New Study: 800 to 10k race times improved by 0.9% (~2 sec per mile) after the release of "Super Spikes"

Thanks for sharing, these conclusions seem to be consistent with those found by other studies. Back when Cheptegei broke Bekele's WRs I'd always estimated that 2021+ era spikes were worth ~1s/km, but it's nice to get some concrete corroboration on that.

Girl… that study probably took about 15 minutes to calculate. We been known the shoes were dropping times.

Track surfaces also got faster, and shoe technology across the board also improved substantially for reasons that had nothing to do with super anything.

The study is fine. But studies like this aren't capable of the nuances of context.

Congratulations on getting your work published, and thanks for sharing! Looks like you've been doing a lot of publishing this fall on the topic of super shoes. I recommend you reach out to the BroJos to offer to discuss your research findings with them on their podcast.

that would not end well

Why do you think it wouldn't end well? From what I've seen, RoJo agrees that super shoes have made a significant difference in race times.

This is fair. We used prediction intervals that hopefully accounted for changes in track surfaces, training programs, and nutrition. Unless Mondo's marketing materials are true and each track is somehow 5% faster than the last one they produced, I think it is not a leap to say that the shoes are the biggest driver of reductions in race times. However, you are correct, it is impossible to tease out exactly what is causing this significant shift in race times since 2020 by doing an observational study.

Thanks! Super shoes/spikes are the main focus of my dissertation so hopefully I'll have some more work to publish in the near future. Like other posters said, these results aren't groundbreaking by any means, just a confirmation of what we already knew. Maybe in the future I'll have some more interesting work to talk with the Brojos about.

what are you talking about? Male elite 800 times did not irmprove after the release of super spikes, they got slower. First Rudisha retired, then Amos got slower (and eventually busted), other 1:42 guys like Bosse, Tuka, Berian, etc came and went until there was nary a 1:42 guy around at all.

Maybe you're counting the sudden spate of 1:41 guys this year, well, nobody believes that has anything to do with shoes. It doesn't.

All the major world records from a mile southward are secure to this "super spike" nonsense. Longer distances naturally progress, 1% over a few years is no big deal. It would be more noteworthy if they went a long time without improving

Might be a dangerous conclusion. There was covid also before, maybe people focused differently on running training. Track surface was also mentioned. Introduction of spikes could be a coincidence with better race times. It would be more scientific to show CR (cost of running) iimprovements with this shoes and not base it on race times (too much variables).

lexel: One can't measure the metabolic cost of running at middle-distance running speeds > LT

This does not say that at all. In fact the divergence for genders would indicate there are other reasons. First you would have to normalize against the average expected improvement per year without shoe improvements. So this is the crap thats published nowadays. Crazy

I just did a high level synopsis of what we did and glossed over the methods. We used regression models based on the average top 100 race times from 2001-2019 to predict what we would expect the average top 100 race times to be for 2021-2023. This would account for any improvements that men and women were experiencing before the introduction of super spikes. Women were improving in every event while the men were fairly stagnant in most events. So the race time improvements I reported accounted for historical race time trends and are normalized to the expected yearly improvement. Hopefully this clears up any confusion.

You should run the same numbers on high school times including a larger sample. The difference will be even more obvious. At the world class level there are confounding factors at the very pointy end.

These studies should factor in improvements in anti-doping, particularly in Kenya.

Best to focus on improvements in European elite runners, but even there, that has almost certainly been influenced by the anti-doping in Kenya and Morocco (ie. standards have risen due to the extra motivating effect and more chances in big races).

In the 33 years since Seb Coe broke 3:30, up until super shoes in 2019, Nick Willis was the only European descent runner to do it, and that was at Monaco. In the five years of super shoes, nine have, eight of them away from Monaco.

And? Does that prove or does that not prove anything?

It has to be shown that the shoe is the reason (and not any other thing).

Maybe all had the same running kit, and the author concludes, it was the kit which creates the better times. Or they applied cold water on the head before to race faster :)

As said too much variables. Authors conclusion, might be an illusion. This has nothing to do with science, nothing.

Is Cacho not of European descent? Maybe not to you but he is European and of European descent.

I posted the 100th best NCAA time for distance races from 2012 to 2023. The time drop after 2020 was even more than you state here. NCAA 100 would be slower than World 100, so that is part of it. In the NCAA, 3k-10k time drop was more than 1sec per 400m. For 1500m / mile it was about 3sec.

I may not all be the shoes, but it coincided exactly with the release of super spikes. Also, most of the tracks were not resurfaced in the same year. There was not a massive turnover of coaches that year. It is highly unlikely that coaches from dozens of schools changed their training radically in a one year span.

Saying it is not the shoes is a bit like walking into a room with a dead person bleeding on the ground with a hole through them, a person holding a gun that is still smoking and concluding that the person probably died of a heart attack.

Fermin Cacho ?