Shoe Review Rules

Every so often, I review a pair of running shoes.  And just for reference, here are my "rules" for writing a shoe review.

1. I must own this pair of shoes.
2. Before I even start gathering thoughts, I must go for a run in them.
3. Before I start writing the review, I must run 100 miles in them.
4. All pictures must be taken after logging 100 miles.
5. If I intend to race in these shoes, I cannot finish the review before completing a "good" race in them.  The LA Marathon, for example, would not qualify because I was having an all-around bad day.  An exception can be made if a "bad" race was solely the fault of the shoes, then the gloves are coming off.

The reasoning behind most of these rules is that I want this to be a "true" review.  Almost any new pair of shoes feels great, or is at least exciting, and everything looks good right out of the box.  It seems like most shoe reviews you see are written after only one training run, by people who are paid to run in a different pair of shoes every week, if not every other day, and somehow come up with a few pages worth of thoughts based on a one-hour experience.  But when I want to know about a shoe, I don't want to know what it felt on the very first day, I want to know how it feels every day.  And I want to know what it looks like once it's got some dirt on it.

I don't have a scoring system or anything like that with my reviews.  I'm just going to give my overall impression, what I like about it, what I don't, what I think it should be used for, and a general thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  Since they will all be shoes I picked out myself (see #1), you can probably expect mostly thumbs-ups.

And that's about it.  There may sometimes be long periods between reviews, since I like to get a long life out of my shoes.