Super spikes are worth 5 secs per mile

Hot Takes wrote:

I guarantee you a runner running 3:54 today will run faster than 3:59 in victories or some other old spike. You're acting like people haven't been getting faster the past 15 years BEFORE the new spikes. When the 2009 NCAA indoor season started the NCAA RECORD was 3:57, then German Fernandez ran 3:55 and that was a big deal. Flash forward to the 2019 a decade later still before 'super spikes' and 10 guys ran 3:57 or faster in the same season (what was the record barely a decade before) and the new record keeps getting lowered. Then in 2020 still before super spikes there were 14 guys at 3:57 or faster. The depth had been getting deeper and deeper for a long time, yet you are attributing all of the improvements to new shoes and ignoring the fact that the times had been dropping long before the shoes? A 3:59 in 2010 is what a 3:57 in 2020 was which is a 3:55 of today, and will be a 3:53 of 2032. Times will keep dropping with or without any new shoes being made. The top end will barely get faster, but the numbers of people at some arbitrary threshold will skyrocket as we approach the maximum speed that humans can go.

800 dude wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

You've just ticked two boxes as to why it would have been banned by WADA. It is significantly and therefore unfairly performance enhancing and it can have a negative effect on in health. But it hasn't been banned. It isn't significantly performance enhancing. But the other drugs athletes are taking will be.

There is more evidence for the performance enhancing effects of bicarb than almost any other substance, including most PEDs. (Not saying it's more effective than PEDs, but there aren't a lot of randomly controlled trials about PEDs, for obvious reasons.)

You act as though WADA's three principles are some kind of bright line rule, but they're not. They're background principles used to guide decisionmaking. Whether a substance or method meets the criteria is frequently a subject of debate. And even meeting two of three criteria does not require WADA to act. The principles simply state that a substance or method may be banned based on those criteria.

In this case the "health risks" of bicarb are not the type that WADA has historically been concerned about. Short term diarrhea is unpleasant, but not a plausible health risk. Moreover, Maurten's formulation essentially eliminates that side-effect, so there are no longer any real consequences other than a mega-dose of sodium, which is a non-issue for a substance used primarily in competition, by athletes who sweat a ton.

Incidentally, you're also just wrong that a substance is necessarily "unfairly" performance enhancing if it is "significantly" performance enhancing. The "spirit of the sport" principle in the WADA code is an extremely vague catch-all, but it clearly does not duplicate the "performance enhancing" principle, otherwise it would not be doing any work. Plenty of substances are significantly performance enhancing without violating the spirit of the sport. Caffeine and acetaminophen are two examples.

snowflakes wrote:

The shoes have some sort of effect, but your results just show a correlation. There were a ton of things that occurred during covid and 2022 that increased interest in distance running. Double threshold style training, wavelights (but not just the light itself but the value of even paced running), an increase in running media (particularly for Western athletes, CitiusMag did a terrific job at stirring interest), sponsorship opportunities for High Schoolers, the obsession now with Gen Z and health (no doubt due to social media), tougher entry standards which invariably leads to fast super meets, BU (the BU track is built differently with the plywood see this link ), I didn't see any of these things in the early 2010's. It seems like track is just more popular now. A lot of the distance kids at High Schools talk about Jakob Ingebrigtsen or Cole Hocker as if they were celebrities. Nobody cared about that back then.

Link:www.geoffreyburns.com/stream/it-pays-b...

I'm not saying that the shoes are worthless, but every time someone brings up the topic of shoes, it's to bring down performances nowadays when comparing them to past runners. We have to be careful about making absolute claims because I can just compare world records set in the 90's to every other era and claim that because of the advent of EPO, records started going down like crazy. Do you think El G, Geb, Kipketer, Komen, or Morceli doped? Do you think that they had some sort of enhancements in an era right after the advent of EPO? That's what you sound like.

cxhbn wrote:

snowflakes wrote:

The shoes have some sort of effect, but your results just show a correlation. There were a ton of things that occurred during covid and 2022 that increased interest in distance running. Double threshold style training, wavelights (but not just the light itself but the value of even paced running), an increase in running media (particularly for Western athletes, CitiusMag did a terrific job at stirring interest), sponsorship opportunities for High Schoolers, the obsession now with Gen Z and health (no doubt due to social media), tougher entry standards which invariably leads to fast super meets, BU (the BU track is built differently with the plywood see this link ), I didn't see any of these things in the early 2010's. It seems like track is just more popular now. A lot of the distance kids at High Schools talk about Jakob Ingebrigtsen or Cole Hocker as if they were celebrities. Nobody cared about that back then.

Link:www.geoffreyburns.com/stream/it-pays-b...

I'm not saying that the shoes are worthless, but every time someone brings up the topic of shoes, it's to bring down performances nowadays when comparing them to past runners. We have to be careful about making absolute claims because I can just compare world records set in the 90's to every other era and claim that because of the advent of EPO, records started going down like crazy. Do you think El G, Geb, Kipketer, Komen, or Morceli doped? Do you think that they had some sort of enhancements in an era right after the advent of EPO? That's what you sound like.

BU track has been around over 20 years. Were we seeing times like we are now in 2019? 2018? Of course not. Every one all of a sudden got interested in track during covid enough to rewrite every Men’s and Women’s World, National, Collegiate, HS record book in 5 years!? BS

And then the ol’ 90s epo argument. Admitting that bouncy shoes are as (or even more) effective than the notorious banned substance while simultaneously thinking today’s athletes are clean - blahahahaaaa! Geb is now 40th on the all-time marathon list. All that supposed “help” only to relegate a top 3 greatest runner ever to mid-pack. Replaced by slop bouncy-shoe times. In 5 years he won’t even be in the top 100. You really think Cheptegei is better than Bekele!? And it’s not like world lists are the only lists being decimated by slop times. NCAA has been completely rewritten. You think 70s, 80s, 90s NCAA times are enhanced!?

In 2019, 66 US men broke 4 in the mile. In 2023, 116 and in 2024, 125! Breaking 4 means absolutely nothing anymore. Bro - this is your sport, at least take some pride in it.

DataDoesntLie wrote:

zzzz wrote:

Could no longer edit my first reply, but a better answer is that the results I got from my analysis are pace specific results, not event specific results. You can calculate times in other events for yourself up to 72 second per 400m pace.

400 pace

old spike time, super spike time, time benefit of superspike per 400

55 54.7 0.3
56 55.6 0.4
57 56.6 0.4
58 57.6 0.4
59 58.5 0.5
60 59.5 0.5
61 60.4 0.6
62 61.4 0.6
63 62.3 0.7
64 63.2 0.8
65 64.2 0.8
66 65.1 0.9
67 66.0 1.0
68 66.9 1.1
69 67.8 1.2
70 68.7 1.3
71 69.5 1.5
72 70.4 1.6

This is a very important point. The closer one gets to maximim limits of humans, the less help the shoes can give. It is an efficiency equation. If you are 99% efficient, you can only gain 1% from there. A less efficient runner gains more.

The ncaa data I posted shows an immediate race time benefit for the shoes, but the records did not immediately fall because records are wild outliers of near perfect running. The 100th place times saw a clear and immediate benefit.

Over time that 100th place benefit got even better as the shoes helped increase training.

The race time improvements exactly correspond in time with super spike introduction after being steady for a decade.

Surely some would have just preferred the feel of the old spikes, kept using them and been just as competitive if they didn't matter. But the old style spikes are now gone despite the new style costing substantially more. Offer a pair of brand new 2019 spikes to any national or international contender for a big race. There will be zero takers and rightly so.

Armstronglivs wrote:

None of this analysis about the supposed benefits of either the shoes or bicarb is worth anything. The reason for that is that in attempting to measure the effects of the shoes or bicarb on performance no account has been made of the effects of doping, which we know for a fact is present. We know that doping has long been present in the sport, that it continues to be so and is subject to continuous and ongoing development. It is a science - and a multimillion dollar one. Over a billion dollars annually in fact. Howman says dopers are getting away with it. At school and college level antidoping is virtually nonexistent. So doping is undoubtedly affecting performances across the board. Nothing claimed about shoes or bicarb can have any credibility unless an accurate accounting can be made of the performance enhancing effects of drugs. No such accounting has been made and certainly not here.

But the farcical nature of the claims about the effects of the shoes, for example, is that if they could deliver 5 seconds in a mile then athletes like Ingebrigtsen and Hocker should be running 3:21-22 over the 1500. They aren't significantly less talented than El G and Lagat. Alternatively, you must consider the best today to be only capable of 3:31 in the shoes that El G and Lagat wore.

Armstronglivs wrote:

DataDoesntLie wrote:

This is a very important point. The closer one gets to maximim limits of humans, the less help the shoes can give. It is an efficiency equation. If you are 99% efficient, you can only gain 1% from there. A less efficient runner gains more.

The ncaa data I posted shows an immediate race time benefit for the shoes, but the records did not immediately fall because records are wild outliers of near perfect running. The 100th place times saw a clear and immediate benefit.

Over time that 100th place benefit got even better as the shoes helped increase training.

The race time improvements exactly correspond in time with super spike introduction after being steady for a decade.

Surely some would have just preferred the feel of the old spikes, kept using them and been just as competitive if they didn't matter. But the old style spikes are now gone despite the new style costing substantially more. Offer a pair of brand new 2019 spikes to any national or international contender for a big race. There will be zero takers and rightly so.

Your argument is refuted by one glaring fallacy. The level of improvement possible isn't reduced as we near the limit of "human capacity" but individual capacity. The limit of human capacity was once thought to be 4 minutes for the mile. So how did it get to 3:43? But for the two runners who recorded 3:59.4 and 3:43 respectively they were likely near their individual limits - taking into account training, tracks and shoes as well as their natural ability. So it follows that for a runner of any level, if they are trained close to their physical limit the advantages of the shoes will be reduced. That will be the same if the limit is of a 5 minute miler or a 3:45 miler. But that shows it really isn't the shoes that make a difference but training. And the other things athletes take to enhance their abilities.

DataDoesntLie wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

Your argument is refuted by one glaring fallacy. The level of improvement possible isn't reduced as we near the limit of "human capacity" but individual capacity. The limit of human capacity was once thought to be 4 minutes for the mile. So how did it get to 3:43? But for the two runners who recorded 3:59.4 and 3:43 respectively they were likely near their individual limits - taking into account training, tracks and shoes as well as their natural ability. So it follows that for a runner of any level, if they are trained close to their physical limit the advantages of the shoes will be reduced. That will be the same if the limit is of a 5 minute miler or a 3:45 miler. But that shows it really isn't the shoes that make a difference but training. And the other things athletes take to enhance their abilities.

You misquoted me, see above. Of course each human has different limits. The differences between Bannister and El G are technology, training, and psychology (El G KNEW sub 4 was not a big deal). We cannot know their actual physical limits, but Bannister trained a lot less, so likely was not nearly as close to his limit.

My point was that as one gets closer to perfection, the possible improvemens become much smaller. It seems that you agree with that. Slower runners tend to be less efficient and the shoes increase efficiency, so slower runners benefit more, but even 4:00 milers are seeing a significant performance boost.

I gave data that shows an obvious improvement in race times exactly corresponding with when the shoes were introduced. Then it gradually got faster from there as the shoes helped increase training (as you said was required).

So, yes, the training was increased leading to faster times because the shoes allowed greater efficiency. The greater efficiency also resulted in an immediate race time benefit. In both cases, the shoes are the primary factor.

rekrunner wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

Aside from your point that as each athlete nears their limits the less room there is for improvement from the shoes - which might be true and we might agree on - you can't make a claim of fact that it is the shoes that have resulted in recent improvements because doping remains an ongoing and unmeasurable factor. New drugs could account for the faster times. You can't rule that out and say it must be the shoes.

You said his argument was refuted by one glaring fallacy, but after your not so clever hair-splitting substitution of "human limit" with "individual limit", his point still stands unrefuted and untouched.

And now, your faithful double negative argument from ignorance, that we can't know it is not some new undetectable drug, is currently a non-starter. You have yet to establish that drugs had any performance impact before supershoes, and yet you keep doubling down arguing that the depth and breadth of our ignorance is such that we cannot know what all the data and observations are telling us. But you can only speak for yourself.

What we have seen is that times on the roads dropped, with the widespread rollout of supershoes around 2017, and on the track with the widespread rollout of superspikes around 2021. If it's a new drug, why the lengthy delay?

To make the new drug argument, you would have to explain why there was a delay in track events with spikes compared to the roads. And given that faster times have been observed across many countries worldwide, for men and women, not only among professionals, but university and high school levels, it boggles the mind that a highly intellectual and informed drugs expert like you, or maybe your friend Dave Howman, has not already identified this new powerful drug that must be well known to so many athletes across the world, including high school students.

Recall the argument that EPO works in the 1990s is the same argument you deny now -- the correlation in time: EPO was widely used in the 1990s in another sport of cycling at the same time many East Africans and some North Africans were getting faster. But despite its widespread use in American and European countries in cycling, their fellow American and European distance runners, with their 1980s level of performances, struggled to keep up with their new African competitors, unless they themselves were also of East or North African origin, until the supershoe-era.