Nike’s Fastest Shoes May Give Runners an Even Bigger Advantage Than We Thought

I bought a pair of the pink ones, still in the box. Not sure if I will ever wear them, they might be in interesting talking point in 25 years or so. OR...if I think I'm in PR shape, I might really go for a big PR :)

I liked this quote from the Nike spokesman:

"We respect the I.A.A.F. and the spirit of their rules, and we do not create any running shoes that return more energy than the runner expends.”

Good to know Nike isn't violating the Law of Conservation of Energy......yet.

POD!

julius talberg wrote:

I liked this quote from the Nike spokesman:

"We respect the I.A.A.F. and the spirit of their rules, and we do not create any running shoes that return more energy than the runner expends.”

Good to know Nike isn't violating the Law of Conservation of Energy......yet.

okay - lets get over this.

Easy process

1) buy them

2) get a jump in time / PR

3) continue to race in them going forward

4) measure progress

They're not going anywhere...WHO CARESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

The wording of this is kind of misleading. The first analysis was for the VF 4%, this article is just updated for the Next %, which we already knew was faster than the VF 4%.

The old article is here, if anyone is interested:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/18/upshot/nike-vaporfly-shoe-strava.html

Boing boing!

LoneStarXC wrote:

The wording of this is kind of misleading. The first analysis was for the VF 4%, this article is just updated for the Next %, which we already knew was faster than the VF 4%.

The new article actually says the next% is not any faster than the 4%.

In the article, they state that they found no meaningful difference between 4% and Next%.

julius talberg wrote:

I liked this quote from the Nike spokesman:

"We respect the I.A.A.F. and the spirit of their rules, and we do not create any running shoes that return more energy than the runner expends.”

Good to know Nike isn't violating the Law of Conservation of Energy......yet.

I'm breathing a sigh of relief to know that one of the foundations of my 40 years of professional life has not been overturned.

Oh hey look it's ANOTHER thread talking about the Vaporfly! Can't wait to read the exact same comments for the 1,000,000th time!

The massive confidence interval on the "Hoka One One Carbon" suggests that they combined the Carbon X and the Carbon Rocket and that the difference between the two is significant. Would have been nice to see those analyzed separately.

Dumass

Don't bring your rationality here! I've tried that too many times.

The vaporfly process is your current PR - 5min every time you wear the shoes. It's pure black magic fluckery.

The fact that the shoes have been out of 4 years escapes the thought of everyone on these boards.

This is sloppy analysis that continually mistakes correlation with causation. It doesn't matter how big your data set is, correlation is never causation.

When I read this, "we see that runners who switch to these Nike shoes improved significantly more than runners who switched to any other kind of shoe. No other shoe comes close to having the same effect.", I just shake my head. The way this sentence should have been written is: "We see that runners who improved significantly in terms of fitness switched to these shoes significantly more than runners who did not." That would be an equally valid takeaway from their data.

Lastly, the point I always make as a rejoinder to this analysis is - What about the Zoom Streak? What about this $80, "old tech" shoe that features phylon and, of all things, Zoom Air, that "causes" a ~2.5% improvement in runners? What's the explanation there? The Streak "causes" a 2.5% improvement, the Vaporfly "causes" a 4% improvement, but only in the case of the Vaporfly is the improvement actually "caused" by the fancy "new tech"? That's called confirmation bias and cherry picking your data points.

Really sloppy analysis.

This is the dumbest take I have read on this topic. No one said that all shoes other than the VF are equal. The claim has always been that the VF is an outlier. So the second fastest shoe has half as much advantage over the slowest shoe as the VF. How is that even relevant? The VF is still an outlier with a much, much, much larger advantage over the second fastest shoe than the second fastest shoe has over the third fastest shoe. Comparing the gap between the VF and Streak with the gap between the Streak and the slowest shoe doesn't make any sense. It seems like you are the one cherry picking nonsensical data points to confirm your bias.

As for your rant about causation and correlation, if you read the article you would see that they carefully performed the analysis multiple different ways such that correlations that would be present in one of the analyses would not be present in the other analyses. If there was an obvious correlation, they would have seen that as one of their analyses would have disagreed with the others. For example your claim that maybe there's a correlation between people who worked on their fitness more and people who switched to VFs. They thought of that. As part of one of their analyses methods they found pairs of athletes who performed similarly in a race and then raced again at the same race the next year with one of them in VFs and the other not. And they took into account the training of those athletes leading up to the second race to see if there was some noticeable difference. That's not to say that there isn't some kind of super subtle non-obvious correlation that they weren't able to eliminate in any of their methods and was consequently present in all of them. But if that's the case, it's not going to be something obvious. They clearly went to great lengths to rule out the obvious potential correlations.

If carbon plates get banned it’ll probably be straight after Tokyo 2020 as there are already so many tainted qualifying times they’ll have to let it slide till the games are done.

julius talberg wrote:

I liked this quote from the Nike spokesman:

"We respect the I.A.A.F. and the spirit of their rules, and we do not create any running shoes that return more energy than the runner expends.”

Good to know Nike isn't violating the Law of Conservation of Energy......yet.

You think this comment was so smart but given that you can store energy in a shoe (e.g. battery, compressed spring, etc), it’s certainly possible for the shoe to return more energy than the runner puts in.

I do think that the vaporflys are faster, which is why I race in them, but there are just soooooooo many issues with this “study”...

glaukos wrote:

The massive confidence interval on the "Hoka One One Carbon" suggests that they combined the Carbon X and the Carbon Rocket and that the difference between the two is significant. Would have been nice to see those analyzed separately.

Or that not many people are using it (or reporting on Strava that they’re using it)

I dont think this is cherry picking analysis but it was a little misleading. A lot of those shoes the Next was compared to were trainers. Of course it will have an advantage over those.

I would have liked to see it lined up against only racing flats since that's what was the competition shoe before. I didn't even see the type A's which I've run all my marathons in listed.

You're not addressing their unusual results for the Streak. How is this mundane, traditional road racing shoe giving a 2.5% advantage while the very similar New Balance 1400 only gives a 0.5% advantage? They both weigh about 7oz, have a plastic midsole plate, and have about the same drop and amount of cushioning (here's a Letsrun thread comparing the two:

). It calls into question the validity of all their results.

I'm not arguing that the Vaporfly gives an advantage in the marathon over any other current shoe, it definitely does and in general their data supports that. But to try to put a firm number to that based on their flawed data is B.S. Four to five percent, by the way, is about the difference between tempo pace and marathon pace. Are they trying to tell me I could keep up my 15k race pace for a full marathon just by strapping these on?