Vaporfly placebo

As experiments go, this would be a fairly easy one to conduct. If Nike wants people to know just how much faster (if at all) the shoes are than others, they will fund an independent study. But perhaps too much precision wouldn't be as good for sales as the mystique surrounding the shoes now.

The simplest study would just take 200 volunteers from a large university and split them evenly between treatment and control. The goal would be for 1 in 200 students in a school of 40,000, to be willing and able to run a fast distance race. They would not be told the real purpose of the study, rather they would be told something like, we want to film fast runners wearing this shoe to study differences in wear patterns across runners in order to improve the design. You will need to run as fast as you can for 10 (or 20) miles. Perhaps run a second race a week later and offer a bonus for every 10 seconds faster they run the second time, switching the treatment and control.

That alone would produce excellent evidence. But there are various things that could be done to improve the quality of the estimates (propensity score methods to improve randomization, modeling covariates like prior PR). You could try to get at placebo effects by asking the runners if they have ever heard of "Vaporfly" or to rank a list of shoes in terms of their speediness. For a subset of runners who have no opinion, you could randomly tell them that their shoe uses new technology that makes them 5% faster.

15kHalfDude wrote:

Keep in mind there are a lot of people running marathons and such in adidas Ultraboost, or Brooks Glycerin etc and never used "racing flats" because they were too minimal. The Vaporfly allowed those people to run in race shoes for the first time, that probably weighed half of what they were used to using for many years, and thus got a good improvement and are posting online everywhere about how great they are.

The NY Times study from a year or two ago shows the VF is great, but marginally more efficient than the Zoom Streak 6. That was my recollection.

I think the above reply nails it in my opinion, especially for the regular Joe runner. The low weight and not just weight but size (i.e. not Hoka big), and high cushioning make them great for anyone running a marathon who would normally wear something substantially heavier to save their feet. Do they make you run faster than other shoes? - probably not, but they make running long distances easier than heavier shoes, or lighter shoes with less cushion.