Wired Mag: Legal doping? Were Zoom Vaporfly 4% wearers twice as likely to negative split NYC?

You can tell by the inner side of the shoes. Vapor has much smaller swoosh plus letters printed on the foam as well. Tell them apart is not that hard.

2:30 to 3:15, I think are a good a real live sample as you're going to get of committed runners. I would consider most of these people dedicated to some degree.

Vaprfly wrote:

Runner's World did this in a lab. The subject ran with a lower heart rate in the Vaporfly 4%. He also ran with less muscle activity in his quads, calves, and shins. Both indicating that the shoes require you expend less energy to maintain the same pace.

So we should put an asterisk next to Flanagan's win?

in all seriousness - I think we need to give up on any argument that the 2 hour marathon barrier won't be broken - shoes like the 4% show that gains can be had from technology. I'd guess in the next 2-3 years someone will break 2 hours decisively.

Our US athletes had been competing in them before the NYCM Sunday, so if we put an asterisk next to Shalane's win, we need to go back over all races over the past 2-3 years and reassess the American places.

Regarding the difference in HR running at specific paces, Jordan Hasay noted this in an interview post-Boston or post-Chicago.. I believe it was post-Boston, so the notion isn't new.

That said, it's unclear who's wearing the VF and who's wearing the VF "elite," which are different shoes. Apparently the elite are much better, but they're also over double the cost of the VFs.

Lastly, I'm a datapoint of wearing VFs and negative-splitting on Sunday, but I did so purposefully: I went in injured, and I wasnt sure my leg would hold up for the whole marathon. I had run in Pegasus a few days before and knew I could run at least an easy pace, but of course I was wanted to push it more. Post Queensboro, I just decided to cut the leash I put myself on and go whatever pace I felt comfortable with/ had trained to be able to maintain, which was the pace I averaged in my MP workouts (no VFs) and much faster than my first-half splits.

Moo Goo wrote:

2:30 to 3:15, I think are a good a real live sample as you're going to get of committed runners. I would consider most of these people dedicated to some degree.

For someone younger than 40, anything slower than 2:20 is hardly dedication.

Let me clear up info about the shoes. The ONLY runners who have every worn VF Elites in a race are the three breaking 2 guys. Outside of that event, Kipchoge wore them again in Berlin, and Desisa wore them again in NYC. EVERYONE else from Rupp to Flanagan and every other Nike athlete has worn the production version of the VF (not counting the prototypes in testing with the Streak upper, etc). If anyone has any pictures to prove otherwise, please post them, but they don't exist. It is very easy to tell them apart from the FLY. The upper is the first give away as the laces on the VF use normal eyelets and no flywire is exposed. The other sign is the text on the midsole. (The VF Elites are very easy to spot and the midsold is shaped entirely different and it's a knit upper) The guy who did the stat sample. IMHO, it would be better to look up past results of all those in the pictures wearing the shoes and compare their times to their 2-3 previous marathon times. Negative split is one thing, but overall time decreases is the entire point of the shoe. If someone ran even splits, but ran 2 minutes faster on a hillier course, the shoes may have helped a bit!

OK. Yes - there is selection bias. They are likely richer, differently motivated, and maybe different in terms of mechanics.

Yes- it was imperfect sampling.

It is Step One, everyone. Step one - not the done deal. Of course popular media will sensationalize that it proves something. They always do. They always will - don't we know this by now?

It is a cool mini-study, by popular press standards. It has a decent sample size. It focused on real data, not anecdotes and impressions.

Now the kinesiology labs can run their own studies and we can see what the consensus will be.

Kudos to the author for giving us something concrete that we can use as step one.

Reality Checker wrote:

OK. Yes - there is selection bias. They are likely richer, differently motivated, and maybe different in terms of mechanics.

Yes- it was imperfect sampling.

It is Step One, everyone. Step one - not the done deal. Of course popular media will sensationalize that it proves something. They always do. They always will - don't we know this by now?

It is a cool mini-study, by popular press standards. It has a decent sample size. It focused on real data, not anecdotes and impressions.

Using bad data to pretend to be scientific is worse than "anecdotes and impressions" because with anecdotes and impressions it's at least clear that it's just someone's opinion rather than fake science.

rojo wrote:

Vaprfly wrote:

Runner's World did this in a lab. The subject ran with a lower heart rate in the Vaporfly 4%. He also ran with less muscle activity in his quads, calves, and shins. Both indicating that the shoes require you expend less energy to maintain the same pace.

So we should put an asterisk next to Flanagan's win?

Yes, you should put an asterisk next to anyone's win who wasn't barefoot. Then at the bottom of the table, next to the asterisk, write "wore shoes".

Someone mentioned Robinson above - her's one of his photos from Sunday. What is this shoe? Kind of an elitey sole with a new streak upper? It doesn't look like the breaking2 knit but as a whole the shoe looks much more like the elite than the Zoom and/or Vapors

They made limited productions in that colorway of the Elite without a fine tuned plate. Kevin Hart also wore the same pair in the race.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbTfrU0hjEz/

GlobalView1 wrote:

Wojo and Rojo, my understanding of the Nike ZV 4% was that the overbuilt foam sole and the internal carbon insert were made to primarily mitigate the pounding that renders marathoners' muscles less effective in the latter stages of the race.

This is opposed to the "put them on and your efficiency improves right away" dynamic you refer to. If you were to do a treadmill test as you suggest, it would have to involve long treadmill runs (30kms + -- maybe more on a treadmill, where impact is reduced) where effiencies are measured after significant muscle damage occurs.

Interesting. So in essence, are you saying that buying these shoes to primarily race 5k-10k would be a waste? There would be no benefit?

I suppose the other question would be if you had money to burn and bought these to train in, would they help over time to allow you to run substantially higher mileage on a weekly basis; in other words reducing fatigue to some degree on a day-to-day level.

Thanks, so Nikeguy was wrong.

There were 100 Elites sold in NY just a few days before the marathon. I imagine 90% went to collectors or people planning to resell to collectors but I'd be shocked if at least 1 of those pairs didn't get worn in the race - there's a lot of dumb money in New York. Not going to trawl marathonfoto to figure it out though.

sfsdfds wrote:

didn't read the article so tak this post with a grain of salt, but faster runners are more likely to buy the vaporfly than the more casual runners. if you take 10 2:30-2:45 runners and 10 4:00+ runners, you'd expect more of the fast ones to have it because they're trying their balls off to run fast times while the 4:00+ runners might just be happy to be there

Ding ding ding! This is exactly correct. If you look at the data, the people wearing the vaporfly's are much faster on average. In fact, if you filter the data and only look at sub 2:50 times, the proportion of negative splitting is almost equal between the two groups..about 66% for vaporfly and 63% for non vaporfly.

Here's another rando racing in VaporFlyElites at Frank furt:

https://www.marathon-photos.com/scripts/photo.py?event=Sports/GKDE/2017/Frankfurt%20Marathon&bib=72&photo=LOUW0125

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ba4ldYGhxvh/?taken-by=vaporflyworldwide

Nikemann?

Nice racing gloves, brah.

I would wear those gloves for a year for a 2:27 but, sadly, it's not me.