Are there any "super-shoe" cynics/doubters left?

I still tend to air on the side of "the shoes help exponentially in training" and therefore athletes spend more time in spikes, recover faster, get quality work in, and turn around feeling fresher. Do we think the more access you have to them the better off you are? Undoubtedly if you take X athlete and train them then give them Y super shoe on race day it will help them. they literally make you faster but I also think they leave you feeling fresher and less beat up towards the end of longer or faster races, therefore they help prevent blowups as much as they enhance speed.

The road shoes are a huge difference, probably between 3-4 seconds a mile. People are overreacting to the track shoes right now by saying they also give 3-4 seconds. Was Johnny Gregorek a 3:45 indoor miler with spikes? Yomif Kejelcha would be knocking on the door of 3:42? Jakob is actually 2 seconds slower now than he was at 17? Makes no sense.

The difference is the commercial potential. They didn´t sell millions of the swimsuits to hobby swimmers, unlike super shoes who are on everybody´s feet even in your local 5k race.

The road shoes make a much larger difference
The spikes only give 1-2 seconds per k at an elite level

So in a outdoor track 5k you think the vaporflys outperform the dragonflys? Let not even discuss the curves just sheer energy return for that event on that surface

I ran a race yesterday whilst a duathlon was being held at the same time. The boring c*** tri athletes were all pulling themselves off about the £5

It's this. Key points

1) the benefit to running economy is far higher in road shoes than track spikes

2) re spikes - in terms of actual "in-race" performance benefits it's really hard to say what the benefit is because you have offsets in slight weight increase and peak force reduction vs the added cushioning/forefoot deformation which reduces fatigue and other tough to quantify benefits such as Achilles tendon lengthening etc.

What you pointed out though (at least for track spikes) is right though - these new spikes have a massive cumulative benefit in reducing impact fatigues over longer distances on the track (5km upwards) and the 800m-1500m athletes who just put more force into the track to begin with can now do so without their muscles being destroyed as much as in the past - especially in grueling workouts. So if you can run your workouts just as hard and recover so much quicker, think about the cumulative effect of that over the course of a season. Huge.

I'd be interested in a before/after records website. Same thing is in the world of bike racing hour.. merckx and later. Merckx records have stayed in place... Showing human limits

I was very clearly saying its a 3-4 second difference on the roads vs prior road shoes. Not that vaporflys are faster than dragonflys.

A] Jakob was was almost 18 when he set some really fast times in 2018. He had been training like a professional for years. We know that Jim Ryun never ran better than when he was 19 so... it's not far-fetched to think someone [ a highly trained prodigy] could run near their Peak at that age in the 800 or mile.

B] people rarely run their PR in the Olympics . Jackob had one goal last year: win the gold in the 1500. He succeeded easily. He was almost certainly capable of at least 1 to 1.5 seconds faster with no rounds and a pacer. [ maybe more]. Therefore he certainly was capable of 327 flat last year which is a full four+ seconds faster than his 2018 time. [ back when he was chasing times not to gold medals]

C] almost everyone agrees that in the shorter races the advantage with the new track spike technology is not as large as it is in the longer races. So.... let's say two seconds in a 1500. That means that with his likely ability of 327 last year he still has inherently improved 2 seconds since 2018. That is reasonable.

D] he has improved a ton in the 5,000 where spikes make a bigger difference.

So.... actually I disagree with you. it makes a lot of "sense." Two second advantage in the 1500 , 3 seconds per mile in the 5k and 10k.

In other words in the old shoe technology Fisher probably would have run 26:53. That is what Solinski would have run if he had paced himself better and not run a last 800 of 156 passing lapped runners.

I don’t think there are many people denying that super shoes work as advertised.

Do we need separate records? No. I don’t know what the 100m record is on a cinder track, and I don’t need to know. In every sport, there is always some percentage of fans who want to be looking to the past, and that’s good for them I guess. I like to experience the sport in the here and now.

I understood that. But I still had the questions

Ridiculous. Show me any actual independent data that the new shoes on the track are worth 20 seconds in a 10k. There is no such data. I would estimate that at best, Fisher ran 7-8 seconds faster in new shoes, but I’m not even confident in that.

Belief, confidence, and timing (peaking) will always beat any shoe advantage on the track.

I hate the doping allegations being made about every fast time/breakthrough, but the Ahmed and Fisher race has been disturbing. I really hope that their training and ability got them there without PEDs.

Why do people have such rose colored glasses for older runners? There is no evidence the shoes make a 20 second difference in the 10k except people on letsrun getting butthurt about their favorite runners from the past are not as fast as newer runners. Fisher is just flat out better than Solinksy, not sure why you feel the need to index his times to him. Fisher finished 5th and 9th in stronger fields than Solinsky has ever run in, and is clearly a level above that now. Solinsky never even made a 10k team, and was 11th in his best 5k final. What makes you think Solinsky and Fisher were equal?

Yes. Doubter for the spikes.

I've seen data for the road shoes but not spikes, and that makes the difference for me. Anecdotes about "the times are faster" mean nothing; times were getting faster before the spikes, too.

2 seconds in a 10k at an elite level would be fricking huge.

It has been interesting to see how the consensus on these boards has pivoted as more data has come in. First, it was the idea that 'propulsion plates' were performance enhancing and thus cheating. Then we learned it was actually the super foam. Then an emphasis on stack heights.

And now, less of a focus on the performance of the shoes (although that is certainly tangible, at least in the road shoes) in favor of the best attribute of the shoes: legal doping.

More workouts, more reps, less recovery, which of course in cyclical fashion leads to more workouts and more reps and plummeting PRs. Atypical body types break down less and will be seen more and more at the elite level. Shame the heavier Solinsky and (and maybe moreso Ritz, with his glass legs) were never able to train in them.