Breaking: Bekele says that the state of the art sub-2 Nike shoes gave him blisters and cost him - adidas guy wins!!

adios to the hype! wrote:

Awesome. I knew those 4% swooshers were all hype.

After Rupp having feet issues after the Prague half. Suguru having difficulty walking after Boston. And Hasay commenting that her legs felt wasted after Boston. Runners should steer clean of NIKE's experimental 4% shoe. It is time to toss them into the castaway pile.

Vaporflys ftw wrote:

5 of the top 6 finishers at Boston for both the men and women were wearing the shoes... in the heat. Bekele is the problem, not the shoes. Dude isn't cut out for the marathon.

Try to keep up. Suguru and Hasay were both suffering after Boston. Rupp likely as well, but he will never say anything anti-Nike.

Vaporflys ftw wrote:

Bekele is the problem, not the shoes. Dude isn't cut out for the marathon.

He has run 2:03:03, #3 all-time (#2 record eligible).

Looking for new watch for trac wrote:

If shoes are the reason you lost then you answer truthfully....

I don't buy Nike anything anymore. If they have a shoe I really like I'll wear it but they never have one I like at the local running stores, trainers flats or spikes.

Everything they have done hurts our sport, If I'm ever a guy is at that level where people want me to wear their stuff I'll never rock the swoosh

(I'm not a sponsored runner so I buy w.e brand)

Are you serious? Without Nike, there would be no track and field. Who in the world do you think supports it right now? As soon as Phil knight dies, I'm betting track and field takes a total nosedive.

Not too long ago, Kipchoge also had an issue with the insoles of his shoes coming out.

Guess what shoe he was wearing?!

Besides that thing with Eliud and his insoles, here are a couple of high-profile athletes who have had problems with Nike shoes:

http://articles.latimes.com/2004/aug/22/sports/sp-olytrackside22

From the Quincy Watts Wikipedia page:

At the World Championships in 1991, Watts won a silver medal in 4x400 relay, which he turned to gold in the next championships in 1993 running the second leg on the team that took almost a second and a half off the World Record he was a part of the year before. That race still stands as the World Record. In the 1993 Individual 400m Final, where Watts was expected to challenge his relay teammates Michael Johnson and Butch Reynolds, his custom built Nike shoe disintegrated as he was coming off the final turn. Continuing to run, he still managed fourth place.[1][2][3] Since this incident, poor Nike shoe quality has been referred to as "doing the Quincy Watts" in track circles. It has also affected Nike's concern for quality control.[4]

hobby jogger two wrote:

New shoes of the same model are fine. I've done it without issues. An entirely new shoe for the first time? That's nuts.

The problem is, even with same model shoes, manufacturers are known to make running (heh) changes in small construction details, such as stitching thread weight or liner fabric qualiy. A model that worked for you before is not guaranteed to be the same exact shoe you might be used to.

Looking for new watch for trac wrote:

If shoes are the reason you lost then you answer truthfully....

I don't buy Nike anything anymore. If they have a shoe I really like I'll wear it but they never have one I like at the local running stores, trainers flats or spikes.

Everything they have done hurts our sport, If I'm ever a guy is at that level where people want me to wear their stuff I'll never rock the swoosh

(I'm not a sponsored runner so I buy w.e brand)

Only wore a Nike shoe once. This was back in 70's with their first waffle soled model. I loved the cushioning, but after only a few runs my heel was sliding out of the heel cup and I never could trust my foot plant. Have run with Asics or Adidas ever since.

So what! This thread is about Kenny B not what shoes a bunch of hacks wear

bkrunner wrote:

rojo wrote:

Are you crazy? Did you watch the race? Can you imagine running a marathon with a blister?

Bekele was amazing today. It's not normal that you get dropped early in a marathon and nearly win it unless the leader blows up. Yet that's what Bekele did today. He just kept coming back - refusing to give up.

There is a whole other thread where people talk about how his form is different - maybe the shoes are partly responsible.

Rojo, you're wrong here. Making excuses about your shoes? That's junior high stuff. It's your job to make sure you're running in a shoe that doesn't give you blisters. Sure, Bekele refused to give up and made a courageous surge late in the race. That doesn't mean he's not lame for blaming the race on his shoes.

So he should know ahead of time whether his shoes will give him blisters or not? Go on and run a marathon with blisters on your feet and then see what you've got to say eh? Clearly you haven't done much real running if you don't know how much running with blisters sucks.

Broken Down wrote:

Vaporflys ftw wrote:

5 of the top 6 finishers at Boston for both the men and women were wearing the shoes... in the heat. Bekele is the problem, not the shoes. Dude isn't cut out for the marathon.

Try to keep up. Suguru and Hasay were both suffering after Boston. Rupp likely as well, but he will never say anything anti-Nike.

Give me the the run Rupp, Hasay and Osako had at Boston and I'll crawl on my kneed and elbows for the next month. Ha!

By the way, I was in the Boston airport the day after the race. It looked like a zombi apocalypse had overtaken the airport. All 30,000 runners must have been wearing those Nike shoes.

You Nike haters be tripp'n.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that he just may be losing it? I mean this is 2 marathons in a row with fairly rough outcomes, and excuses for both of them, not saying everyone isn't entitled to a bad day, but maybe blaming it on the shoes isn't the best move....

When I read in several descriptions how stiff they are and saw in a video someone trying to flex them with their hands, I was actually impressed that Nike was able to counteract that stiffness enough so many runners could (apparently) wear them without getting blisters. My first thought was how can they do that without runners getting blisters? So, I looked at some slow motion videos of some pro runners in regular shoes to see how much flex at the ball of the foot was normal in standard shoes (a lot), and then tried to look at how much the shoes flex on Kipchoge in a video. I don't think I got a good look because I didn't find a slow motion video. I think maybe the normal flex in the foot is partially accommodated by squishing the ball of the foot into that bend/cup of the plate. Maybe Bekele's normal foot flex is more than most others?

Bekele obviously bought into the hype, wanting to experience the possible speed increase, and took a risk using the shoe likely without enough experience with it. Nike will probably be able to modify the shoe to work for Bekele, but in hindsight, he should have stuck with what works in races until then.

Bad Wigins wrote:

I counted him only 5 seconds behind at the 600m to go mark. He should have easily been able to switch gears and run the guy down. He wasn't racing against El Guerrouj or something. Obviously he threw the race.

When they were in the tunnel, then again just as they hit Hyde Park, the gap was down to 2s or less.

dc-guy wrote:

It's on Bekele to make sure he's OK with the equipment. He did not have to wear the vaporfly if he didn't want to. It wasn't long ago that almost every African elite racer (including Bekele) who were sponsored by Nike were wearing the 2011 Zoom Streak 3 because that's what they liked, even though the shoes were several versions old. I'm wearing a pair right now.

It was a great race, but I can only imagine the outcry on this forum if Rupp said he had to slow down at Boston due to a blister.

#1, you don't know that Bekele wasn't required to wear the shoe by his Nike contract.

#2, note that Galen Rupp wore a version of the Vaporfly that had a Streak 6 upper.

Pre won "a high-intensity race"?? Huh? Which?Against nobody good, because Pre never won anything important.

Also that WC steeplechase where Nikes fell apart.

There's a pic on LetsRun somewhere.

Vaporflys ftw wrote:

5 of the top 6 finishers at Boston for both the men and women were wearing the shoes... in the heat. Bekele is the problem, not the shoes. Dude isn't cut out for the marathon.

Are you seriously saying that a 2:03:03 guy "isn't cut out of the marathon"?

Wow.

Here's the deal with prototyping and customizing shoes for elites. They start wearing different versions of the shoe and then give feedback as to what they do and don't like. That feedback is taken and built into the next prototype. This can go on until they feel like they have a version customized and 'perfected' for a specific athlete. One they have a 'perfected' sample they may build a brand new pair based on those same specifications for race day. If you notice now all of the Streak 6 models have glued in insoles. The ones that Kipchoge wore may have been brand new and the spray glue that was used may have not gotten a bond and the insoles then worked free. He then went on to wear Vaporfly 4% prototypes in London and Rio with no issues.

Take Galen, for example. The shoes that he wore at Boston were modified for him between Prague and Boston.

Bekele had certainly tested shoes that were exact copies of the ones that he wore at London yesterday, but they made him a brand new pair for race day. Maybe he did something like a 10K tempo effort in the prototype and deemed them suitable, but maybe you aren't going to have a blister until you hit 15K at race pace instead. It could be something very simple. A rough seam, the race course and terrain, or temperatures and conditions on race day. Do you have any idea how many tiny variables can affect performance in a shoe? It's very hard to get it 100% right when you are customizing shoes for an athlete.

At any rate it's unfortunate that his shoes detracted from his performance. He ran a ballsy race and I thought that he might still have a shot at the win with half a mile to go. Hopefully he recovers well and we will possibly see him in the World Championships.

The Vaporfly Elite has had great success so far and this was an incident where it just wasn't tuned quite right for the specific athlete. The wear testing team works really hard to take the feedback from each elite athlete and to get the shoe 100% right for them, but it's not always a perfect process.