I had terrible shin splints for years. If I ran on pavement, a mile or two one time would put me in agonizing pain for a month. A sports medicine doctor shrugged her shoulders and told me I probably just wasn’t built for running and would never be able to. I had the best shoes – a pair of $150 ASICS at the peak of my futile interest – and then I read “Born to Run” by Christopher MacDougall. It’s a somewhat faddish book that we can probably pinpoint as the origin of the barefoot running craze, but it makes some great points. Notably, one of MacDougall’s theses is that shin splints and other running injuries are due to heavily padded and “well-designed” running shoes like ASICs. He reserves special condemnation for Nike as the original propagator of the myth that people need running shoes.
For my part, I threw out my ASICS and started running in thin, sole-less aqua socks. I don’t get shin splints any more, I can run for miles at a time several days a week, and I haven’t looked back. I’m convinced now that running shoes are a scam, but all other information in MacDougall’s book aside, there is a facet of common sense to this argument, and that’s this:
Heavily padded running shoes force you to land on your heel. When you do so, your weight and momentum cause thousands of pounds of force to come down on a bone that does not give at all – it’s the scaled-down equivalent of crashing your car into a concrete wall. MacDougall is fond of saying that running shoes “block pain, not impact” – that is, that we need to be able to listen to our bodies telling us when and how to run. In my experience, this has been true. I am almost 100% confident that if you throw out your fancy running shoes and buy a pair of Five Fingers or $10 aqua socks, that if you start slow and work your way up, you will never have problems with shin splints again.