We’ve been a long time away from our unfinished running-shoe-selection project, Common Running. We were reminded this morning of the importance of good shoe selection when we spotted this New York Times article on Hitoshi Mimura, the Asics craftsman who makes racing flats for many Olympic marathon medalists and medal contenders, including both gold medalists in Athens and both American Trials winners.
Mimura, for example, made shoes for the 2000 Sydney Olympics gold medalist, Naoko Takahashi, with soles of slightly different thicknesses to compensate for a leg-length discrepancy of 8mm–less than a centimeter, about a third of an inch, according to reporter Jere Longman.
Longman, a longtime follower of the sport and sometime marathoner himself, concludes the article with a vivid simile from Mimura himself on the importance of running shoes:
“Samurai cannot fight without their swords,” Mimura said. “It is the same for runners and their shoes.”