LRC note: We've merged two threads on the topic into 1 and combined the thread titles. The quote comes from this article: https://www.letsrun.com/news/2...
Yeah, the key part of that quote is the very first line: "I hate these shoes." Tucker hates the shoes, so he looks for any argument to criticize them.
There's absolutely massive individual variation in, say, response to altitude training. There's massive individual variation in how different runners respond to different surfaces. So it's not clear why individual variation in shoe response should be such a big deal.
The "super-responder" theory has never been convincing to me. Assuming that a runner responded so well to a shoe that their performance far exceeded what they would normally do in their preferred race-day shoe, I can't imagine what physiological or biomechanical characteristic there could be that anyone could find objectionable. Are we going to disallow runners who have some special cartilage in their ankle, or distinctive shape of their tibia, which allows them to bounce forward more effectively in the super-shoes than someone who lacks such advantages? I don't see how such objections would work in real life.
Remember that the variance in responding to different types of shoes was not relative to their preferred favorite shoe, but to the other shoes which the study's researchers gave to them to wear. Imagine walking into a shoe store and the salesman gives you 5 different shoes to wear. Of course some of them are going to feel completely off and unsuitable.
As a side note, without knowing the methodology, I am also not wholly convinced by attributing all this variance in performances to shoes in the first place. Were the studies well controlled and conducted enough to actually be able to pin 7% economy changes on the shoes, and not just day-to-day variance?
Yes. The "respnder/non-responder" thing hasn't been demonstrated with any of these shoes. It's a hypothesis based on the messiness of the data, but data in small studies is always messy.
Sorry, by "Yes" do you mean agreement with my point, or that the studies are in fact good enough to pull out that variance?
This is one thing that drove me nuts about the Tucker interview. He spends all this time talking about relative response and then completely brushes aside the possibility of PEDs with a "well I don't know of a drug that could make her that much better than anyone else on drugs hur dur." As if response to PEDs is purely linear.
+1
But all of that just adds to the uncertainty, doesn't it? She improved the WR by a bit over 2 minutes. So, she could for example have gained 1 minute each by 2 of these options:
1) being more talented
2) having trained harder/better
3) better (response to the) shoes
4) better response to the drugs
5) more drugs
...
(Better pacing gave her something too.)
She could also have lost 1 minute by being not as talented, and gained 1 minute by points 2, 3 and 4 etc. etc.
He didn't say older shoe styles didn't have an advantage
He say from one athlete to another wearing the same shoe - the advantage gained varies widely.
The older shoes did not have the issue. If I was wearing nike waffle and you were wearing Nike waffle we would both get about the same advantage.
but If you put on super shoes and I put on supers hoes, One of us could get a huge bump and the other little = this is he argument.
the second issue is because the bump is so great it makes all existing records and record lists pointless...in other words meaningless. This is why swimming banned the new suits in their sport: the preserve the integrity of the records.
The records before the shoes vs after the shoes are no longer comparable. Marathon times across the board for ELITE athletes got 2 minutes faster. For women maybe more because it seems to be percentage based so the slower athlete gets more time benefit. On the track, ONE athlete broke 3:47 for the mile from 2000 to 2022. This year, two guys were 3 seconds faster than anybody in 23 years and 3 seconds faster than their own PRs.
Right or wrong, this is the effect of the shoes. We can't pretend to compare the times of athletes on the track before 2020 and we can't pretend to compare times on the road before 2016. There MIGHT be a new drug, but that would not explain an across the board (HS, College, Semi pro, Pro) improvement in times that corresponds exactly to when the shoes were introduced.
This seems to be Ross Tucker's issue. Not only have they drastically changed the meaning of race times, they seem to have a varying effect on runners such that one might get a 1% improvement and another might get 3%. Remember that the Nike road shoes were designed with and FOR Kipchoge. Do you think he might be getting close to the maximum benefit from them?
The older shoes did not have the issue. If I was wearing nike waffle and you were wearing Nike waffle we would both get about the same advantage.
On what basis do you make this claim? I'm not aware of any data showing that "old" shoes have uniform effects without individual variation. It seems highly unlikely.
I think response is super valid when talking about super shoes. Maybe it's ok for pros because they have the resources to get tested. Most amateur runners are never going to know which shoes work the best for them. I think it's more complex than saying people responded to different shoes before this tech. Racing flats seemed more evenly aligned than super shoes do now. We don't want races decided because someone responds better than someone else.
It's said very early in the thread that there isn't science that shows differences in response. That's just not true. Labratrundown did studies on this. Others have too. It's pretty clear that some super shoes are, in general, better than others. But it's also clear that individuals will do better using one top tier shoe than another. Response, scientifically speaking, does have an impact on what we're talking about.
This post was edited 1 minute after it was posted.
So what is the complaint? If we took all the performance enhancements we have in shoes, clothing, running surfaces and sports drinks, etc., it is likely we would have a different star running the best times than we do now. Is that unfair?
Bad faith argument. You can't pick a dozen individual factors and make the sum of them equal the impact supershoes have undoubtedly had. As an example, the WR in the mile progressed after the first Nike waffle from 3:51.1 to.......3:51.0. Four years after their introduction. And I think it was in a Puma. It's insane to even call them a 'performance enhancement' in the same breath as supershoes. Supershoes have spoiled historic time comparisons and record progressions in a way that only the prime doping era surpassed.
And yes, I own a pair of supershoes, and yes they offer a ridiculous advantage.
The "super-responder" theory has never been convincing to me. Assuming that a runner responded so well to a shoe that their performance far exceeded what they would normally do in their preferred race-day shoe, I can't imagine what physiological or biomechanical characteristic there could be that anyone could find objectionable. Are we going to disallow runners who have some special cartilage in their ankle, or distinctive shape of their tibia, which allows them to bounce forward more effectively in the super-shoes than someone who lacks such advantages? I don't see how such objections would work in real life.
Remember that the variance in responding to different types of shoes was not relative to their preferred favorite shoe, but to the other shoes which the study's researchers gave to them to wear. Imagine walking into a shoe store and the salesman gives you 5 different shoes to wear. Of course some of them are going to feel completely off and unsuitable.
Totally agree - it's a pandoras box of variables and how do you ever enforce this? The only practical solution is a totally impractical solution.
Let me go back to my point on this having existed forever in the sport with respect to athletes and their interactions with product.
Prior to 2015, the consensus road racing product - including for marathons, was super minimal, lightweight product. Cushioning was definitely the compromised element with respect to weight.
Do we think that there were some athletes who weren't better "responders" to these lightweight, zero cushion products than others? Of course there were. What about runner A who grew up training exclusively on the roads and just evolved to be able to easily handle the pounding of the pavement on their lower limbs vs runner B who grew up running exclusively on natural surfaces and really struggled with muscle fatigue later in races that were on asphalt? Each runner wears the product of the era that is seen as the most advantageous for performance, even though one athlete clearly has an advantage wearing it than the other.
Just because the spectrum has been widened on this, doesn't mean you can revoke a principal that has existed in the sport since it began. Ultimately I'm smiling because the furore over this shoe is conveniently distracting from another really plausible explanation for such a performance which is at least in my opinion is far more obvious and plausible when you evaluate all circumstances involved. But it's America and we like to work in hyperbole for everything so sure, whatever floats the boat.
Really? The way Ross Tucker was talking about them makes it seem like they are supposed to translate into x% faster times? Not for everyone, but for some.
Also, how are the studies on individual response differences done? Could someone who knows the field post some of the more convincing studies? Basically, I am wondering if the 2 - 6% range represents uncertainty (due to typical experimental error) or real individual differences.
Really.
4% mer efficient running doesn't mean 4% faster times. Lets take 2.05 at marathon, you won't run 2 hour marathon just because you get vaporflies.
Yes the scientific consensus is that the "predicted percent improvement in velocity is ∼2/3rds of the percent improvement in RE".
2.11.53 is 5.33m/s and 2.15.37 is 5.19m/s
Her velocity improvement was therefore 2.63% so the implied RE improvement was actually 3.92% from one pair of shoes to the next (primary difference being approx 70g of weight which should translate to approx 0.6% RE benefit)
I think the answer is to stop caring about historic time comparisons. Its just so much less interesting to watch a race vs the clock than a race vs a person. I did a (Heats, semis, finals) 2.2K race round a go cart track and it was so much more fun because time was not a factor (). Try applying the argument of historical comparison to basically any popular sport and it falls down fast. Cycling I think is a good comparison - its the road races where noone cares about time that get the coverage.
Also, his point about responder vs non-responder athletes is BS - whatever rules you put in place will advantage some people and disadvantage others, its arbitrary to say that its bad to allow some people to speed up, but okay to allow others to maintain the advantage they have under the current rules. Reminds me of when they flew a helicopter over the NCAA XC course to dry it out - I would have kicked off royally - some athletes benefit from a slow course and its unfair to intervene and take their advantage away ...
The records before the shoes vs after the shoes are no longer comparable. Marathon times across the board for ELITE athletes got 2 minutes faster. For women maybe more because it seems to be percentage based so the slower athlete gets more time benefit. On the track, ONE athlete broke 3:47 for the mile from 2000 to 2022. This year, two guys were 3 seconds faster than anybody in 23 years and 3 seconds faster than their own PRs.
Right or wrong, this is the effect of the shoes. We can't pretend to compare the times of athletes on the track before 2020 and we can't pretend to compare times on the road before 2016. There MIGHT be a new drug, but that would not explain an across the board (HS, College, Semi pro, Pro) improvement in times that corresponds exactly to when the shoes were introduced.
This seems to be Ross Tucker's issue. Not only have they drastically changed the meaning of race times, they seem to have a varying effect on runners such that one might get a 1% improvement and another might get 3%. Remember that the Nike road shoes were designed with and FOR Kipchoge. Do you think he might be getting close to the maximum benefit from them?
For whatever it's worth, I've tried to prove the times of elite men before super-shoes in the long-distance events are very much comparable to the times of previous years. That is to say, there has always been a general improvement in times over decades, and the improvement shown during the adoption of super-shoes was not any different for the men. For the women, it is not quite so clear.
I am planning to add the times for the events run in 2022 and 2023 to the analysis at the conclusion of this year's season and hopes it will add more clarity to the question.
Events studied for the years 2001-2021 were the 10,000 Meters, 10km Road race, Half Marathon, and Marathon. For each event, the average time of the top 100 runners was calculated for each year and …
And comparing to times of the past has always been loaded with so many caveats that the comparisons are meaningless no matter which era we are looking at. And if we hypothetically say that super shoes are the primary driver for all these current records being set, but we don't know (and will never know) to what extent specific athletes "respond" to the shoes they are wearing, we can't make the leap to say it's the shoes. Tucker's own analysis defeats the whole shoe argument that shoes are the drivers are records.
Kipchoge ran the current WR last year in the Alphafly 2, a shoe which most people hated and few wear racing. Do we know if Kipchoge would have run even faster in a different shoe? We'll never know and it doesn't matter. The shoe companies pay the pros to wear their shoes and hopefully win races and set records. For the rest of us, wear what works for you and enjoy running.
Someone mentioned some of the pre-supershoe Nikes earlier, but was there the same continued uproar when Adidas athletes were lowering the (men's) world record? I believe Haile set the first of his marathon world records in a fully plated Adidas shoe and then continued to speed up when Adidas introduced its Adizero and Adios lines. Kipsang (besides probably also doping) was in a new version of the Adios, I believe Kimetto was too...
Really? The way Ross Tucker was talking about them makes it seem like they are supposed to translate into x% faster times? Not for everyone, but for some.
Also, how are the studies on individual response differences done? Could someone who knows the field post some of the more convincing studies? Basically, I am wondering if the 2 - 6% range represents uncertainty (due to typical experimental error) or real individual differences.
Here's the original study. It's real individual differences. See Figure 4. Also see Joubert's labratrundown Instagram page for summaries of a lot of the studies he has done with different folks (as well as himself as N=1).
Figure 4 says nothing more than that the experiment observed individual variation of responsiveness to super shoe. But it is still very much possible or even very likely that part of this variation is due to uncontroled factors, such as the athletes not being in exactly the same state in terms of fitness between the trials, as it's simply not possible to hold them in identical state.
your optimal shoe design depends on how you foot strike and stride, and your speed,
and the study needs to be on elites only at elite pace to be valid.
and athletes tested need to wear the right shoe for them to determine the advantage.
at the crux, the shoes back in the day, some were injury creating, if not most, and i'd like to see an injury study on super shoes, to see if in fact they create a more natural movement.
and proper study can provide an approximate equivalent advantage so historic times have their proper acclaim.
in fact, all times that were not drug tested, are not valid technically today, so there needs to be a non-tested era, a synthetic track era, a super shoes era, to make any sense what so ever about times over the years.
i'd like to see someone put together a cinder track with the same specs and condition of Jim Ryuns WR, run solo, with 52-53 400 finish, and pay $1M to anyone who can do it solo, in Ryun's same shoes.
Now that would put things into perspective.
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studies involving 5-6 minute mile pace don't apply to 430 mile or 343 mile situations.
one study i saw, they were analyzing the stride, foot strike of "runners" and they choose something like the 30km mark in a marathon. it's like a boxer in the later rounds getting punched in the face, and you come up with the idea that the guy can't walk properly.
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