches and parents, trying to find the tradeoff between “win now” and “triumph later.” Which means that for top students, trying to get into top colleges, judicious use of super shoes will become increasingly necessary. And which also means that college recruiters are going to have to think long and hard about what to do for those who can’t afford them.