Records are being broken - is it ALL shoes?

When did the post-NCAA X-C Championships 5K at BU get cranking?   Lots of Top 30 times run in that meet now.

Heb Elliot & N. Willis were doper or not?

Just to read in your psychic.

You see a big jump in performances in these latest pandemic and non active years and you still accuse the old runners of the benefit of drugs?

Marathon less than 2 hours

A 5000m WR 12:35 in a highly inactive years.

Three runners in the Olympic games running under 3:10:00 in the 1500m in a highly inactive year?

A 800m women final with two women under 1:56

A runner from the NL wining three medals, two of them gold?

Nothing is ever totally and completely one thing or another. Yes, training methods and intensity at the high school level has changed and allowed collegians to achieve more especially in their frosh years. Yes, track technology, oversized indoor facilities and pacing has gotten better. But it is, most definitely, at least 90% shoes. Mileage, workouts, recovery may vary slightly, but the constant with ALL top performances are super shoes. Kessler is not a world beater without them. Hell, they almost brought a washed Bekele to a WR in the thon. 

Love em or hate em, they're here to stay and you are fighting a losing battel lining up without them on.

When I last checked you have never run in the new shoes.

Clearly a number of factors including the shoes are working together to improve standards. Standards keep getting higher people reset their view on what is good and aim higher each year.

The internet and spread of knowledge of training methods has had a massive impact on standards particularly in the last decade and particularly in younger runners and their coaches. Even before the super shoes the number of sub 4 high school kids was increasing significantly. There are more and more better informed runners and coaches training more and more optimally each year.

There has been a definite increase of people doing more work at anaerobic threshold and running a high volume of easy miles the rest of the time. This has followed on from the work done by Marius Bakken and others posted online and now from the approach taken by Jakob and his brothers. This is a key development as anaerobic threshold is the key limiting factor in endurance running. People did it before but not in such a focused way and not as much of it. The increased polarisation of easy and hard days is equally important.

Sports science has moved on to being more practically useful, more widely available and is continuing to develop all the time. e.g. altitude tents and houses, portable lactate monitors allowing accurate threshold work, strength and conditioning improvements, recovery methods etc.

Better meets with big groups of elite and sub elite athletes of similar standards turning up to run in paced meets for times for qualifying standards or just to run fast. This has particularly been the case through Covid where there were limited races so people turned up ready to go. This has continued as restrictions have been lifted.

Add the shoes and better track surfaces indoors and out to all the above and improvements are even bigger.

I think it is daft to try and put a set time on the improvement from the shoes though. Some people will benefit more than others and if everything else is equal then slower runners will surely get more time as people get a % improvement due to the shoes not a set amount of time per lap or mile.

There should be a lot of credit given to today's generation for training hard, training smart and taking the opportunities to run fast and complete. It's not all the shoes and it is disrespectful to dismiss performances as just down to the shoes. Rojo said in his pod cast today's runners are no better than in the past. Certainly the gap is made to look bigger by the shoes and tracks but some of it is also down to being much better informed than previous generations about training (learning from them and their mistakes) and training much smarter, along with higher expectations or a revised view of what is good. This results in a higher volume of runners at a higher standard from high school, through to college to pro level. More better runners, more chance of some of them running amazing times and more chance of medallists.

VaporFlys give me 15 sec per mile. I’ve tested it multiple times.

Compared to what shoes over what distance and what times are you running?

this is the worst take I have ever heard. almost as bad as the guy saying "more scientific training methods." it's all the shoes

I said it was being shared more and applied more, not that there is new knowledge. Maybe COVID allowed more research, people had more time to look into it because there was nowhere to go.

Because Gregorek isn't that good. He made one US Team and he made a World Final that year. The idea of him being capable of 3:45 or 3:46 in super-spikes I just can't see. He is not near the talent of a contemporary like Josh Kerr or McSweyn, I'm sorry. The Wheating thing is disingenuous because comparing their NCAA careers and adjacent PBs (Wheating 2 seconds faster at 800, multiple NCAA titles) it's not close.

Is it more likely it's 3-4 seconds and Tim Cheruiyot has regressed heavily, or its 1-1.5 and the times make sense.

I’ve been running competitively for 25 years. My old racing flat is the New Balance Hanzo S. It weighs about 4-5 ounces and has no cushioning. The VaporFlys make me about 4 sec faster per quarter in my track intervals. I’m running anywhere from 20-45 sec faster for 5k on the roads, depending on the race. 

It's the shoes. Before that, it was the choreography of pacing/drafting teams. At the international level, doping has been a somewhat uncertain factor throughout. Globally, the emergence of East Africa has been huge.

I don't pay attention to times anymore. And to the extent that this site focuses on such things, I ignore it. If Eliud Kipchoge is the GOAT, it's not because he's run under two hours in an orchestrated promo for one product or another, or because he's run a world record or two in scripted time trials. It's because he won a world championship over El G and Bekele when he was eighteen, and put eighty seconds on the rest of the world at the end of the Olympic marathon eighteen years later, when he wasn't the only guy wearing the mystery shoes.

A new type of undetectable pork burrito.

I don't accuse the old runners of drugs. You have been talking to yourself.

*If you mean Elliot and Willis as the "old runners".

So it's the shoes and not your legs doing the running?

If an athlete was running on a track that rotated slightly (think of those moving walkways at airports), wouldn't the athlete's legs still be doing the running? After all, the moving track isn't doing any running. How are shoes that provide significant return, more so than any piece of equipment we've seen in the past, any different? High return = less effort = less leg fatigue = less overall stress on carviovascular system = faster running. If you're feeling 1% - 2% better during every lap of a 10,000, that can be over a second each lap if you're averaging 70 seconds per lap. Just by putting on a pair of shoes you are potentially able to run 25-30 seconds faster in a 10k...just from shoes.

Super shoes are the beginning of the end. In 20 years they will have developed even newer technology. Average times will drop significantly. Your 13:40 5,000 will be obsolete and high school kids will be laughing at how slow you were in college.