The other day I was reminiscing about my high school cross-country days. I remember one kid on the team; he was a sophomore when I was a senior. He was probably the 9th or 10th guy on the team. New to running, didn’t have a lot of experience. The other “funny” thing that I remember about him was that he literally would practice and race in basketball shoes. Now I’m talking about true basketball shoes, not the ones they make today that don’t even cover your ankles. I bet those basketball shoes weighed 20 ounces. In hindsight it amazes me that he could even run in those things and we would often run up to 9 miles on some of our training runs. These basketball shoes were also worn, rather broken in.

Finally, one day he shows up to practice with a brand new pair of running shoes. The next day we had a race. Now most of the top runners wore spikes, we had our normal trainers and on race days we laced up the six to seven ounce racing flats. Well this kid must have felt like Steve Prefontaine when he put those running shoes on. All of a sudden he went from being our 10th man to the 4th or 5th guy on our team. I bet he dropped a solid minute off his 5k time.

It’s probably akin to facing the pitcher with the donuts still on the bat. The difference had to have felt amazing.

A good racing flat makes a world of difference. I think part of that is psychological. It’s great to be able to slip into a racing shoe that is lightweight after doing a warm-up in your normal trainers. A racing flat is also flexible, which promotes turnover and often times they are built on a curved platform to help get you up on your toes which provides a greater push off.

The true question is how much benefit does one gain from a racing flat? The general rule of thumb is that for each ounce you drop on shoe weight it will save you one second per mile. Being that you can easily find a racing flat that is about five ounces lighter than your normal training shoe, that can be a time savings of 15 seconds on a 5k, which is significant.

Thus, if you’re an efficient runner, I would definitely look into getting a pair of racing flats. The tough question is whether or not you should use a racing flat for the longer distances. I ran the Denver Marathon last year in the Asics DS Racer and didn’t have any issues at all. However, it’s a big gamble running a marathon in a racing flat. Often times a good hedge is to use a shoe that falls into the performance-training category. The last thing you want to happen is for your feet to get sore at mile 16 because of the racing flat and your pace subsequently slows, thus negating any timesaving from the racing flat.

The other issue is that the slower you are the more steps you will take out on a racecourse, so a racing flat may not be for you. A faster runner will cover the same ground in fewer steps, due to a longer stride, thus a racing flat is better suited for the faster runner as their body will have less impact over the same distance.

In conclusion, if you’re looking to shave off a few seconds on race day, you may want to consider a racing flat. I actually own two pairs of racing shoes, the Asics DS Racers for the 1/2 Marathon and up and the Brooks T4 Racer for the shorter distances.