Riley made the team because he wore Alphaflys. Linden lost out because she didn't.

the doped shoes wrote:

THOUGHTSLEADER wrote:

Rojo, you've lost your mind in the shoe hysteria. Practically NOBODY was wearing a standard pair of racing flats. That is no longer a thing. Everyone has a shoe with a plate and a significant stack height/foam midsole. I'd urge you to look at Runner's World's analysis.

First of all, discussing the biggest thing since drugs (steroids, EPO, etc) that has removed the 'purity' of competitive physicality from a foot-race, which is technology's encroachment on shoe-wear, is hardly 'hysteria'.

Secondly, just jamming more foam and/or a carbon plate in a shoe will not determine its effectiveness in energy storage and return.

Lastly, RW analysis (or other probably) is probably not going to get into the specifics of what is the physics behind the specific improvements in the shoes. But post a link if you think they have an analysis of value.

No, that is not the hysteria. The hysteria is thinking Riley would fall out of the top 10 if he didn't have the advantage of his shoes. It ignores everyone else in the top 10 had plated shoes (mostly Nike Next). So it's an irrelevant point. We don't have studies on if the prototypes that are challenging the Nikes work as well. We have anecdotal evidence they're pretty damn good from the women's side and in jumps in performance from other athletes (the 50-year-old in the UK, CJ Albertson, Ward/Fauble in Boston).

So maybe the competitor brands have failed, and in testing they're waaaay off. In reality, if they've narrowed the gap from Adios --> Vaporfly by a decent margin as it appears, the idea that Riley would fall out of the top 10 is absurd even if the rest of the top 10 was wearing challenger shoes (they were NOT).

Many of you are making arguments based on the assumption that Nike sees actual race results in the shoes and adapts accordingly. This is 100% false. They measure many athletes running economy and go through many iterations of the shoe until they get it where they want to go. The alphafly was being designed many years ago. It takes years of R&D to make this kind of shoe. We saw weird shoes with these pods more than a year ago, that means the shoe existed for a long time and was solely lab tested. They don't just give prototypes away to random sub elites as soon as it's conceived. When a shoe comes out most likely it is close to or even over the 10th prototype. It usually takes around 10 until a company is satisfied.

you might be one of the only intelligent people on these message boards!

Yawn, so much controversy.

Does it really matter? US Marathon running depth is still really poor and almost everyone will finish 1mile plus behind the Olympic medal places

ShilohDoesntCare wrote:

Nike...measure many athletes running economy and go through many iterations of the shoe until they get it where they want to go. The alphafly was being designed many years ago. It takes years of R&D to make this kind of shoe.

Yes, it is conceivable, as a poster alluded earlier, that even though Kipchoge and Rupp were in "alpha-flys" by outside appearance, each athlete may actually have had tailor-made tweaks to their shoes. For example, the spring restitution between their air-pods may have been different, selected based upon their weight and average ground-contact times. Tests on a treadmill with Kipchoge may have been done, in different shoe iterations, in preparation for the breaking-2-hours project, but these prototypes would have been created after, and in conjunction with, a lot of dynamical computer modeling.

This (and ditto Linden).

Linden must be gutted on being stuck with Brooks. So many “maybe ifs...”

From the Wired article, a quote from Brooks: ““Right from the onset, we’re not looking into how much more efficient” the shoe makes you” ok great.

This should be Des’s response.

The longer that someone like Des says nothing the longer she promotes Nike.

I don't understand (well I do) why people are all up in arms with Nike's % shoes. Nike has always been a level above the competition when it comes to racing shoes and this hasnt changed anything. If I'm running on the track, I'm wearing the victories or Mambas. If I'm racing Xc, i'm going with the Vic Xcs. Before the %s,I went with the streak LTs on the roads which I still think are faster but they beat my legs up pretty good for anything after 5k.

Nice job Jonathan, sort of picking Hehir.

I hadn't seen that sort of bounce since Kipchoge ran the final 600 of his sub-2.