Unfortunately my experiment with using Saucony shoes or at least the Saucony Jazz 13's was a failure. I should qualify that the Jazz 13's may be a good shoe but they were not right for me and I will explain why. Not sure if you can make out the wear and tear on the shoe photos in this post but to explain I think you can see that the uppers are as good as new and would last many more miles. However the heal wear was excessive and the black carbon sole has been worn away to show patches of yellow beneath. At this point I never run on using a pair of shoes as to do so will only lead to probable injury. There may be people who do and get away with it but not me.
Unbelievably I have only run a 108 miles in them! They were very comfortable and out of the box were immediately enjoyable to wear perhaps more so than most shoes that I have had which normally require 3-4 runs to get used to them. New shoes can often feel so springy and it just takes a few runs for you and shoe to become perfect partners. The Jazz 13's as I say felt like slippers and were a great fit.
As a runner I have high arches and under pronate as I run and the advice I have always had is that I need a neutral shoe.As I tend to land on the outside of my heel this is where I found shoes
wear out. I need shoes to have a hard carbon outer otherwise I can find
the wear is too great.I can end up chucking shoes out even the rest of
the shoe may be in good condition because the outer heel has become like
a cliff edge.What lead to the Jazz 13's not being right for me? Well I just don't know but with my long term injury I did put on weight so I would have been a harder on the shoes. I do tend to mix my running between road and trail. As you can see from the photos there is plenty of mud on these but I have never had a pair which gave up the ghost after just 108 miles! Clearly Jazz 13's were not ideal for trail running.
I always try to alternate shoes for each training run so I still have my Asics Gel Stratus 3's which currently have over 300 miles of usage and are still fine. In fact this set me to looking back on recent shoes and how many miles they have lasted as a basis for what brand I should buy next. My results are
Asic Gel Stratus 2's 412 miles
Asic GT 2130 449 miles
Mizuno Wave Rider 423 miles
Asic Gel 427 miles
Asic Gel GT 2110 516 miles
Reebok Premier Ultra 111 314 miles
Reebok Premier 214 miles
New Balance 1060 439 miles
New Balance 854's 241 miles
Saucony MC5's 356 miles
Brooks Addiction 405 miles
New Balance 855 406 miles
Saucony Trigon 258 miles
I started recording the shoe I wore and the miles run in them from around 2004 so what does the stats tell me ? It is fairly clear that the Saucony shoes just don't suit me as well as Asics. I have consistently got at least 400 miles out of Asics. New Balance , Brooks and Mizuno were also in the main likely to give me 400 miles of running. From this I am likely to look at one of these brands for my next shoe.
I would be interested to know how many miles do you get out of your shoes before they wear out ?
I ran a 40 minute mainly green paced heart rate monitor run this morning. This is a medium paced effort and I think doing the race on Sunday acted a little as a kick up the pants as I ran 4.6 miles for around 8.45 pace. Still no great shakes but heading in the right direction as most of my previous training runs in the last month have been at 9 min plus miles.
