Archaeologists recently found a pair of 5,500 year old leather shoes in Armenia, making this the oldest leather shoe ever found (you can see a picture of the shoes to the left – picture taken from Boston.com via AP Photo/Department of Archaeology University College Cork). The shoe is made from a single piece of leather laced up the heel and down the midline of the midfoot and forefoot.The shoe was stuffed with grass, though it is unknown if this was for insulation, to be used as a lining, or simply to maintain the shape of the shoe. My hypothesis? The grass was there to beef up the heel to make sure the ancient Armenian wearing it wouldn’t suffer injury due to heel striking while running. Nike Air Max Classic BW Womens Alternative hypothesis? The grass was an ancient pronation control device.The recent Nike Air Max 270 Femme explosion of interest in minimalist running shoes has brought along with it an interest in specific shoe design features that probably rarely crossed the mind of most runners just a year ago (before the publication of Born to Run by Christopher McDougall got people thinking about these kind of things). One of these is the concept of heel-to-toe drop, sometimes also referred to as heel-toe offset, heel-toe differential, or heel-toe lift (you sometimes also see “forefoot” substituted for “toe”). So what exactly is heel-toe drop, and why are people interested in it as a shoe design element?Thus, a drop of zero would mean that when seated in the shoe, the heel and ball of the forefoot would be at exactly the same height off of the ground. A drop of 12mm Nike Air Max 90 Dames would mean that the heel sits 12mm higher off the ground than the forefoot. The Nike Air Max 2017 Femme importance of the HT drop value is that it’s thought that the lower it is, the easier it will be to land on your midfoot or forefoot while running. I’m not sure if there have been published studies confirming this, but my personal experience running in shoes of varying HT drop values, as well as a few of my informal laboratory attempts to correlate heel height in shoes with footstrike, seem to suggest that this relationship is likely real.Given growing interest among runners in how a given shoe might affect their footstrike, some running shoe manufacturers and running shoe sellers have begun reporting this value as a standard spec on each shoe. For example, Brooks Running has posted HT drop data on their blog for their more “minimalist” shoes, and Running Nike Air Max 90 Dames Roze Warehouse lists midsole height for the heel and forefoot for many of the shoes that Adidas Superstar Femme it sells. I like this trend a lot, as it allows runners to consider one more piece of data to help them make a more informed choice of shoe to match their running style (e.g., it allows midfoot/forefoot runners to more easily find shoes with a lower drop if that’s what they prefer).Despite the seemingly simple definition, I still find a few points confusing about the concept of heel-toe drop. Some places refer only to midsole height (e.g., Running Warehouse), whereas others (Brooks) include both midsole and outsole height in their calculation. You can see from the above example that the Launch actually has a slightly lower offset when the outsole is included in the Adidas ZX 700 Womens calculation, due to the fact that the outsole is actually a bit thicker in the Nike Air Max Classic BW Dames forefoot (tooling height, another new term to me, is oustole + midsole thickness). What confuses ike Air Max 90 Mens Grey me is why you would ever exclude the outsole, and why the insole never seems to be included in these calculations? Seems to me that the goal is to determine how high off the ground the heel sits relative to the forefoot, and thus all three elements separating the foot from the ground should be included: insole (insert), midsole, and outsole.Given this, I thought I’d do a little home experiment and measure the heel-toe drop in some of the shoes in my shoe rack. The challenge in doing this is that you can’t simply measure heel or forefoot height from the side of the shoe because the midsole frequently curls up around the sides above the level where the heel sits, Nike Air Max 95 Femme such that you might overestimate thickness if measuring in this manner (not to Nike Air Max 90 Mens Grey mention that you wouldn’t be including the insole thickness).