I’ve been snookered (to use one of this month’s words du jour).

For more than two decades, on the advice of doctors, trainers and shoe salespeople alike, I’ve bought “motion-control” running shoes. My feet overpronate and, thus, I needed (or so I was told) heavy, rigid shoes to avoid injuries.

I got injured anyway, and gave up running marathons (after two) for that reason. But I’ve kept buying motion-control running and walking shoes, even though I’ve hated wearing them. They’ve always felt too hard, too heavy, too inflexible.

Now I learn, thanks to an article by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times, that those shoes were an unnecessary precaution. In fact, it's possible that they may have contributed to my injuries.

What’s even more aggravating to learn (here’s where the snookered part comes in) is that all that advice I was given about runners with pronating feet needing sturdier shoes was based on no scientific evidence at all. Writes Reynolds:

Reynolds describes two new studies that back up that conclusion. Last June, in the latest of a series of their own studies on the topic, military researchers concluded that “assigning shoes based on the shape of the plantar foot surface [low, normal or high arches] had little influence on injuries even after considering other injury risk factors.” In fact, their research found that military recruits were more likely to get injured when assigned shoes specifically for their foot postures.

Canadian researchers also reported last month that experienced women runners who engaged in a 13-week half-marathon training program were more likely to miss training days due to injury if they had been assigned a running shoe that “matched” their foot posture than if they had been given a shoe type at random. “The findings of this study suggest that our current approach of prescribing in-shoe pronation control systems on the basis of foot type is overly simplistic and potentially injurious,” concluded the researchers.

Motion-control shoes may be particularly problematic, as Reynolds points out:

I can't wait to go shoe shopping this weekend.