Running Shoes: A Century of Myths and Science

In the 1920s a running shoe was a sliver of leather and a row of hand-forged spikes. The cushioned, elevated-heel trainer most of us picture today is barely fifty years old, arriving with the 1970s jogging boom. In the century between, the industry has cycled through air pockets, gel, motion control, barefoot minimalism, and now carbon plates—each sold as the answer to injury or speed.

There is one uncomfortable thread running through all of it.

This article traces how the shoe got here, separates the claims that survive scrutiny from the ones that do not, and then turns to what the evidence actually supports: how to choose shoes for training and racing, and how to build feet strong enough that the shoe matters less.

A hundred years of running shoes

The Dassler brothers and the age of spikes (1920s–1940s)

The modern athletic-shoe industry traces back to one German workshop. Adolf "Adi" Dassler began making sports shoes in the small Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach in the early 1920s, and in 1924 he and his brother Rudolf formally founded the Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, producing thin leather shoes with hand-forged spikes for track and field. Their reputation went global when American sprinter Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Dassler spikes. A bitter falling-out then split the firm in 1948–1949 into two companies sitting on opposite banks of the town's Aurach river: Adolf's Adidas and Rudolf's Puma. Throughout this era a running shoe was essentially a protective layer with traction—minimal cushioning and no elevated heel.

Bowerman, Nike and the cushioning revolution (1960s–1970s)

The shoe most people now picture—soft foam underfoot, a heel raised above the toes—is, as Lieberman and colleagues note in their 2010 Nature study, a product of the 1970s. Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon track coach whose 1967 book Jogging sold over a million copies and helped ignite America's jogging boom, famously experimented with pouring urethane into a household waffle iron around 1971 to make a light, grippy outsole. That "waffle" sole became a signature of the young Nike brand he co-founded. Cushioned EVA-foam midsoles, and later air- and gel-based systems, turned the running shoe into a comfort product—and made the heel-first landing the default for most runners.

The pronation era (1980s–1990s)

As running boomed, an injury-prevention theory took hold: that excessive inward roll of the foot ("overpronation") caused injury and could be engineered out. Shoes were sorted into cushioned, stability and motion-control classes, to be matched to a runner's arch via the in-store "wet test." That framework still dominates shoe-shop fittings today—even though the impact-force and pronation assumptions behind it were later directly challenged by Nigg.

The barefoot backlash (2000s–2010s)

A counter-movement argued the cushioned shoe was itself the problem. The 2009 book Born to Run and Lieberman et al.'s 2010 study popularized barefoot and minimalist running, and Vibram's glove-like FiveFingers became its emblem. The boom cooled after a wave of transition injuries and a class action filed in 2012 — settled in 2014 for $3.75 million — in which Vibram resolved claims that it had made unsupported health assertions about the shoes.

The super-shoe era (2017–present)

In 2017 Nike's Vaporfly paired a curved carbon-fibre plate with a thick slab of resilient PEBA foam, and elite racing changed almost overnight. Stack heights climbed so quickly that World Athletics capped road-racing soles at 40 mm in 2020. The full story is below, because this is the rare case where the technology clearly works.

The myths that don't survive contact with the evidence

Most shoe advice you have heard descends from ideas formed in the 1980s and 1990s—the pronation paradigm and the impact-force paradigm. Both have aged poorly under controlled testing.

The "wet test" does not predict your shoe

The idea that a high arch needs cushioning and a flat arch needs motion control underpins most in-store fittings. It does not hold up. Across three large randomized trials in military basic training, totalling roughly 7,200 recruits, assigning shoes by arch height had no meaningful influence on injury rates. The 2022 Cochrane review rates this the single strongest comparison in the whole footwear literature — rate ratio 1.03 (95% CI 0.94–1.13), moderate-certainty evidence, the only comparison in the review to clear "low" or "very low."

Two honest caveats. Those three trials are the same three studies Cochrane pooled, so this is one body of evidence, not two. And all three ran in military populations, which limits how confidently it transfers to recreational runners. It is still, by some distance, the best-evidenced claim in this article — and it points the opposite way from what the fitting stool implies.

More foam is not automatically more protection

Cushioning feels protective, and intuitively it should blunt impact. Yet runners often land more stiffly on softer surfaces, partly offsetting the material's effect, and the long-run injury data have stayed flat through every cushioning advance.

The nuance: this does not mean firmer is better. In a trial of 848 runners randomized to soft versus hard midsoles, the harder midsole carried a significantly higher injury risk (subhazard ratio 1.52, 95% CI 1.07–2.16) — but the effect was concentrated in lighter runners (SHR 1.80), while heavier runners showed no significant difference at all (SHR 1.23, 95% CI 0.75–2.03). That's the reverse of the standard shop advice that bigger runners need more foam.

Hold even that loosely. When the 2022 Cochrane review pooled soft against hard midsoles across two studies and 1,095 participants, the difference vanished (RR 0.82, 95% CI 0.61–1.10, low-certainty evidence). The lesson is not "maximize cushioning" but "cushioning is not a simple injury dial," and the right amount is individual.

Minimalist running is not a shortcut, and it is not a fraud

The 2009 book Born to Run and Lieberman et al.'s 2010 Nature paper launched a barefoot boom. That research showed something real: habitually barefoot runners tend to land on the forefoot or midfoot and avoid the sharp impact spike that most shod heel-strikers produce. But it studied biomechanics, not injuries—it never demonstrated that barefoot running prevents them, a claim it is still wrongly cited for.

What is well documented is the danger of switching too fast. Of 36 experienced runners, 10 of the 19 who transitioned into minimalist shoes over ten weeks developed increased foot bone-marrow edema — a stress-injury precursor — significantly more than the 17 who stayed in traditional shoes. Minimalism is a training tool, not a cure.

How to choose shoes for training and racing

If prescription by foot type fails, what should guide the choice? The most defensible principle in the literature is comfort: runners gravitate toward footwear that keeps them in their habitual "preferred movement path," and subjective comfort tracks with lower injury risk better than any fitting category.

Training shoes and racing shoes answer different questions, and conflating them is a common error.

Adjusting for who you are

Group-specific advice should stay modest, because the evidence rarely supports strong prescriptions. The points below are the few that hold up.

A word on carbon "super shoes"

These are the rare case where the technology clearly delivers, and the effect is unusually consistent. Testing 18 high-calibre male runners against two established marathon racers, the Nike prototype cut the energetic cost of running by about 4% on average — and every single one of the 18 was faster in it, at all three test speeds. Elite road times then stepped downward from 2017 as the shoes spread, with every subsequent marathon world record set in plated footwear.

How to build stronger feet

The deeper fix is not a better shoe but a more capable foot. Habitual footwear is associated with weaker intrinsic foot muscles and reduced arch stiffness, and growing up shod is linked to measurable changes in arch development. The encouraging part is that this is trainable. The intrinsic muscles function like a core for the foot, and they respond to targeted work.

A sensible, evidence-aligned progression:

1. Learn the short-foot exercise. Without curling the toes, draw the ball of the foot toward the heel to raise the arch. Hold, release, repeat. This is the foundational isolation drill for the foot core.
2. Add toe control. Practise lifting the big toe while keeping the others down, then reverse it. Crude at first, this rebuilds the toe-by-toe control that cushioned shoes let atrophy.
3. Spend time in minimalist footwear—walking first. In a randomized trial of 57 runners over 8 weeks, simply walking in minimalist shoes increased foot-muscle size and strength as effectively as a dedicated foot-strengthening program — both beat the control group. Begin with daily wear and short walks before any running.
4. Progress to loaded and dynamic work. Calf raises, single-leg balance, and barefoot strides on safe surfaces, added in small increments.
5. Let strength, not the calendar, set the pace. Bone and connective tissue adapt more slowly than muscle. If a foot aches between sessions, you are progressing too fast.

The bottom line

Choose shoes by comfort, not by arch charts or pronation labels. Don't expect any shoe to prevent injury—manage your training load instead. Use carbon shoes for racing if they suit you, and invest in foot strength so the shoe matters less. A century of technology has changed the marketing far more than it has changed the outcomes.

References

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