The running shoe wall at any specialty store can feel overwhelming. Carbon plates, super foams, rocker geometries – the technology has exploded, and with it, the paradox of choice. Who better to navigate this complexity than someone who's both raced at the highest level and helps everyday runners make these decisions daily? Oska Inkster-Baynes brings a unique dual perspective to the conversation. The New Zealand distance runner has represented his country in the half marathon three times and scooped up multiple national titles. He’s won his hometown Christchurch marathon twice, its half three times and its 10K twice; he also won last year’s Auckland Marathon and has been a top-five finisher at Gold Coast. When he's not training or racing, you can find him at one of his two stores, Frontrunner Colombo in Christchurch or Frontrunner Richmond in Nelson. With his Frontrunner colleagues Tom Moulai and Anna Gibbs, he co-hosts the Run Spesh podcast. He estimates that in his career he’s run more than 136,000 kilometres, and he or his employees have helped around 100,000 customers find their perfect shoe. It's this combination of elite performance and retail experience that makes his insights particularly valuable.

HOW THE HELL AM I MEANT TO CHOOSE?

Our starting place for Oska was that there are so many shoes on the market. How are you supposed to pick one to help you get through race day? Specifically, a marathon.

His answer starts with training and is focused on the basics. He states that if you’re building towards a marathon you’re probably running five days a week, and you’ll need a rotation of at least two shoes, which may be a lot fewer than you’re used to hearing. One of those is your basic mileage shoe, which we’re not addressing in this article. The other is your race shoe, and again Oska’s thoughts on this are surprisingly simple.

He says the best advice he ever got for choosing a shoe is to ask if it will allow you to stand up for long enough and run the pace you think you’re capable of. In other words, is it going to be stable enough to support you for 42.2km at your goal marathon pace? “A marathon is a war of attrition. It's who dies the least, who can look good at 32K, 34K, 36K, 38K, and then hang the fuck on,” Oska says in his typically candid manner.

“What we don't want is a situation where the shoes maybe feel good for 21K – and I've made this mistake too, as a half marathon specialist – like, these feel amazing but then you get to 28K and you're like, ‘Fuck, I can't keep up with these anymore. My mechanics are changing. I'm breaking down.’”

Okay, so how do I avoid those pitfalls and find a shoe that allows me to “stand up” at my goal pace for 42km?

TOOLS AND LEVERS

“Every shoe is a solution to a problem or a tool for a job,” Oska says. “So, be really clear on what’s the question you're asking. It's saying, ‘Okay, I have this foot type. I strike the ground in this way. I like the feeling of this.’” He points to the RUN-CAT running shoe comfort assessment tool, developed by Sydney biomechanist Chris Bishop and his colleagues. “It’s a way of looking at footwear prescription or choice around five key things: heel cushioning, forefoot cushioning, forefoot flexibility, stability side to side, and balance front to back. “There's no right or wrong answer there. It's just a sliding scale. So it might be more heel cushioning or less heel cushioning. More forefoot cushioning or less forefoot cushioning. Stiffer front or less stiff front, more flexible forefoot.”

Working in harmony with the RUN–CAT framework, there are four main levers that shoe designers can pull, Oska says: chemistry, geometry, accessibility and aesthetics. “Chemistry is obviously blowing up: foams and additives and raw materials are through the wazoo at the moment. Geometry is about creating platforms for different foot types to keep them heading in a straight line for as long as possible. And then, obviously, aesthetics is what a shoe looks like. That's important. Finally, accessibility is making sure we don't price people out of good footwear.”

DESCRIPTION VERSUS PRESCRIPTION

Oska says he’s become much less prescriptive as he’s become more experienced as a shoe consultant. Nowadays, he says he seeks to guide a customer through a set of questions to help them find something that intuitively feels right. Initial comfort will often correlate with a successful training block and race day.

“I give you the tools to understand what you like the feeling of and ask you questions,” he explains. “Does it feel too high in the back? Do you feel vulnerable? That’s a good question. Does it feel uncontrollable? Does it feel like you're running down the outside of the shoe? Does it feel like you're collapsing medially? Does it feel like you can push out of the big toe or roll off the big toe? Do you get forefoot blisters in your current shoes? What does that mean? And other questions as well.”

Each answer is “a filter as we go down the line”, making it quite simple to figure out what a specific runner needs. That is, a particular runner (height and weight being just two factors) with a specific running style, who’s looking to run a particular distance and pace. “It looks complicated because every brand has a million shoes, but I swear to god only six shoes from each brand are worth looking at – and some brands only have two but they've got to fill a range out,” Oska says. “Once you go, ‘Okay, I like these things and here are the shoes that match those things,’ well there's probably only three options.”

CARBON PLATES AND SLOPPY SPONGES

For a guy who’s in the business of selling shoes, Oska has some no-bullshit takes on how brands are shaping our options.

Like, super shoes can be great but maybe not for the reason you think. In short, it’s the super foam not the carbon plate that’s doing most of the good work. Supercritical foams like PEBA, TPE and TPU are lighter and more responsive than cheaper EVA alternatives. But they’re like “sloppy sponges” that need “a stiff additive to the midsole to give them stability”. That’s where the plate comes in. “The carbon plate is scooped and is stiff in the middle. So it gives a little bit of torsional stiffness. It gives the foam some integrity,” Oska explains. On its own – and depending partly on the runner – it’s not doing all that much for propulsion or energy return.

“It might give you a little propulsion off the toe, but you have to be able to load that … And there's a risk to these products as well, right? We have seen an increase in, say, navicular stress fractures or hairline fractures if people are overusing them.”

HOW FAST DO I NEED TO BE?

A common question is if there’s a certain pace needed to justify running in a carbon plate. Oska is at pains to point out he’s not a “time-ist” elitist. “If someone's running five hours and they want to wear a carbon shoe then they should do that, so long as it doesn't hurt them. Sometimes people think we're attacking them for being not good enough, which is not true,” he says. “If you can get away with running in it and you want to, and it feels comfortable and it gets you to the finish line, run in whatever you want. You do you, babe.” That said, he does acknowledge that weight, speed and effort play roles in whether a runner will get the full benefits of a carbon-plated super shoe. “If I'm 60 kilos and I run at a 4:30/km pace, I'm not going to squash or load that plate enough running at that effort to feel a spring,” he explains. “I'm going to have to go faster to push down harder on it. If you get someone who's bigger than me or has more power than me, they might squash it before I do. So, it's hard to put a pace on it – it's more like an effort.”

WHAT OTHER OPTIONS DO I HAVE?

This is why Oska thinks the relatively recent development of “shoes with slabs of fun foam without plates” – he points to the adidas Adizero Evo SL and ASICS Megablast as examples – is an interesting trend, especially for slower runners. He’d like to see a comparison with the same runner completing a marathon in a super shoe and then again in one of these.

“I'd love to get a four-hour marathoner to run a race in March and then one in October. Run one race in, for example, an ASICS Metaspeed Edge Paris or Tokyo and then run the next race in a Megablast and see two things: one, is there any performance difference? And two, how sore are you afterwards, and when can you get back to training?”

“There's also absolutely nothing wrong,” Oska says, “with taking a side step and trying one of the trainer-racers with more flexible plates. Shoes like the Speed 5 from Saucony or the ASICS Sonicblast – the plastic plate will still give you a bit of zip and a bit of stability, but it requires less load than a carbon to spring and go forwards.”

BIG RUNNING IS PREYING ON YOUR DEFICIENCIES

You’ve already heard Oska say he believes most brands only have six shoes worth considering. Well, it gets worse. “These companies are preying on your deficiencies,” he says. “They're telling you that you're slow, but you should buy their shoes so you're fast, you know? Fuck, that's confusing.” Oska believes most non-elite runners would be best off finding a comfortable shoe that won’t injure them and then concentrating on the other areas where they might find gains: “Is the shoe going to make you faster? Probably not. Is sleeping eight hours? Is hitting your protein number? Is eating enough calories?

“Is it doing the things outside of running that make you happy? Is it seeing a mental skills coach? You know, spending time with your kids, or your wife or your husband. All of those things are way more important than the 2% improvement that shoe is promising you.”

BORING IS GOOD

Another way the brands are preying on our deficiencies, Oska believes, is by always pushing consumers towards their most-expensive flagship models, when most people might be better off with a mid-tier daily trainer. Not necessarily for race day, but the principle holds: is a brand’s “best” shoe the best shoe for you?

“Brand X are not taking out a $1 million billboard in Times Square to advertise their [very good mid-tier shoe], but they're going to take out a $1 million billboard to put the [premium carbon-plated super shoe] on it because it's their flagship product. So, you’ve got to be careful of that messaging. I do believe that there are more shoes that will hurt you than help you.” Oska lists the shoes Frontrunner sells the most of. He rattles off names including ASICS’ GT-2000 and Gel-Kayano, New Balance’s 880, Brooks’ Ghost and Glycerin lines, Saucony’s Tempus.

“And they're boring,” he says. He means that as a compliment.

BRING YOUR EXPERIENCE TO THE SHOP

Ultimately, the more information you can bring to a store the more they’ll be able to help you. It’s a good idea to look for a specialist like Frontrunner in Aotearoa, or the Running Company in Melbourne or Pace Athletic in Sydney. “There are great stores in New Zealand and Australia where you can go and communicate with someone who has probably run a marathon and knows what 38K feels like – because that's a pretty cruel place,” Oska says. “You've come in and you say, ‘I want to shoot for around three hours. I want a carbon shoe and here's some stuff I like the feeling of. Here's a particular shape that's annoying me.’ We’ll work out which of the shoe’s features are annoying you. Let's take them away … Here's a shoe that doesn't have any of the negative features of Shoe A, and it’s got a couple of the positive features you told me you liked about Shoe B – and then it has a couple of its own features.” If you have no access to a specialist running store, Oska rates the physical therapists who present the Doctors of running podcast. “They do a really good job of having four or five hosts, all of very different abilities, ages, weights, speeds and distances they run,” he says. “They’re great at communicating the features and benefits of shoes from a physiotherapy, podiatry point of view.”

DO THE DECISION

Once you have chosen a shoe, Oska says, commit to it. Being a Kiwi, he backs this with a quote he attributes to the All Blacks’ former coach Steven Hansen: “The All Blacks make a decision – the All Blacks do the decision.” In other words, once you’ve picked a shoe, “Give it a really good go, and don't worry about the other ones unless something happens where you can't get through a long run or a long tempo in the shoe you've chosen. “Don't switch around too much. Don't get confused. Don't worry about stack height, pitches and foam, or flaring on the midsole. Or plate positions and whether they’re forked or scooped. Because we only just understand what all those words mean.”

Amen.