Super Shoe Adjusted All Time Lists

Do Mondo vs. cinder track conversion next. Then go ahead and do a pre-super shoe spike vs. leather shoe spike all-time list conversion. Finally, combine it all together to do a cinder track & leather shoe vs super shoe mondo track conversion and then... well you get my point. The conversions you did may be accurate (idk personally, but they seem reasonable) but there's an ad infinitum element to these conversion that makes it arbitrary to stop at just super shoe to non super shoe conversion. Unless this was just for fun I'm not sure if there's otherwise a meaningful conclusion that this is supposed to show

You’re not very sharp.

@Rojo

That messageboard poster you referenced is spot on. I have been crosschecking both USA top lists and NCAA lists trying to come up with some logical conversions. Obviously there seems to be some variability based on both event (I don’t believe the 800m has been significantly affected by super shoes at the international level) and who is a high responder. But I thought this was a fun excercise to at least throw some general conversions out there. My formula was a bit more convoluded and unnecessarily cluttered but I found an easy shorthand to be: (5000m time in seconds x .9875) to convert to a super shoe time. I am working on collecting 1500m to marathon data now to convert those

The NCAA data is VERY messy because Covid resulted in their being an extra year of eligibility.

what about a synthetic track adjusted list?

It is equal to the supershoes adjusted one, since everybody is still microdosing (you just need to miss a couple of tests per year while you are glowing...no worries however, given that the average number of out of competition tests per athlete is only 2.8 per year!)

I'll be very interested in 10,000m and marathon.

RE track surface; Mondotrack WS, the "super track", has been around for while. It's been used at every Olympics since 2008.

Give Bob Schul a all weather track and super shoes and he goes 12:45

You are doing 9-10s and the answer is more like 5-6.5s. They are a big aid, but I don't believe for a second Chris Solinsky ran the equivalent of 12:45-6 three times in one season (notably never finishing better than 3rd in those races despite it being past Bekele/Kipchoge/Lagat's prime). Solinsky was a great runner, but this is giving too much respect to that era based on shoe tech. I don't think Solinsky and some of these fringe East African medal guys were all 12:37-12:45 guys in superspikes.

No American-born athlete had ever broken 12:55 and now Klecker, Teare, Kincaid, Fisher (I know he’s Canadian born) have all done it. And Fisher was (you guessed it) … 9 seconds faster at 12:46. In the history of the world, 6 men ran 12:46 or faster until 2020. From 2020-2023, ten men have done it; including an American and several others who have never sniffed a medal on the global stage. You are still still thinking of 12:37 to 12:45 as a crazy time, when the data is showing us it is not. 12:45 now is a 12:53 guy from 10 years ago. Incredible athlete, but not a medal lock by any stretch. Even our 12:35 man is not some superhuman, Cheptegei is incredible, but has lost the 10000m Olympic Title, and been handily beaten at World CC and the World Half Champs. 12:35 in Bekele, Farah, and Gebs day meant they would never lose a damn race in their prime.

Get over it. The super shoes are a part of the sport. You going to do a conversion for the type of track next too?

What you are missing is how many men ran between 12:46-12:53 in the old days even in races without wavelight and often an unwillingness to push the 3rd/4th km. I don’t think 12:40-12:45 is a *crazy* time. But I didn’t think 12:48-12:53 was a crazy time back then either. We are arguing over 3-4s, so there’s not some huge divide here. From races like Paris 2012 we see a lot of runners capable of 12:46-12:49 just like we see 12:40-12:43 times now. But John Kipkoech was not a 12:40 guy in superspikes. I don’t buy it.

EDIT: and to the American side using the 5-6s adjustment, only Fisher stands up over Ritz/Solinsky. That makes sense as he is more internationally competitive than they were.

I'm on board with that. It's a % not some arbitrary number of seconds. I always guessed the day Bekele ran 12:37 he was probably a 12:31-12:32 runner in today's era.

old man yells at clouds. More at 10. Get over yourself.

Bekele, Geb, Komen, Barega, Krop, Kipchoge, Kejelcha, Gebremeskel,

Aligned. Seconds are easier to think about and here the times won’t affect things much. For women the impact is great because the effect is greater the longer you run and the slower the speed. So you are talking about Dibaba’s 14:11 more in the 14:03 neighborhood

This is all such bs generalization...this assumes that you know the actual repeatable effects of each super shoe and to what extent each athlete responds to the shoe. How about we adjust all the race times of those who live at altitude and those and don't? That's actually easier to measure with hemocrit levels...

I don't like the adjusted individual times either. I find the general trend more valuable.

Anyone who calls the Nike Dragonfly a "super spike" has never run in them. They are a nice, light, cushioned spike. There is no carbon plate in them. You guys would have lost your minds over the Victory Elites.

It's also absolutely insane to suggest that Dathan would be a 12:46 guy in this era. Fisher is straight up better than Dathan (and definitely Solinsky) in every metric. It's not particularly close. Now, we could maybe quibble that Rupp and Lagat were better than Fisher, but putting Solinsky and Dathan ahead of him is just laughable. You guys are so tainted by nostalgia for one of the worst eras of American distance running in history that you are entirely oblivious to our current distance renaissance. Don't worry, I'm paying attention, and I'm enjoying it immensely.