What's a Zero Drop Shoe?

From Running Times online…

What's the Deal with Zero-Drop Shoes

Altra shoes provides something more refined than strip-mined running shoes

By Brian Metzler

As featured in the April 2011 issue of Running Times Magazine

For years, Golden Harper has been helping injured runners cut apart their old running shoes. Yes, literally, cutting them open with a saw blade. It's not that Harper and running store coworker and former high school cross country teammate Brian Beckstead were helping disgruntled runners achieve some sort of misplaced retribution for getting hurt, but instead trying to remove what they believe--what many experts now believe--is the culprit to a lot of common running injuries, namely the significantly elevated heels of most training shoes.

Essentially what Harper and Beckstead were doing was creating "zero-drop" shoes--or shoes that allowed the foot to sit level to the ground without a slope from the heel to the forefoot--by cutting a triangular shaped wedge of foam out of the back half of the shoe and then re-gluing them back together. They estimate they modified 2,000 pairs of shoes over the past seven years with an overwhelmingly positive response.

"Initially, we only recommended injured runners should do it, but then we realized it was a tool that could help a lot of runners who wanted to run more naturally and more efficiently," Harper says. "That's when we decided to pursue it as a marketable shoe."

Zero-drop shoes can make it easier to run with more efficient form, says Jay Dicharry, MPT, director of the SPEED Clinic at the University of Virginia's Center for Endurance Sport, though it's still possible to run efficiently in shoes with slightly raised heels.

Read on here.