Apparently Kiptum wore a yet-to-be released Nike Alphafly today

i thought there was a rule that any gear they wear must be accessible by all sides. i am all for super shoes unlike the grumpy old owner of this site, but i am everyone should be allowed access to this shoe or it shouldn't be allowed

Or, get this, just run in non-supershoes. Anytime anyone criticizes cheat shoes it’s automatically “well then, guess we just go back to running naked, on a dirt track, barefoot.” Nice try but shoes were just fine 10 years ago. No one asked for supershoes. But here we are.

They may be super but god all these super shoes are the ugliest things I've ever seen haha. But hey if you're running a 2-flat marathon wearing dumb looking shoes while doing it is a-ok!

You’ll never completely level the playing field, unless everybody runs in the exact same shoe.
I truly believe that the shoes are just part of it. It’s a combination of better training, better nutrition, the shoes, possibly PEDs for some. It is what it is, technology advances. We could go back to cinder tracks as well, I guess.

The one thing that still really surprises me since 2015 when all the super-shoes started and yet no-one was paying attention is that EIGHT YEARS LATER people still do not grasp that no two athletes benefit from the same super-shoe the same way.

It's the single most "unfair" thing about super-shoes vs conventional shoes.

There are low responders and then there are most certainly are super responders.

Especially bigger heavier athletes where going at lactate threshold past a half-marathon was previously impossible. Now they can stitch two of their best regular-shoe half-marathons together.

But don't take my word for it about the low vs high responders, there's literally a scientific study that proves this, more than one, but here's a great graph that says it in a nutshell, see how each line represents each different athlete, branching at each different shoe? See how the alphafly (v1) on the right reduces vo2max requirements by almost TWO points at just 6:00 pace?

Imagine 4:30 pace where the effect would be even more dramatic.

See the runner that only needs 49 vo2max and drops dramatically to only 47 with alphafly (v1)

(also note the vo2max 55/56 runners who actually get WORSE with the alphafly)

With the alphafly3 tuning, Kiptum might be able to sit on his lactate threshold for two hours

Rupp and Mantz both had on the AF1, which is itself probably the greatest marathon shoe ever released prior to maybe the AF3 or the Evo.

Supershoes make a big difference, but I don't think that the AF3 made a big difference in this race. Kiptum ran 2:01:25 in the VF2 in London on a slightly harder course with slightly worse weather finishing in 59:45 -- before this Chicago run, his London performance was my pick for the best marathon ever run. I have never seen someone blast off from world class competition (I think it was Kamworor that was chasing him?) at the rate he did in London just after halfway.

Does make you wonder about the drugs, obviously. You'd have to be naive not to wonder about it. But therein lies madness, so I just try to appreciate what I'm seeing while it happens and if it ends up that it was aided...okay.

Every 1% in a two hour marathon is at least 1.2 minutes or 72 seconds

That is huge, you wouldn't see the person behind them at the finish.

alphafly3 looks very very tuned vs v1, if a high responder got another 1% out of it that would definitely look like doping to anyone not aware of the improvement

Look at the platform size, Nike said "okay you won't let the stack height higher? Here's much more foam everywhere else" It also appears to use some kind of clever inversion like an upside down pyramid the previous versions of the shoes didn't have, may produce some kind of snowshoe effect without the user tripping over their own now massive feet?

Maybe Rupp would have OQ'd in the v3 ?

But the whole "pods" aka airbags on the alpha is beyond acceptable imho, even more-so than the plate it is definitely a physical, mechanical mechanism added like WHEELS which is NOT what running is about