Vicky: I Put My Feet in Their Hands

For the past 10 years, this has been my M.O. for buying athletic footwear: Walk into a discount shoe chain, spot an attractive pair in my size for under $60, and grab it.

This process, while thrifty, is an idiotic way to buy running shoes -- especially now that Howard has talked me into logging longer distances. So I recently marched into several local running specialty stores to let the experts scold and school me.

As it turns out, my last randomly purchased pair -- the Brooks Adrenaline GTS -- is one of the most popular running shoe models on the market, especially for folks with lower arches like mine. (Who knew?) When the owner of Adams Morgan's Fleet Feet, Phil Fenty (a.k.a. the mayor's dad), spied them, he said, "That's the workhorse."

Every store I visited recommended I slip into an updated model, but first the salespeople put me through some kind of "gait analysis" to see if a stability shoe like the Adrenaline GTS was indeed right for me. That usually involved jogging a good distance away from and then back toward their knowing gaze. The highest-tech version was at Potomac River Running in Reston, where the staff placed me on a treadmill with a camera pointed at the back of my ankles. While I ran, the sales guy and I watched my feet on a monitor, which was weird but helpful in seeing my pronation issues for myself.

Contrast that to Fleet Feet, where Fenty just instructed me to take off my shoes and, with a glance down at my socks, declared that I indeed needed a stability shoe. Even more remarkably, with that second-long gaze, he also seemed to divine my shoe size: The 9s he pulled were perfect.

All the stores gave me at least two pairs to test. Potomac River Running won for quantity (I lost track at the 10th pair) and quality of service, probing my foot in each shoe to make sure I had the correct size. (In some models, they upped me to a 9 1/2 .)

Then it was time to run. Fenty sent me outside for a jog on my own, while at Pacers and Gotta Run in Arlington and at the Running Co. in Georgetown, the salespeople had me jog the same strip of store floor I had covered earlier while they watched my form. At Potomac River Running, it was back to the treadmill.

Both Pacers and Running Co. suggested putting a different brand of shoe on each foot to compare models I liked. But they all left the final decision to me, based on the shoe's feel. I remained torn between the Brooks Adrenaline GTS 8 and the Mizuno Wave Inspire 4. Both awesome-feeling shoes, both $95. So I broke the tie the only way I knew how -- by color -- and went for the minty-green Mizunos.