Amazing: The Vaporfly Controversy Has Come To Cross Country - Vaporfly Wearing Teams Stun Fields at Northeast Regional

PS. I had like a 10-second video showing the Cornell women in the shoes at the start but flotrack filed a copyright claim against it. What a joke. It's called fair use. Are they going to prevent parents from uploading family videos of races soon?

This should actually be fun to see how they do relative to the same teams and other teams next week when they won't have any shoe advantage.

rojo wrote:

PS. I had like a 10-second video showing the Cornell women in the shoes at the start but flotrack filed a copyright claim against it. What a joke. It's called fair use. Are they going to prevent parents from uploading family videos of races soon?

Lol flotrack is ridiculous.

Were the vaporfly-wearing schools sponsored by Nike?

i'm surprised the ncaa didn't ban them already

So they were running marathons then? Vaporfly shouldn't hold the advantage in a 5-10k race.

Also with zero traction they should have been scared of wiping out on the wet asphalt - any bad falls?

Leave it to Robert Johnson to s**t talk the school he coached at.

Vaporfly shoes did it for Cornell, right? It wasn't the athletes, the coaches, or the other staff behind them. Good eyes, rojo.

Sounds like the other companies need to start working two shifts per day instead of one in order to catch up.

vapor+ wrote:

So they were running marathons then? Vaporfly shouldn't hold the advantage in a 5-10k race.

Let me know of any woman running faster than 4:30 per mile for 5k-10k.

vapor+ wrote:

So they were running marathons then? Vaporfly shouldn't hold the advantage in a 5-10k race.

Also with zero traction they should have been scared of wiping out on the wet asphalt - any bad falls?

"It also found that the Vaporfly was 2.6 percent more efficient than Nike Zoom Matumbo track spikes, and observed an average improvement of 1.90 percent in 3,000 and 5,000-meter track times—new territory for a shoe that’s mostly been marketed to marathoners."

So in the next couple of years you'll have a pretty broad adoption of similar shoe technologies that have been released through virtually all running shoe companies. Are we going to do this for anyone wearing new shoes? Is it only/always Nike's? Are we almost done with this?

I thought Harvard was New Balance.

Remember the NCAA championships last spring, where BYU famously qualified 6 guys for the 10,000m? 4 of those 6 guys were wearing them, including Connor Mantz, the national champion. The 10k national champion in DII from GVSU also wore them in his race.

It’ll be wildly prevalent this year, which is certainly problematic from an availability/fairness standpoint. Often times, especially at the D1 level, kids are restricted to the brands with which their schools are contractually tied.

And what about the parents who will throw down for HS kids wearing them in 3200m races? Get ready

Not really. They ran on a road course, so it wasn’t actually a cross country race. Nike’s pogo shoes took over the roads years ago. Boing boing!

Burnsy wrote:

Remember the NCAA championships last spring, where BYU famously qualified 6 guys for the 10,000m? 4 of those 6 guys were wearing them, including Connor Mantz, the national champion. The 10k national champion in DII from GVSU also wore them in his race.

It’ll be wildly prevalent this year, which is certainly problematic from an availability/fairness standpoint. Often times, especially at the D1 level, kids are restricted to the brands with which their schools are contractually tied.

And what about the parents who will throw down for HS kids wearing them in 3200m races? Get ready

Winner of Kentucky state mile in 2019 wore them. Along with Indiana stand out Caleb Futter, who wore them throughout his season, including in some 800m races.

dude- wrote:

So in the next couple of years you'll have a pretty broad adoption of similar shoe technologies that have been released through virtually all running shoe companies. Are we going to do this for anyone wearing new shoes? Is it only/always Nike's? Are we almost done with this?

No, it's not a level playing field yet, so it continues to be worth discussing. It clearly makes a difference in the results, so it would be foolish NOT to talk about it. When it becomes relatively level between shoe companies, it will fade to the background for historical talk, like cinder tracks vs. modern tracks.

Right now, Nike has a patent pending on the extreme curve that gives their carbon plates a big advantage. This prevents other companies from using that curve - they would surely get sued $$$ by Nike for every shoe that they sell using the design if that patent is finalized.

Running shoe designers (including some that have chimed in here) have experimented with plates in shoes for at least a few decades, so a carbon plate in itself is not special. The extreme curve is clearly the secret sauce in a rigid plate design. Maybe it is like the wheel of rigid plate designs - no way to improve shape of a circle in a wheel, no way to improve rigid plate design without that extreme curve. That extreme curve is probably why other carbon plate shoes are not as fast (Hoka versions), or protoypes only (copying the curve of the plate for the sponsored runners, but not able to sell them due that patent pending).

The Zoom X foam might be creating a lot of the advantage, in conjunction with the extremely curved carbon plate, but that foam is available for other companies to use (Reebok uses it for instance).

From Buffalo’s XC team. The finish line video of the men’s race. Pretty easy to count as they come through, haha

https://twitter.com/ub_xctf/status/1195395139444838402?s=21

To quote the genius Dick Mulvaney, “Get over it.”

Should the cross country ranking even be considered?

What if the Cornell women simply performed faster on a road course?

Marginal gains. Some teams were watching bad TV. Others were GEARING UP to win. It shows.