Can Nike's $250 Running Shoes Make You Run Faster? NYT Analysis Says Yes (fastcompany.com)

Last year, Nike released a new pair of running shoes that claim to make you run 4% faster, thanks to its proprietary sole technology. The new "Vaporfly 4%" shoes would, in theory, "be enough to help a runner break the mythical two-hour marathon barrier for the first time," Fast Company points out. The New York Times decided to put the shoes to the test through an intensive analysis of 500,000 marathon and half marathon running times, culled from the social network Strava. Nike's claims apparently check out. Fast Company reports the findings: We know a lot about the runners in our data set, including their age, gender, race history and, in some cases, how much training they've done in the months before a race. We also know about the races themselves, including the distribution of runners' times and the weather that day. We can put all of this information into a model to try to estimate the change in runners' time from their previous races. After controlling for all of these variables, our model estimates that the shoes account for an expected improvement of about 4 percent over a runner's previous time. Including the uncertainty around the estimates, the Vaporflys are a clear outlier, one of the only popular shoes we can really say makes any difference at all.

Comments

Sure they can

[nehumanuscrede]

The .0001% of elite runners where footwear technology might be a variable in their performance don't typically buy their own shoes.
They are gifted to them or are required to wear them as part of their endorsement deal with Nike. ( Or Reebok, or $Shoe_Brand )

The other part of that endorsement deal is them getting in front of a camera and convincing YOU that buying this shoe will make you
into the most awesome athlete the world has ever seen.

Just look what it did for them ! :|

Re:Illegal performance enhancement ??

[DRJlaw]

The International Association of Athletics Federations, track's governing body, has rules about shoes, but they are vague: "Shoes must not be constructed so as to give athletes any unfair assistance or advantage." It does not specify what such an advantage might be.

4% faster?

Sure... because there's no difference between barefoot and a 1920s running shoe, and then a 1960s running shoe, and then a mid 70s running shoe, and then a turn-of-the-century running shoe.

TFA doesn't say that this is the only shoe that shows a performance difference, period. It says that this is the only shoe that shows a significant performance difference versus the prior generation of racing shoes.

TFA also explains that the "unfair" adjective is significant -- "The rules also state that shoes "must be reasonably available to all in the spirit of the universality of athletics." Being available to all of the competitors sounds as if it goes a long way towards conformance to the rule.