800 dude wrote:
Lofty Goals wrote:
I think a fair standard would be to say that a shoe is illegal if it is more efficient than running barefoot. Maybe allow 1-2% of leeway just to make things simple. Barefoot running is pretty efficient, so most current shoes would still be allowed.
This would be impossible to implement. You would never know if a shoe passes until after it was produced and you got a bunch of lab testing done, and even then, the numbers would vary widely depending on the protocol used.
In any event, all racing shoes are more efficient than running barefoot. It's just that the VF is the best of the bunch.
I feel like it’d be doable, and definitely better than banning a specific technology. The problem is that if you ban something specific like carbon springs, Nike will just figure out how to make a 5% shoe with only foam.
Companies already make prototypes of every shoe, so it wouldn’t add that much cost. It’s not like they would have to build a billion dollar assembly line to find out there shoe fails. They could simply run a standardized test with an identical preproduction model.
Testing to make sure a shoe qualifies seems pretty straightforward. Get 15 elite/sub elite runners and have them run a few miles barefoot and a few miles in a new shoe. Measure and compare their oxygen consumption. If the new shoe is “too efficient,” it is banned from elite competition. Hobbyjoggers, the real market for these shoes, could still use them.
Also, I’m not convinced that racing flats are more efficient than barefoot. I couldn’t find any research on flats specifically, but comparisons with regular shoes show that barefoot wins. Obviously flats will be better than trainers, but still: the goal of traditional flats was to be as similar to barefoot as possible, so I don’t see how they could be better. Traditional 5k/10k flats are basically a thin sheet of foam glued to an upper; there’s not really any room to improve efficiency.
Either way, you could tweak the rule to allow current shoes. For example, give 3-4% of leeway over barefoot. Or, if you really want, you could base the efficiency comparison off of a standardized traditional trainer rather than barefoot.