These are the shoes I'm more concerned about. They are marketed as being able to change the amount of gravity one experiences...
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Time-Toys-Shoes-Styles/dp/B000N5OIE6
These are the shoes I'm more concerned about. They are marketed as being able to change the amount of gravity one experiences...
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Time-Toys-Shoes-Styles/dp/B000N5OIE6
I remember back in the 70's when Nike always came out with gimmick shoes right after the Runners World shoe issue.
If any of you had taken the time, and some surely have, to read Nike's patents that were linked on this site a week or two ago you'd know that these are 100% designed to be against the spirt of the sport.
It's like a little carbon fiber leaf spring. Not massive, but definitely something that could greatly help people who have bad control of their feet or weak arches and plantar fascia and a little help with people who have great control of their feet.
Wait until the real cyborg stuff comes along. This is hardly scratching the surface.
rojo wrote:
It's funny as just the other day I was thinking about this topic and I thought to myself, "If this ends up with people calling for the shoes to be banned, I wonder if that's exactly what Nike was looking for. To get the idea out there that their technology is superior is worth a ton - do they really care about the WR or medals?"
The other thought I had was, "If their technology is so much better than everyone else's , can someone please explain to me why the last 5 men's world records have been set by someone wearing adidas?"
2:04:26 Haile Gebrselassie Ethiopia September 30, 2007- adidas
2:03:59 Haile Gebrselassie Ethiopia September 28, 2008 - adidas
2:03:38 Patrick Makau Kenya September 25, 2011 -adidas
2:03:23 Wilson Kipsang Kenya September 29, 2013 -adidas
2:02:57 Dennis Kimetto Kenya September 28, 2014 - adidas
Maybe that fact leads to my initial thought?
^ This. It's a damn shoe. If you're a good enough runner to run a world record, that's that. A stupid shoe will do nothing to change that. I legit can't even take this argument seriously because of how stupid it is. Kipchoge is actually good enough to run a WR, while pretty much every other Nike athlete in the world right now isn't (aside from Bekele if he gets his sh"t together). Lol the shoe doesn't mean anything. Nike is just being Nike - that's what they did with the Nike victory spike when it came out; it was supposed to be the lightest, yet most efficient spike in existence. I also think it's dumb that people are pissed at Amy Cragg and Shalane Flanagan for wearing "experimental" models during the Olympic trials last Feb, when Desi Linden (Brooks) beat Shalane in that race. I didn't see an advantage there.
the B standard wrote:
If any of you had taken the time, and some surely have, to read Nike's patents that were linked on this site a week or two ago you'd know that these are 100% designed to be against the spirt of the sport.
It's like a little carbon fiber leaf spring. Not massive, but definitely something that could greatly help people who have bad control of their feet or weak arches and plantar fascia and a little help with people who have great control of their feet.
Wait until the real cyborg stuff comes along. This is hardly scratching the surface.
I don't see how you can say it is against the spirit of the sport when you still have to run under your own power even with springs in your shoes. The sport stays the same, you just run faster.
Regardless we can all agree that this is great free advertising for Nike. Abebe Bikila proves these guys are full of crap.
Science and sport wrote:
How about this blogger do some independent research to see if there is actually a significant advantage from these shoes before saying they need to be banned.
That's what you do in 'science.'
Because Nike is not allowing anyone else to study them. It's under a veil of secrecy.
Like their PED program.
NOP supertramp wrote:
Science and sport wrote:How about this blogger do some independent research to see if there is actually a significant advantage from these shoes before saying they need to be banned.
That's what you do in 'science.'
Because Nike is not allowing anyone else to study them. It's under a veil of secrecy.
Like their PED program.
If you are looking for a study,
I have studied the correlation between advertising spend in RW and Wired and the corresponding number of articles.
CONCLUSION
Npositive=RWspend$ * WIREDfreeshoes*NtripstoMonza
Anyone ever tried the Adidas feather, came out a few years ago based around that Harvard (??) study that racing flats should be a bit more like sprint spikes with a bit of plastic structure. It seems adidas discontinued this line of thought. I noticed that I bought some last year cheap and put them in my wardrobe and forgot about them. I'm injured right and there is nothing on here for 2-3 months to try them out in. I would have thought that this would have been Avenue the various sub 2 projects would have gone down. Notice nobody here is talking about Kipsang's shoes from Tokyo.
Tomato Tomato wrote:
These are the shoes I'm more concerned about. They are marketed as being able to change the amount of gravity one experiences...
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Time-Toys-Shoes-Styles/dp/B000N5OIE6
I actually laughed out loud
Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:
Anyone ever tried the Adidas feather, came out a few years ago based around that Harvard (??) study that racing flats should be a bit more like sprint spikes with a bit of plastic structure. It seems adidas discontinued this line of thought. I noticed that I bought some last year cheap and put them in my wardrobe and forgot about them. I'm injured right and there is nothing on here for 2-3 months to try them out in. I would have thought that this would have been Avenue the various sub 2 projects would have gone down. Notice nobody here is talking about Kipsang's shoes from Tokyo.
Question: Do my shoes have mechanical propulsion springs hidden inside that need to be tuned for my very specific running style rendering them useless for normal runners who buy the generic non tuned version????
Answer: No. There are no hidden propulsive carbon leaf springs, and everything on my shoe works for all athletes.
Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:
Anyone ever tried the Adidas feather, came out a few years ago based around that Harvard (??) study that racing flats should be a bit more like sprint spikes with a bit of plastic structure. It seems adidas discontinued this line of thought. I noticed that I bought some last year cheap and put them in my wardrobe and forgot about them. I'm injured right and there is nothing on here for 2-3 months to try them out in. I would have thought that this would have been Avenue the various sub 2 projects would have gone down. Notice nobody here is talking about Kipsang's shoes from Tokyo.
One thing about stiff plates is that they are designed for straight lines. Not good for corners. Most marathons have lots of corners..... oh wait I forgot about Monza!
Schweik wrote:
Nike claims a 4% improvement. Let's see...a 3:45 miler, just by wearing these shoes, would be able to run the mile 9 seconds faster! That would be a 3:36 mile! Does anyone believe this drivel? The whole thing is a great marketing tool, no doubt about it. As the song says, "Let's See What Happens".
You've got to be trolling, right? If people could run a marathon in something as light as track spikes and not completely wreck their ligaments, tendons muscles etc. they would do it. But obviously the human anatomy doesn't allow for that, so we run marathons in more cushioned shoes.
This 4% number is Nike probably testing the best marathon shoes on the market and using those as a baseline, maybe an average of the best shoes, or maybe just the numbers from the best shoe. Then they take the numbers and compare them to the vaporfly's. This seems pretty logical to me and unless Nike has an official statement on where the 4% number comes from, this, IMO, is the most logical way to test improvement.
yourmom.com wrote:
fisky wrote:As an amateur inventor of three running related devices, I've often thought that running shoes could be manufactured to create more energy return using a plate as a spring or a specially formed "superball" forefoot outsole.
The challenge is tuning the device to individual running mechanics. Even a slight deviation could negate the benefits. Energy released before the foot reaches push off position is lost. Energy released after the shoe leaves the ground is lost. Energy released at the wrong point on the shoe is reduced.
According to the articles in this thread, Nike is addressing this challenge by manufacturing unique plates for each runner. Even this would be hard to do because a treadmill doesn't reflect energy return the same as asphalt.
I think just preventing top athletes from running in custom made shoes would be enough. The off-the-shelf Vaporfly Elite probably won't convey any advantage to the majority of runners.
I was thinking about that in a similar way and completely agree.
Maybe there is some angle or shape that returns some level of energy using a certain type of gait that is optimized for someone for like kipchoge.
There's no way it works as well for a 7min/mile pace joe jogger or even other elites who have a different gait.
I really want to see specifically what this "spoon" shape is in the new shoe and how it's angled and where it is placed.
I'm also kind of surprised that something like this doesn't have some effect on the runner's mechanics - especially a fine-tuned elite logging +100miles/wk - IF it actually does have some kind of remarkable energy return. The Wired article author says he can hardly stand in these shoes... you'd think a drastic shoe change would be a gamble that might have all kinds of slight side effects on kipchoge's mechanics that can add up to seconds here or there in a marathon, in a bad way.
I think there is a lot less tuning than Nike or you guys suggest. I disagree with fisky's comments on the timing of energy release being something that needs to be tuned. On the contrary, springs are excellent at releasing energy at exactly the right time in this series (as opposed to parallel) kind of system. It would be hard to design it so that the timing is off. You see this in things like pogo sticks, flex in bicycle frames (that is NOT all wasted contrary to advertising, just the little portion that is lost due to the bike frame material not being 100% elastic), and trampolines.
A spring in a shoe would be loaded at the same time the runner's leg is being loaded up in its own spring-like manner (plus additional force added), with the part that is under the ball of the foot what you should be paying attention to because that's where the push off force is coming from (both body and energy return from shoe). The maximum force applied by the body to the legs occurs the same time as the maximum force applied by the feet to the shoes (thus close to the maximum force applied to a spring in a shoe): When the body's center of mass is directly over the ball of the foot (see any of the force plate graphs with any style of running - forefoot and heel strike, doesn't matter). The force applied to the ground decreases immediately afterward that point. The energy return force on a spring in a shoe is automatically released from the shoe starting because the force on the shoe decreases.
You can step on a leaf spring in a non-optimal place (not at the highest camber) for energy return or trampoline in the wrong place (not in the center) and not get as much bounce out of it. I don't think this would be too much of an issue in a shoe because different shoe sizes match up foot size with plate size/camber position, but sure, there is probably some individualized tuning that would help match that up better because no everyone's foot is the same. It's possible that the shoe works best with a certain type of running style too.
All this is not to say that I buy the advantage that Nike claims. And, like I said in a previous thread, the ideas that this Nike shoe uses - springy foam and stiff plate have long been used in some running shoes and spikes, so I don't think the combination should be banned.
Plates and corners don't go wrote:
Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:Anyone ever tried the Adidas feather, came out a few years ago based around that Harvard (??) study that racing flats should be a bit more like sprint spikes with a bit of plastic structure. It seems adidas discontinued this line of thought. I noticed that I bought some last year cheap and put them in my wardrobe and forgot about them. I'm injured right and there is nothing on here for 2-3 months to try them out in. I would have thought that this would have been Avenue the various sub 2 projects would have gone down. Notice nobody here is talking about Kipsang's shoes from Tokyo.
One thing about stiff plates is that they are designed for straight lines. Not good for corners. Most marathons have lots of corners..... oh wait I forgot about Monza!
Monza (is it?) will have tighter corners than a standard big marathon.
https://images0.persgroep.net/rcs/hdKUwE3xQ8w1vkKlhK3tdZcbmPg/diocontent/100356430/_fitwidth/694/?appId=21791a8992982cd8da851550a453bd7f&quality=0.9Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:
Plates and corners don't go wrote:One thing about stiff plates is that they are designed for straight lines. Not good for corners. Most marathons have lots of corners..... oh wait I forgot about Monza!
Monza (is it?) will have tighter corners than a standard big marathon.
Looking at this I agree it is not necessarily perfect due to the number of corners but the bends are similar to a 400m track which means no deceleration or acceleration which is better than city marathons even Berlin.
We almost made it to 100 posts!
Hobbie Tri wrote:
GrandmaFilly wrote:Lol honestly though this is why I will NEVER EVER get into Competitive triathlon, if you don't have the best most expensive bike you will get schooled into the ground.
I compete from time to time in local triathlons for fun in the off season and got to the podium a few times. My bike is a 12 years-old 1500$ Giant TCR Aero1. Once, I got second place overall riding the 300$ road bike that I use to commute. Granted, perhaps I could have shaved a few seconds off my time with a better bike, but definitely you do not need to spend top $$$ to be competitive. If you get schooled to the ground, it is not the bike.
i could show up to local road races wearing dutch clogs and win while smoking a cigarette. who cares...
the B standard wrote:
If any of you had taken the time, and some surely have, to read Nike's patents that were linked on this site a week or two ago you'd know that these are 100% designed to be against the spirt of the sport.
It's like a little carbon fiber leaf spring. Not massive, but definitely something that could greatly help people who have bad control of their feet or weak arches and plantar fascia and a little help with people who have great control of their feet.
Wait until the real cyborg stuff comes along. This is hardly scratching the surface.
can you explain why carbon fiber leaf spring is against the spirit of the sport but the transition from leather soles to nike air wasnt/isnt? or why spikes aren't against the spirit of the sport?
Brooooosky wrote:
Schweik wrote:Nike claims a 4% improvement. Let's see...a 3:45 miler, just by wearing these shoes, would be able to run the mile 9 seconds faster! That would be a 3:36 mile! Does anyone believe this drivel? The whole thing is a great marketing tool, no doubt about it. As the song says, "Let's See What Happens".
You've got to be trolling, right? If people could run a marathon in something as light as track spikes and not completely wreck their ligaments, tendons muscles etc. they would do it. But obviously the human anatomy doesn't allow for that, so we run marathons in more cushioned shoes.
This 4% number is Nike probably testing the best marathon shoes on the market and using those as a baseline, maybe an average of the best shoes, or maybe just the numbers from the best shoe. Then they take the numbers and compare them to the vaporfly's. This seems pretty logical to me and unless Nike has an official statement on where the 4% number comes from, this, IMO, is the most logical way to test improvement.
As we all know this is theory that Nike is talking about. Their ability to measure actual performance enhancement will be difficult. The tuning of shoes has been talked about for years and adding mechanical components to do that has been ongoing.
Carbon as a performance material and improving a piece of sports equipment has been around for decades. Look at bicycle frames, ski's, tennis rackets, hockey sticks, any athlete will tell you, its a better product and benefits me.
Banned from racing, silly. Racing shoes don't mean squat to a footwear companies bottom line. It will go into the everyday training shoes that every runner would enjoy a little help with efficiency.