Data doesn't lie. In the 100th best NCAA time for distance races 2010-2023, times were nearly unchanged 2010-2019. Super spikes introduced 2020, widely available 2021,2. Indoor mile about 3s faster post 2020, 10sec 3000, 15sec 5000, 30sec 10000. Many WR and NR in new spikes.
As zzzz says, slower velocity gets more benefits so race time improvement shows more in female and sub elite.
This study only reinforces what is already known. The super spikes improve race times in a meaningful way.
Those shoes are so different that it’s hard to attribute the improvements just to PEBA or PEBA+plate. Different masses, very different midsole thicknesses, very different physical characteristics. Obviously, the testers are constrained when choosing to work with commercial models, but this hasn’t really settled anything about the performance of the foams/plates. So even though the thread title is literally true, the data don’t support how people will interpret/oversimplify and trumpet the results.
To some extent yeah. But at a higher level we are at the point where which spikes you chose can be worth 10-20s over 3k. Maybe some other super spike is worth 25s and maybe some other traditional is worth 5s. We are talking differences that are much larger than what most of us used to think.
Have mile times dropped six seconds across the board? Have you seen any established pros who suddenly dropped their mile time six seconds when they switched to super spikes?
Any super shoe study is going to have too many variables with too much uncertainty to tell you anything more than super shoes are faster. A much better method world be to simply average the before-and-after times of mid-career runners who made the switch.
They only used one pace for women, 4.44 m/s, which is 90-second 400m pace and one pace for men, 5 m/s, which is 80-second 400m pace. The conclusions are only good for those paces.
I did a little analysis based on World Athletics data last year that showed that super spike were worth more the slower the pace. See post #35 in that thread for my summary based on men's data (I didn't post the women's data. . . yet). Read the thread from the start if you want to know how I did the analysis:
This study has results for 80-second 400 pace. 2.8% improvement for men at 80-second pace means:
80 77.8 2.2
That looks totally reasonable, as if the 55 to 72 second 400-pace results were extrapolated out to 80-second pace.
At 3:43 mile pace, the benefit of the superspikes is more like 0.4 second per lap or around ~1.5 seconds total for the mile based on my analysis. That doesn't contradict this new study which is about much slower paces.
No, they also performed a 3000m time trial for men. I calculated the average pace to be as follows:
traditional spikes: 3000m / 5.79s/m = 8:38 for 3000m = 4:38/mi
super spikes: 3000m/ 5.87s/m = 8:31 for 3000m = 4:34/mi
Although they did not use elite runners in the study, there are other studies that have given a method of extrapolating improvement conversions based on relative running velocities. Also, it is a good study because it is isolating out variables to compare apples to apples, to a decent degree. Even though the test subjects weren't elite, consider that 99% of athletes who compete on the track are not elite athletes either, and they may see a point to this study, even if they had your mindset and didn't consider extrapolating based on if they were not better runners than those in the study. But the finding in this study that I've shared is limited in that it is providing data points representing a sub-group of runners: male runners who average about 5 min/mile pace for 3000m, wearing one specific model of super spike vs another specific traditional model of spike, running one specific distance. Further studies can compare different brands and models of super spikes, or runners at different levels of ability , or performance at longer or shorter distances, keeping other variables controlled. There is not one study that gives you all the answers to everything. This study is giving an average for a group of runners at a similar level of ability, but . within the group, some got substantially better benefits from the superspikes than others, as compared to the traditional spike. One even performed worse in the superspikes than the traditional spikes.
Can you provide a link to the study? As you pointed out, sometimes the individual results can be informative.
Those shoes are so different that it’s hard to attribute the improvements just to PEBA or PEBA+plate. Different masses, very different midsole thicknesses, very different physical characteristics. Obviously, the testers are constrained when choosing to work with commercial models, but this hasn’t really settled anything about the performance of the foams/plates. So even though the thread title is literally true, the data don’t support how people will interpret/oversimplify and trumpet the results.
To some extent yeah. But at a higher level we are at the point where which spikes you chose can be worth 10-20s over 3k. Maybe some other super spike is worth 25s and maybe some other traditional is worth 5s. We are talking differences that are much larger than what most of us used to think.
Not really. If you took 30 people and made each do a track 3k TT in nike victory xc5, Nike air zoom victory, and Nike dragonfly you'd expect these exact results. However, I think you get the exact same results if you used XC spikes, mid-d spikes, and distance spikes from any year, not just now. The geometries are just too different.
Have mile times dropped six seconds across the board? Have you seen any established pros who suddenly dropped their mile time six seconds when they switched to super spikes?
Any super shoe study is going to have too many variables with too much uncertainty to tell you anything more than super shoes are faster. A much better method world be to simply average the before-and-after times of mid-career runners who made the switch.
They only used one pace for women, 4.44 m/s, which is 90-second 400m pace and one pace for men, 5 m/s, which is 80-second 400m pace. The conclusions are only good for those paces.
I did a little analysis based on World Athletics data last year that showed that super spike were worth more the slower the pace. See post #35 in that thread for my summary based on men's data (I didn't post the women's data. . . yet). Read the thread from the start if you want to know how I did the analysis:
This study has results for 80-second 400 pace. 2.8% improvement for men at 80-second pace means:
80 77.8 2.2
That looks totally reasonable, as if the 55 to 72 second 400-pace results were extrapolated out to 80-second pace.
At 3:43 mile pace, the benefit of the superspikes is more like 0.4 second per lap or around ~1.5 seconds total for the mile based on my analysis. That doesn't contradict this new study which is about much slower paces.
It looks like your calculation for a 3:43/mile gain of ~ 1.5 sec/mi with super spikes is pretty spot on!
That study is crap. If true, Komen, with the new shoe technology, would have run 7:10, which is equivalent to back to back 3:52s.
No because Komen would be subject to modern drug testing and thus wouldn't be running anywhere near as fast to begin with. Essentially technology is replacing the rampant doping of the past!
Fully off the rails when it got to the women running 4.44 m/s and men running 5 m/s. That's about 90 and 80 seconds per 400m.
If you are "trained" enough for spikes to have any effect, you're faster by far than that.
They ARE faster, by far, than that. Those were relatively pedestrian paces for the test subjects - an intentionally controlled sub-sub-max VO2 pace that is standard procedure in pretty much all studies of this nature to determine the effect on running economy when comparing running in one pair of shoes vs another. The same exact male runners who ran the running economy testing at an intentionally controlled pace of exactly 5m/sec, on a treadmill, ALSO ran 3000m time trials in the different the provided shoe-types, and, as I explained in a post above, AVERAGED, as a group, 8:38 for the 3K in the traditional spikes, and averaged 8:31 in the super spikes. Please read the source article I provided if this still doesn't make sense to you.
LOL! All the shoe apologists coming out of the woodwork. All asked for a study to prove that the shoes didn’t improve times significantly and when the study proved the exact opposite they all start crying. Hilarious!
Hey! If the shoes don’t work, stop spending money on them. Problem solved. But, we all know they work. Just admit it.
Meant to say they ran the 3000m time trials in the same three shoe types that were provided in the 5m/sec controlled pace part of the study.
the 5 m/s part is completely irrelevant to anything. Which spike is best at that speed does not matter. Only which is best at fast speeds matters. This shows the researches were clueless.
As for the 3k time trial, that's still at the outer edge of spike usefulness. Were the athletes blind to which spike was which? If they could figure it out, then your researchers studied a placebo.
Noone's got within sniffing distance of 7:20 yet. 12:37 has been broken exactly once. 3:26.00 still stands. These gimmicks have no effect at all.
That study is crap. If true, Komen, with the new shoe technology, would have run 7:10, which is equivalent to back to back 3:52s.
No because Komen would be subject to modern drug testing and thus wouldn't be running anywhere near as fast to begin with. Essentially technology is replacing the rampant doping of the past!
Meant to say they ran the 3000m time trials in the same three shoe types that were provided in the 5m/sec controlled pace part of the study.
the 5 m/s part is completely irrelevant to anything. Which spike is best at that speed does not matter. Only which is best at fast speeds matters. This shows the researches were clueless.
As for the 3k time trial, that's still at the outer edge of spike usefulness. Were the athletes blind to which spike was which? If they could figure it out, then your researchers studied a placebo.
Noone's got within sniffing distance of 7:20 yet. 12:37 has been broken exactly once. 3:26.00 still stands. These gimmicks have no effect at all.
Good thoughts being raised if you haven't read the article. The 5m/s part is not completely irrelevant to anything. It isolates the oxygen management efficiency at a purely aerobic pace that the test subject has no ability to manipulate, whether tested blindly or not. This is, however, increasingly more influential the longer (more reliant on aerobic metabolism) the event, (1500m < 3000m < 10k < marathon). The researchers acknowledge this, as it is a well known factor that no one is trying to hide or deny its existence, in fact, they are developing methods more suited to determine comparisons more suited for middle distance racing speed comparisons, as is all explained in this passage from the article:
"It has been shown that AFT road shoes improve running economy (RE)3,4 and long distance running performance in events from the 10 km to the marathon.5–7 RE is commonly defined as the steady-state oxygen uptake or metabolic energy required at a given submaximal speed.8 Changes in RE translate directly into changes in running performance.9,10 However, in track events athletes typically run at an intensity far above their aerobic steady-state capacity (except for during the 10,000 m),11,12 and therefore RE measures cannot be assessed at race intensity. This is particularly relevant for spikes, since benefits from footwear are likely to be speed-specific.13 To overcome this challenge, we recently introduced and validated a novel approach to assess the benefits of AFT spikes consisting of a series of 200 m trials at self-perceived middle-distance race pace on the track.14 Between this interval-based protocol for middle-distance track events (800/1500 m), time trials (3,000/5,000 m) and RE measurements for long-distance track events (10,000 m), tools are now available to assess the benefits of AFT spikes, specific to each event."
"We chose 5 m/s so the participants should be able to run below the second ventilatory threshold to ensure steady-state VO2 measurements."
Whether the athletes blinded to which spikes were which, the answer is yes, to the extent that was possible - again, from the article:
"All spikes had standardized 6 mm spike pins for traction. The average mass was 158g for the control and 151g and 149g for the PEBA and PEBA+Plate conditions, respectively, for EU42 (Table 1). Participants were able to see the spikes, but they could not manipulate the spikes and were not aware of any differences in spike properties."
If you read the complete design and methodology section, more of your follow up questions may be answered here:
"Design and methodology We evaluated the effects of AFT spikes on middle- and long-distance running performance measures using a randomized mirrored experimental design. All participants refrained from intense exercise in the 48h preceding the test sessions. Test sessions were performed on an outdoor athletics track (400 m) with controlled environmental conditions (550 m altitude, 22-25ºC, 26-29% relative humidity). Participants were asked to avoid caffeine and alcohol intake within 24 hours of their . testing visits and refrained from eating and drinking anything but water for 4h before testing. The female runners completed one single visit. Following the novel interval-based approach to evaluate middle-distance spikes of Bertschy et al.,14 participants performed six experimental trials of 200 m, controlling effort at self-perceived 800 m race pace. After a standardized warm-up of 10 min of jogging and two runs of 200 m at a pace close to their 800 m race pace (to ensure that the pace was constant), the participants completed six 200 m trials, two in each spike condition, in a mirrored order (a-b-c-c-b a). Participants were unaware of the times they were running for each trial as they were not using a watch and researchers did not disclose the times they recorded until after the data collection was complete. Rest between trials was 8 minutes, to allow for changing spikes, enough rest and to go to the start of the next trial. Participants put on the spikes and ran 100 m in the direction of the starting line to test each spike, prior to the trial. They then walked the final 100 m to the start line to avoid fatigue. They then ran the 200 m trial from a standing start (similar to a middle-distance race start) which was timed by two researchers. For the timing of each trial, researchers started their timers when the participant started running, indicated by the participant quickly lowering one hand from a raised position, and stopped their stopwatches when the participant crossed the finish line. Subsequently to the 200 m trials, the female runners performed three trials of 800 m at 4.44 m/s (16 km/h), one in each spike condition, with 8 min rest between trials, with the objective of measuring running biomechanics at a constant speed. We chose 4.44 m/s according to the level of the participants, targeting a metabolic steady state speed, with the purpose to evaluate a long-distance running pace. During the 800 m trials the speed was controlled by sound signals every 22.5 seconds. The participants aimed to cover 100 m between sound signals, which coincided with running 4.44 m/s. The male runners performed four different visits separated by five days. During the first three visits the participants completed six experimental trials of 200 m controlling effort at self-perceived 800 m race pace with the same protocol as the female runners.14 After this, the male runners performed a 3,000 m time trial wearing one of the three spike conditions. The participants received verbal information about the number of laps completed and to go, but no other feedback or encouragement was provided during the test. Participants were kept blind to time during each of the 3,000 m time trial test. The sequence of the shoes was randomized for each participant using a random number generator. We quantified pacing by expressing each lap as a percentage of the average 3,000 m time trial speed. The male runners performed an additional, fourth, visit consisting of a series of 3-lap RE trials at 5.00 m/s (18 km/h; i.e., 4-minute trials) with each condition twice, in a mirrored order (total 2 × [3 × 4 min]). During the 4-minute trials, the speed was controlled by sound signals every 20 seconds. The participants aimed to cover 100 m between sound signals, which coincided with running 5 m/s. We chose 5 m/s so the participants should be able to run below the second ventilatory threshold to ensure steady-state VO2 measurements. This was confirmed by respiratory exchange ratio measurements (values below 1.0). During the RE trials, we measured respiratory variables using a PNOE gas analyzer (ENDO Medical, Palo Alto, CA, USA)30 which was calibrated prior to each session (CO2 4.10%; O2 15.92%). We used VO2 and VCO2 values, collected during the last minute of each 4-minute trial, to calculate RE in W/kg.31–33 Each participant performed all of their running trials on the same athletic track, but not all participants ran on the same track (five different tracks in total). Recruiting a sample of 14 female runners, meeting our inclusion criteria proved to be challenging and resulted a large geographical spread within this group. Travel and time limitations (outdoor season was over for most of the participants) did not allow us to have the female runners execute all four visits that the male runners performed. So, we adapted the protocol to a single visit for the female runners. We measured the main spatiotemporal parameters(contact time and step frequency) for every step during the self-paced 200 m trials and the controlled speed 800 m trials for the female runners, and during the self-paced 200 m trials, the 3,000 m time trial and the controlled speed RE trials for the male runners, using a Stryd Power Meter device (V2, Stryd, Boulder, CO, USA), sampling at 1000 Hz.34 The Stryd device was paired with a Polar® watch (Vantage M GPS system; Polar, Kempele, Finland) and the information was analyzed in the web-based Stryd Power Center. In the 200 m trials, the spatiotemporal parameters were extracted for 50-150 m (at least thirty steps). Twenty five steps provide enough reliability for running mechanics measurements to distinguish running technique between people.35 For the 800 m trials for female runners and the 4 minute RE trials for male runners we evaluated the central minute of each trial. During the 3,000 m time trial, the spatiotemporal variables were measured during the whole test and was averaged for subsequent analyses. At the end of each 200 m trial at self-perceived 800 m race pace, and each long-distance running pace trial (800 m at 4.44 m/s for female runners, 4 min at 5 m/s for male runners) of each spike condition, participants provided their perception of spike comfort and performance enhancement on a subjective scale36 from 0 to 100, and then rested before the beginning of the next trial. The questions were, “how comfortable were the shoes?” and “how much do you think the shoes help you during running?” The corresponding anchor points for these scales were 0 = “Least comfortable spike I have ever worn” to 100 = “Most comfortable spike I have ever worn”, and 0 = “Least helpful spike I have ever worn” to 100 = “Most helpful spike I have ever worn”, respectively."
Data doesn't lie. In the 100th best NCAA time for distance races 2010-2023, times were nearly unchanged 2010-2019. Super spikes introduced 2020, widely available 2021,2. Indoor mile about 3s faster post 2020, 10sec 3000, 15sec 5000, 30sec 10000. Many WR and NR in new spikes.
As zzzz says, slower velocity gets more benefits so race time improvement shows more in female and sub elite.
This study only reinforces what is already known. The super spikes improve race times in a meaningful way.
Data doesn’t lie, but you’re also dealing with an equation with multiple variables and multiple unknowns. There’s no way to attribute dramatic improvements to just a pair of shoes. Older runners, different runners, several years of nearly uninterrupted training, increasing popularity of different training methods, and so on. The fact that records *keep* improving suggests it’s not just the spikes/shoes, because now the presence of the shoes is a constant, and no longer a variable.
Data doesn't lie. ..... The super spikes improve race times in a meaningful way.
Data doesn’t lie, but you’re also dealing with an equation with multiple variables and multiple unknowns. There’s no way to attribute dramatic improvements to just a pair of shoes. Older runners, different runners, several years of nearly uninterrupted training, increasing popularity of different training methods, and so on. The fact that records *keep* improving suggests it’s not just the spikes/shoes, because now the presence of the shoes is a constant, and no longer a variable.
There are always other variables, but studies such as this attempt to eliminate as many as possible. The improvements in this study correlate very closely with the improvements at the NCAA level. Therefore, other variables seem to be a very small difference.
Does training in the shoes longer term produce better times than a first time user? Probably.
Did most coaches dramatically change their training program at a time exactly corresponding to the new spikes. No.
Did track surfaces change en masse exactly corresponding to the introduction of the spikes? No.
Did PEDs become more accessible at a sub elite level exactly corresponding to the introduction of the spikes? I have not seen any proof of that, but would not rule it out as a notable factor.
The study is not crap. These are not world-class runners. Research has shown that faster performers get modestly less % gain in race velocity (there is a study that gives reasonable correlations) at a given gain in running economy, however, they will still get gain in race velocity.
What’s the point of the study if it’s not applicable to elite runners?
What's the point of you running since you're not an elite runner?
What’s the point of the study if it’s not applicable to elite runners?
What's the point of you running since you're not an elite runner?
Many posters have been attributing the increased depth in running elite times to the use of new shoe technology. Does the study address that issue? If it only benefits slower runners, someone improving from 32:00 to 31:40 is not that big a deal.
What's the point of you running since you're not an elite runner?
Many posters have been attributing the increased depth in running elite times to the use of new shoe technology. Does the study address that issue? If it only benefits slower runners, someone improving from 32:00 to 31:40 is not that big a deal.
You guys are tiresome, changing hat others say. No one is claiming that it only benefits slower runners. But it benefits slower runners more in terms of absolute time. Let me give you an analogy. What is more impressive? A 2:55 marathon runner improving to 2:48 or a 2:05 one improving to 2:03? One improved by 7 minutes, the other by 2. That doesn't mean the shoes benefit the slower runner more. It's probably as hard for one runner to take 7 minutes off his time as for the other to take 2.