The Right Sports Shoe – Is There One?

Sneakers dont come cheap these days. So it is essential to spend time finding the one that fits the best, and fulfils your specific need. Here are some crucial tips from an expert.

- Prashant Desai

There is something romantic about a sports shoe (sneakers) and childhood.

If you like it, you can’t afford it. If you can afford it, you don’t like it.

My childhood in a middle-class family was financially challenging. For us, recycling carried a different connotation: not that of a product that transformed its use from one to another but a product that changed ‘owners’ as one grew older: the elder brother’s shirt or shorts would become mine after a few years.

However, this arrangement would be different when it came to shoes or sneakers: they would need to be ‘imported’: from outside the family, from my friends to be worn to special occasions like a match, or even to family weddings in my case.

Somewhere, irony catches up with you in life. Three decades later, a boy who would need to borrow sneakers in his childhood, found himself in the business of sneakers.

Sneakers have been through many incarnations. After running half-marathons for six years, one has realised that sports shoes have undergone a revolution: from the Bata white canvas shoes we wore to school, to DNA AMP, DNA LOFT, Air, Gel and Boost. Functional convenience has yielded to technological sophistication.

The ‘technology’ bit was interesting. Even now – after years of shoe design evolution - one in two runners gets injured, most of these around the knee. Within my running group, one is hearing of knee injuries all the time. And herein lies the irony: even as running shoes are getting technically advanced, injuries are also rising – precisely what these shoes should have prevented.

The big question, therefore, is: ‘Is there a right sports shoe for you?’

Yes. There is.

Like every other product, the answer lies in who you are and what you wish to get out of the sports shoe.