The spikes are not worth ‘several seconds’ in the 1500

runderun wrote:

[quote]

It is completely relevant because when you are talking about a marginal benefit of 0.5s (where you pulled that from is a mystery, but anyway), you are in the realms of talking about no real benefit at all. Half a second can be lost or made up by any number of random racing incidents or just not being comfortable in a shoe. In essence, a benefit of 0.5s is a completely undetectable gain.

You don't understand statistics. A consistent 0.5 second gain attributable to a shoe is entirely different from a random 0.5 second gain. You would be an idiot to forego a certain 0.5 second gain unless the shoe was dangerous or unbearably uncomfortable. Same goes for a shoe that gives you a reliable 0.1 second edge over any other shoe.

Hobbs Joggler wrote:

runderun wrote:

[quote]

It is completely relevant because when you are talking about a marginal benefit of 0.5s (where you pulled that from is a mystery, but anyway), you are in the realms of talking about no real benefit at all. Half a second can be lost or made up by any number of random racing incidents or just not being comfortable in a shoe. In essence, a benefit of 0.5s is a completely undetectable gain.

You don't understand statistics. A consistent 0.5 second gain attributable to a shoe is entirely different from a random 0.5 second gain. You would be an idiot to forego a certain 0.5 second gain unless the shoe was dangerous or unbearably uncomfortable. Same goes for a shoe that gives you a reliable 0.1 second edge over any other shoe.

Exactly. If you look at the actual rudimentary statistical done by the user above, you will see that the new shoes correspond to an improvement of perhaps a couple tenths of a second AT MOST.

Still, if you can guarantee that I run 0.2s faster just by changing my shoes, OF COURSE I'm going to use those shoes. Anyone whose livelihood, or collegiate accolades, rely on those extra tenths of a second will no doubt choose the superior shoe, even if the advantage is relatively slim.

BUT, this does not mean that the shoes are as absurd of a game changer as many are claiming. We simply do not have the data yet to support that claim.

Jacob Kiplimo ran a 26:33 without the pretend "super spikes". His second 5k in that race was a 13:06 ! Enough already with the imaginary Santa Claus lol.

Why not wear them? Do N.B.A players wear Converse still?? DrJ dunks with Converse..Michael Jordan dunked with Nike. Track and Field enthusiasts need to get out of the cinder track era lol.

distancerunningwizard wrote:

Jacob Kiplimo ran a 26:33 without the pretend "super spikes". His second 5k in that race was a 13:06 ! Enough already with the imaginary Santa Claus lol.

Geb ran 26:22. Bekele ran 26:17. Both without super shoes. What’s your point?

nike has created the “Santa Claus” - whatever that means. nike has marketed them as a super shoe. So much so that they had to modify the design to make them legal. They were probably ecstatic when that happened. “Our shoes are so fast they had to be modified to be legal!”

El G was doped.

Sucks to say

Most his time were

Doping didn't really get cracked down until past few years

Makhloufi might still fly under the radar

Hobbs Joggler wrote:

runderun wrote:

[quote]

It is completely relevant because when you are talking about a marginal benefit of 0.5s (where you pulled that from is a mystery, but anyway), you are in the realms of talking about no real benefit at all. Half a second can be lost or made up by any number of random racing incidents or just not being comfortable in a shoe. In essence, a benefit of 0.5s is a completely undetectable gain.

You don't understand statistics. A consistent 0.5 second gain attributable to a shoe is entirely different from a random 0.5 second gain. You would be an idiot to forego a certain 0.5 second gain unless the shoe was dangerous or unbearably uncomfortable. Same goes for a shoe that gives you a reliable 0.1 second edge over any other shoe.

A 0.5 second gain is undetectable precisely because it is so small that it will never be consistent, at least not in repeated tests with sufficient statistical power. I could set up a treadmill test with top end runners, give them precisely the same conditions and preparation on two different dates and they would almost all likely run times greater than +/-0.5s on those two occasions. There is no method we can use to detect a 0.5s advantage that could be conveyed by these shoes. The best we can do is a running economy test because we have a good benchmark for this - anything above a 1% gain is likely to be a real advantage because all runners have a round a 1% variation in their running economy on a day-to-day basis. That's why the original Vaporfly was marketed on the basis of its RE advantage rather than time gains. RE doesn't translate straightforwardly into time but a RE test on the Dragonfly would be the best way to tell us if it provides an advantage. My starting position would be that the Dragonfly provides a running economy gain of less than 4% as it is built on the same technology as the Vaporfly but with a little less Zoomx foam. That's seems like a reasonable proposition.

Again, athletes and brands would not insist on wearing the Dragonfly if the advantage was not in the detectable range. 0.5s is not enough to override commercial interests.

I think your selection of years to compare is inappropriate and artificially deflates the effect of the new spikes your cut-off point doesn't accurately capture the proliferation of the super spikes. In 2019, only Nike athletes had a super spike and even then, not for the whole year, and only the top end athletes had them for any length of time. This means that you have a lot of athletes and a whole lot more times set in standard spikes which are deflating your average for the post-super spike estimates.

The Dragonfly really only became widely available in Q2 2020, which is when college athletes and non-Nike could have started getting them. In fact, it wasn't available in sufficient quantities until late 2020/early 2021. My guess is that if you compare times in 2020 and 2021 to 2018/2019 averages, a much greater boost in times will be apparent

The very fact that D1 coaches couldn't overrace and overtrain and injure their athletes for a considerable period would help fast times. But if you look at top 100 qualifiers in D1 and D3 national qualifiers in 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, you'll see no significant differences at the top or bottom in the distances from 800 through 10000m. There is literally no evidence to support that the spikes are faster. By contrast, tons shows the road shoes are.

Random question xyz wrote:

Call me when someone runs 3:25. Until then the spikes are not worth several seconds (pre spike most years someone would run 3:28 or better and ‘several’ seconds off that is 3:25 or better), and probably not even a full second.

Finally someone can use their brain. There are plenty of non-Nike athletes who ran in older spikes that have run fast this year. The world leading 10,000 time is in old spikes. Every year we see sub 3:30 1500's, right now the world lead is 3:30. Will we see a sub 3:30 this year? Yeah, probably. We see them pretty much every year. If the spikes made you 1 second per lap faster then that typical 3:28 world lead would mean we should see a 3:25 world record this year. I highly doubt we see that. And our typical slew of Americans running 3:34-3:38 should all be running 3:30-3:34. Yet we only have a few sub 3:35 runners. We are seeing more depth this year, but that has been something that's been building over the past decade. And it's happening because the NCAA depth has become insane in the past decade. The past few years NCAA times to qualify for nationals is like 13:45 for 5k. Go back to the year 2000, people who are now sitting at home would have been All-Americans 20 years ago. And you can't say enough about the benefits of having a full YEAR of doing huge training and not having to peak for three separate championship seasons. If we have multiple sub 3:30 Americans and multiple people running under the 1500 world record this year, then I'll change my mind. But I don't think that's going to happen. We haven't even seen a men's American record this year in the 1500/steeple/5k/10k. If spikes take a second per lap off then we should be seeing these records fall left and right. A second per lap at that level is huge.

runderun wrote:

I think your selection of years to compare is inappropriate and artificially deflates the effect of the new spikes your cut-off point doesn't accurately capture the proliferation of the super spikes. In 2019, only Nike athletes had a super spike and even then, not for the whole year, and only the top end athletes had them for any length of time. This means that you have a lot of athletes and a whole lot more times set in standard spikes which are deflating your average for the post-super spike estimates.

The Dragonfly really only became widely available in Q2 2020, which is when college athletes and non-Nike could have started getting them. In fact, it wasn't available in sufficient quantities until late 2020/early 2021. My guess is that if you compare times in 2020 and 2021 to 2018/2019 averages, a much greater boost in times will be apparent

Hi runderun.

I didn't exclusively choose 2019 - I just used it as an example. I cited only the top 30 athletes (and not the 50th, 100th, 150th, 200th etc) because it was only this top group of Nike/NB athletes who had access to prototypes of next gen spikes. However yes, you are correct that they did not become mainstream until mid to late 2020. That's why I will continue to track these results throughout this year and even for years to come. A bad year time wise, by pure chance, could totally skew the numbers. Likewise a good year could skew it.

Where I think the change will actually be most visible isn't near the top, but further down the list. There is pretty much *zero* variation 2010-2018 in the times of the 150th and 200th fastest season bests of the men's 1500m. In fact, across that period, every single mark is separated by 1.00 seconds for 150th, and 0.66s for 200th. I.e. while world leads and patterns eb and flow in the top 50 (where you see variation of 2-3s/1-3% year to year), there is almost no change once you get down the list. If the spikes really are worth 1s or so per lap, or even 0.5s per lap, you should 100% see a considerable spike in that 150th-200th range.

FYI though, one reason why my working hypothesis is still maxing out around 0.5% (still not insignificant) is partly based off of 2020. In 2020, covid obliterated athletics. Across the board races and meets cancelled, training disrupted etc. Despite all of the majors being cancelled and/or held with whittled down elite fields, the disruptions to training, etc. - the impact of next gen road shoes on the marathon is strong that **across the board** from WL down to the 200th best SB, 2020 was a faster year than the 8 year pre next gen shoe average. That's staggering.

However, when you look at track races, aside from world leads (and records) by Gidey and Cheptegei, 2020 was significantly *slower* than the pre spike average. By more than a second in many cases for men's 1500m, and by 2-3s in the women's 1500m. The disparity was even bigger in the 5000m. Again, this doesn't mean the spikes make you slower, it just meant that covid screwed over track.

Given the road shoes are so good that the times still overcame the massively reduced road season while track times actually slowed down, it feels logical to hypothesize that while conferring an advantage to the wearer, next gen spikes likely offer a reduced benefit compared to the road shoes.

Again, this is just a hypothesis. Will post with updates at the end of the season.

PS - some folks talking about 10,000m times above - if there is a 0.5% improvement or even slightly less, that could still be worth 2-3s in a 5k, 6-8s in a 10k on the track. Not 45s claimed by the likes of Ross Tucker (which is ludicrous IMO), but still not at all redundant. The spikes indeed could have been what got Joshua Cheptegei across the line vs Bekele's records as he beat the 5000m mark by less than 2s, and the 10000m mark by less than 7s.