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

Posted by BeauHD on from the numbers-don't-lie dept.

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.

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Illegal performance enhancement ?? by Archfeld · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wouldn't this qualify the shoes as an illegal performance enhancement ? Just like the artificial lower limbs with a higher than natural spring resistance enhance a runners ability ?

    https://www.scientificamerican...

    --
    errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
    1. Re:Illegal performance enhancement ?? by Whibla · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      On reading the summary I found myself wondering if they tested Enko's running shoes. Then I realised, they didn't actually test any shoes at all, just performed some analysis on runners and their times.

      The various quotes however, from you and parents, do go some way towards answering the question I've had since I first saw those shoes (rather ironically from an ad. on /.): Would they even be 'legal' to run in, in any 'proper' race. But then, given the following quote from the article, I find myself wondering what the difference is apart from one pair of shoes has a visible spring, while the other is less 'honest' about how it works:

      "Nested in the central part of the shoe is a piece of carbon fiber that stores and releases energy every time it hits the floor. Imagine an ACME spring-powered shoe from a Looney Tunes cartoon. Except this shoe, unlike the ones used by Wile E. Coyote, actually work–and work well.

      I guess the one thing it does show though is that athletic records aren't (necessarily) being beaten today by superior athletes just by athletes with superior equipment. That has to cheapen any sense of achievement, surely?