Sorbothane Insoles - do shoe designers consider their use?
Well, this is a tale to two soles...
The first is thin and flimsy and is delivered with a pair of shoes when you buy them. The second is thick and luxurious, costs you a shedload of money and promises a "smooth ride". I bought a pair to address my concerns about being a "heavy runner" training for a marathon. For me, these insoles fit into the "good in principle, not so good in practice".
You may have read my previous entry, which heavily criticised the build quality of a pair of Brooks Adrenaline GTS 6 shoes. In hindsight and following the fact that my latest pair of shoes, a pair of Saucony Omni 5s, have met a similar fate, I think it may not be wholly be the shoes fault, but also that of the Sorbothane insoles that I bought afterwards. I am not backing down from my previous statements that shoes are being designed to fall apart more quickly. I think this is a general trend of our consumption driven society (e.g. why do electronics always generally break down a couple of weeks after the warranty runs out?)
Sorbothane insoles are marketed as a great way to improve the cushioning of a pair of shoes. Now here is where things go a bit astray. Unless shoe manufacturers design shoes with these retrofittable insoles in mind, one could run into problems. I did.
Now the reason this happened is simple. Feet are meant to be cushioned by padding below the base of the "foot compartment". Hence this is why I believe that insoles are quite thin. However, the thin insolve also ensures that foot movement within the foot compartment is kept to a minimum. This reduces wear and tear of the material used inside the shoe.
Now when you introduce padding above the base of the foot compartment, this does give the shoe more cushioning overall. However, this introduces foot movement within the foot comparment. In my case, the resulted in the heel area of two pairs of shoes wearing out after 200km rather than the customary 400-500.
I wouldn't have thought this possible, but the motivation of losing £170 of shoes and having to walk 20 minutes in agony walking as a result of the shoes digging into my heals enabled me to develop and test this hypothesis.
Word of advice... get shoes that work out of the box. I am going to email Sorbathane with my story and see what they say. I'll let you know their response.