Why running shoes have an extra eyelet hole? Obviously if you are a running enthusiast you probably know the answer already. This post targets the rest of you who still enjoy your jogging on a leisure manner and still wonder what those extra holes for the shoe lace are for. The short answer is… blisters! That’s right. According to several sources, this feature on running shoes are meant to prevent that nasty phenomenal which can be unpleasant for a few days!

Blisters are the result of a three factors combination, heat, moister and friction. While running our body generates heat, on top of that we start sweating, and if your shoe is a bit loose it will occur friction between the shoe lining and your sock or directly with your skin. Now, we can easily avoid this to happen if we remove one of those three factors. Since we can’t avoid the heat and moister, we can however remove friction out of the equation. This is where the extra holes comes in very handy, let’s see how.

As a common practice, when we purchase a pair of shoes for running, it might be wise to get a half size or a full size above the regular size we use. This is a good option to accommodate our feet more comfortably while running, since they tend to lightly swallow due to the physical stress. But once that the shoe is slightly bigger than our feet it means that there will be some loose room and obviously we will not have a good tight fit.

Turns out that extra eyelet is meant to workaround this issue, its purpose is to tie the shoes extra tight with what the running community commonly refers as a "lace lock" or "heel lock" or “racer’s loop” method. Let us show how it’s done: