Buying A Vest From Someone With A Vested Interest

I've been thinking a lot lately about the hidden, and not so hidden, agendas of organizations that people, consumers like myself, think are looking out for them. I think that it's fairly safe to say that no corporation has your best interest in mind. Unless, possibly, you are a shareholder in said corporation. The government may or may not have your best interest in mind, that one is a little circuitous and depends mainly on whether you get your news from the New York Times or Fox News. But if you think about it, most of the "authorities" that we rely on for guidance are either governmental or corporate. I think that it's also safe to say that you should take any advice given by someone trying to sell you something with a grain of salt. And that goes for magazines or any other media really because they are beholden to their advertisers; mainly large corporations. Don't worry though, News From Out There is completely privately capitalized and accepts no advertising revenue whatsoever. Well that's not quite true, I do get free stuff sometimes, but I won't try to sell you anything here that I don't personally believe in, even if I did get it for free. In fact, anyone who knows me knows that I can't sell anything with a straight face and dry underarms. I'm straying off topic though. What I mean to say is that it's very difficult to get good information anywhere. You really can't even trust scientists anymore, as we've seen with the previous administration. Scientists are sometimes obliged to make conclusions for money as well.

I've been thinking about this topic for a while now but it was just refreshed by a book that I'm reading. The book is Born To Run by Christopher Macdougal. It's about a lot of different things; running in general, ultra distance running, the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico, a white runner named Caballo Blanco (white horse) who wants to be a Tarhumara, and running injuries, to name a few. But one of the big things I'm taking away from the book is that the running shoe industry is probably largely responsible for a whole host of running injuries that plague nearly every runner who ever laces up a shoe. Here's an example: There is this pervasive idea floating around that you absolutely must replace your running shoes every 300 miles or so. Failure to heed this warning will result in running injuries. That means that a typical elite marathoner is going have to replace a $130 pair of shoes every three weeks or so. It seems plausible though, and you literally hear this advice from so many different directions that you don't really know where it comes from and you just heed it as running gospel. But if you stop and think about it, where could it come from, other than running shoe manufacturers or running media, which for all intents and purposes are the same thing. Well, it turns out that worn out running shoes are actually less likely to injure you than new expensive ones. In fact, one study found that the only factor that had any correlation to the likelihood of a runner being injured (for the record, during any given year somewhere between 65% and 80% of all people who consider themselves runners suffer an injury, so the likelihood is high anyway) was dollar amount spent on shoes. That means that the cost of one's shoes was more important than stretching, weight, prior history of injury, talent, distance run, years running, etc. Now, you're probably thinking "of course, buying more expensive and technologically advanced shoes will offer a level of protection." Wrong. The correlation was that runners who spent more than $95 dollars on a pair of shoes were two times more likely to be injured than runners who spent less than $40 dollars on a pair of shoes. Guess how many column inches that study got in Runners World Magazine? I feel like a real dipshit for buying all of those $130 dollar pairs of Asics shoes and throwing them away after two or three months.

It turns out that running shoes probably have too much cushioning for humans to run in them anyway. That's a topic for another time though. What I'm getting at is that for a long time now I've been putting my trust these big athletic shoe companies, assuming that all of the research and fancy acronyms that they are putting into my shoes have been geared toward making a better and safer product for me. Instead, they've been making a better product to liberate my money from me. As for Runners World, well I figured out that they were trying to sell me something in every article a while ago and I stopped listening. Almost all magazines are trying to sell you something and I've stopped buying most of them for that reason. Ever notice how at least 75% of all magazines on the news stand at any given time have a cover story about "flattening your stomach and developing six-pack abs"? Mmm hmmm. I don't know about you but my stomach has not gotten any flatter from any of those god-awful cover stories. Now if somebody could write an article so intense that my abs would get ripped just from reading it, I might buy the magazine. Consider that a challenge fitness writers!

I guess the thing that kind of shocked me into paying attention is that we are all so culturally conditioned to consume that we don't even stop to think where our information is coming from and how that source might taint it's validity. I mean why wouldn't Nike want to give me the best shoe possible that would last a long time and protect me from injury? Umm, because then I wouldn't be susceptible to their future claims that now they really do have if figured out and if I just replace my worn out (in two months) supermachindestructa trainers with this new model, that nagging pain in my illio-tibial band will finally go away. Finally. And in case you were wondering, the Tarahumara Indians have been running great distances, sometimes over 100 miles a day, for centuries. And they don't even have shoes. Screw you Nike.