Running shoes

How long should you run before you retire your running shoes? A Google search for this returns numbers between 200 miles and 500 miles. Some people are running up to 800 miles on the same shoes. In kilometres that's approximately 400 Km to 800 Km. 800 miles is almost 1300 Km.

These shoes just finished 650 Km. They're done!

The shoe on the left was beginning to tear near the top. They still felt comfortable, bouncy, and I'm sure they could have done an additional 100 Km, but their time is up!

I read an article somewhere about this, the author said that the distance would also depend on the runner. The heavier you are, then the shorter the life of the shoe. In addition to that, there was a post I saw where the writer advises on buying two pairs of shoes. Using one of them more frequently and when it starts to feel off then you can replace it. In the buy more than one shoe category there's this notion that the shoe takes time to recover. The moulded cushioning provided by the shoe compresses after a workout. This needs between 24 to 48 hours to recover -- according to this source. Sounds logical, but I've worn the same shoe every morning for 650 Km without much of a problem. I used to have two shoes and alternate them and I might do that in the winter. The main problem in the winter is wet shoes and drying out definitely takes longer than a day.

Those shoes were replaced with these ones:

Same model, different colour. The last one had that green trim thing happening, this one's blue. Blue's definitely my colour though I was hoping to get yellow or red this time around. After all, I'm now comfortable running in red and orange tops.

So for me, I'll switch shoes close to the 600 Km mark. 700 Km is the outer limit but I should start looking for shoes once I reach about 550 Km. With my weekly 134 Km dosage it doesn't take long to go through running shoes.