That's what I would do. You'd have a slight boost on top of the usual race day boost and $250 to get ~4 marathons/8 half marathons isn't bad. I mean that would probably be 4+ years for a lot of non-serious runners.
I would save your money.
4% of 3 hours is more than 7 minutes! That could be equivalent to tens of hours on the road. $250 is a _great_ investment at that rate.
This is the "Why go to that expensive restaurant?" argument all over again. When it's your hobby, and it's important to you, the thought process behind the purchase is very different.
There's literally NO WAY I'd buy a pair of shoes I can run in for 100 miles for $250. I wouldn't be able to NOT think about every mile just costing me $2.50.
Call me frugal, but that's two pairs of any other shoe, and I can run in those for most of the summer.
A $250 pair of shoe is nothing but a luxury item for an extremely simple pastime. It's absolutely marketed to make you first feel inferior, then offer a solution. You always lose out when you fall for marketing.
Even with these shoes (provided these shoes do what they say they do), there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who can run faster than me, even if they all wear flip flops. I would be embarrassed to even consider purchasing shoes that promise to make me faster like these are marketed to do.
> This is the "Why go to that expensive restaurant?" argument all over again.
I mean, I guess so: "expensive" doesn't mean, "best". It just means, "expensive". The food may be good, or people pay because of the exclusivity the price creates. I'm not really about that sort of classicism. I like good tasting food too, but you know what I learned to do?
Cook.
To be a better a runner, I decided to run. Running taught me a lot about keeping things simple, and to get rid of the b.s.
Explain to me how, in a gym setting there are, "better" shoes that "take away a false limit due to inappropriate technology" What does that mean?
Honestly, I thought the best shoes to use in the gym were just a pair of All Stars. I would use the weight room barefoot, but they yell at me too much.
Are you talking about Oly Shoes? 'cause those just counteract a mobility problem. Kinda better to solve that mobility problem. But thinking that's cutting edge technology is garbage. It's just a raised heal.
> Unlike most running shoes, they have a carbon-fiber plate in the midsole, which stores and releases energy with each stride and is meant to act as a kind of slingshot, or catapult, to propel runners forward.
That's like literally every single midsole "technology" companies like Nike try to market their shoes with.
Your foot already has one of those catapult like things - it's called the Achilles. Just let it do it's job.
https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a20810504/how-much-energy-...
You'd have better return on investment by just going to yourself, "Hey for every 10 miles you run this week, you get a beer!" and using that as a reward for actually following your training plan.
I mean try it out: $250 buys a good few slabs of beer!
And if it doesn't work - well, the beer was delicious.
Throwing technology as something as simple as running shouldn't be the first idea to get better. It should literally be the last. If you're marathon pace is some-a-wheres near 2:25 - then let's talk.
At that pace, good chance someone is buying your shoes for you.