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by justinator 2897 days ago
I have to say, running is a little more than a hobby to me, (obsession perhaps?). So I understand how runners think about running, and the gear they purchase for running.

There's literally NO WAY I'd buy a pair of shoes I can run in for 100 miles for $250. I wouldn't be able to NOT think about every mile just costing me $2.50.

Call me frugal, but that's two pairs of any other shoe, and I can run in those for most of the summer.

A $250 pair of shoe is nothing but a luxury item for an extremely simple pastime. It's absolutely marketed to make you first feel inferior, then offer a solution. You always lose out when you fall for marketing.

Even with these shoes (provided these shoes do what they say they do), there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who can run faster than me, even if they all wear flip flops. I would be embarrassed to even consider purchasing shoes that promise to make me faster like these are marketed to do.

> This is the "Why go to that expensive restaurant?" argument all over again.

I mean, I guess so: "expensive" doesn't mean, "best". It just means, "expensive". The food may be good, or people pay because of the exclusivity the price creates. I'm not really about that sort of classicism. I like good tasting food too, but you know what I learned to do?

Cook.

To be a better a runner, I decided to run. Running taught me a lot about keeping things simple, and to get rid of the b.s.

1 comments

I think your justification for your opinion is sound, but I think the justification for the other side is sound as well. An elite runner may have only a handful of marathons in a year they really want to trim time off of, and another $250 on top of the many months (and dollars) that go into training for them seems reasonable. Perhaps the best argument for why this plan seems reasonable is that many ordinary people already seem to be doing it.
In software engineering terms, these shoes would be, "premature optimization"