Look after you running shoes and keep them stink free!

 

Should you put your running shoes in the washing machine? How to do stop them from smelling? Take a look at this short video to get the low down on clean running shoes.

Transcript
Just in from a morning of training which means a morning of running around on wet grass with clients, hence my shoes need a bit of attention. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to show you guys how I look after my running shoes. It’s very simple.  It’ll stop your running shoes form being stinky, and help dry them out and keep them nice and light.

So if you’re just wanting to dry your shoes out when you come home, take the inner soles out of your shoes, get some rolled up newspaper and just stuff the newspaper right in. Notice I’ve also loosened my shoe laces quite a lot. You can take your shoe laces right out if your shoes are really wet, and it just enables you to get the newspaper right in there. This newspaper will absorb all the moisture. You might need to change the newspaper a couple of times if your shoes are really wet.  And then I leave them out in the sun.

With my inner soles to stop them being too smelly, I just give them a bit of a sprinkling with bi carb soda. (That’s a bit more than a sprinkling – a very liberal sprinkling of bicarb soda)-If your shoes are smelly they are probably the things that area doing the damage.

To clean your shoes, shoe manufacturers recommend a soft brush warm soapy water and then just scrubbing off any excess dirt. [A toothbrush or a washing up brush is great for this] I’m not too fussed about whether my shoes are dirty but I’m not too keen on them being smelly. People do suggest putting them in the washing machine. Shoe manufacturers suggest against doing that.

I did actually put a pair of my old shoes through the washing machine a couple of days ago. You can see this one here on your left is a little bit cleaner, but I certainly wouldn’t be doing that with my better shoes, just because the more your shoes are submerged in water the heavier they will get. To put them in the washing machine put them on a low spin, low heat, short cycle and pop a couple of towels in with them just for padding. Make sure you take the shoe laces out. You can either replace them or pop them in a sock bag and wash them in the sock bag.

So a few things to remember. Just dry your shoes out even if you don’t dry them out with newspaper. Just make sure you open them up and air them out pretty much every time you use them and you should have stink-free lovely clean shoes.