Shoe Health produces two estimates that help you time your running: recovery hours (how long to let a pair rest before its next run) and an estimated retirement point (when a pair is nearing the end of its useful life). Both are guidance to support good habits — not guarantees or medical advice.
Recovery hours
Recovery hours are an estimate of how long it’s ideal to let a pair rest before you run in it again. Shoe Health looks at:
- your recent runs in that shoe (how far, how fast, how hard versus its usual pace),
- how long ago you last wore it,
- how worn it is, and
- for catalog shoes, how the shoe is built.
Treat it as a gentle nudge: while a pair still shows hours left, it’s a good moment to reach for a different shoe and spread the load across your rotation.
An honest caveat: the popular idea that foam fully “bounces back” on a fixed timeline between runs isn’t strongly established — some lab work has found limited recovery of cushioning after a rest period. So recovery hours are best understood as a rotation aid (spreading load across pairs and your legs), not a precise measurement of the foam’s state.
Retirement estimate
Each pair also shows an estimated retirement point, based on its accumulated mileage against its lifespan (pre-filled from the catalog and editable). It lets you plan a replacement ahead of time instead of being caught out mid-training.
As with mileage, retirement is a planning signal — judge a shoe’s real state from how it looks and feels, using the physical wear signs, which matter more than any single number.
Why it matters
Together, these estimates turn vague guesswork into two useful prompts: rest this pair for now, and start thinking about replacing that one. They feed directly into rotation suggestions, so the app can steer you toward a rested, in-shape pair for each run.