Neutral or stability shoes? Hack into your running!

Two month ago, I sprained my ankle. Now that my ankle recovered, I feel comfortable running again. My shoes had about 200 miles on them already so I decided to buy a new pair. I went to Texas Running Company and I discovered a very geeky equipment there, and I could not resist to share it on this blog.

I am not an expert in running shoes business but from what I understand there are two types: neutral or stability. Depending on how you run, you will need one or the other. But how do you know which one is good for you? You could ask somebody to run behind you and look, or you can go the techie way. And of course, this is the way I like the best. :)

In the store, they had a camera positioned right behind a treadmill. We recorded 2 short runs (about 30 seconds for each run) and analyzed them. I was honestly very surprised by the results.

The two pictures below shows the two shoe types. On the left, I was trying neutral shoes; on the right it is stability shoes.

As you can see, my right ankle bends inward when my feet is landing with the neutral shoes. The technical term for it is actually overpronation.

Here is the video of the 2 runs.

Since this is a tech blog, I would like to share how I merge the 2 videos I got from the store. I used Avisynth and VirtualDub with the following script.

clip1=AVISource("run1.avi").AssumeFPS(5, false)
clip2=AVISource("run2.avi").AssumeFPS(5, false)
StackHorizontal(clip1,clip2)