From Paul Tergat's Fila's to Eliud Kipchoge's Alphaflys, AW shoe guru looks at history of carbon fiber plated shoes

Wildhorse wrote:

If the rules are applied, which they should unless we want to turn this sport into a bigger mockery than it already is due to doping, the fastest marathon time run in shoes in accordance to the rules at the time was Bekele's 2019 Berlin (he ran in standard Next%s).

Kenenisa Bekele should be the current marathon WR holder.

The rules do not prohibit athletes from running in prototypes or custom shoes, period.

If that had been the IAAF's intention, it would have been easy to say so explicitly. Instead it wrote a rule that was intentionally vague because it didn't know what to do about shoes. The rule is simply a placeholder for more specific regulation down the road. When asked, repeatedly, about the meaning of the rules, the IAAF has clarified that prototypes are not prohibited.

truth hertz wrote:

Dennis Kimetto and Wilson Kipsang before him held the last TRUE world records in the marathon, wearing shoes with NO carbon fibre spring plate and NO leg-lengthening stack height:

Shoes that were nevertheless shown in lab tests to improve running economy.

The Boost shoes DK and WK wore were more efficient, but magnitudes less than the Cheaterfly shoes are. ALL shoes are essentially a lever, Nike has just gone too far. It's a bit like if the floaty swim suits that were banned back in the day were not full-body, compared to full-body suits that all but allowed the swimmers to float atop the water with no effort.

Paul's video is cool, I wish he'd addressed the prototypes used at the 2016 Olympic Trials and Games.

Also, and I've not heard this addressed, the Cheaterfly isn't completely rocket science. It's just a spike wrapped in foam, really.

well this dude is a bit off on the history. He's right that Brooks had a carbon fiber plate shoe before Fila. but he's wrong about the actual plate and it's purpose in the shoe. Brooks was the first shoe company to put a carbon fiber plate in a running shoe, actually two styles, The Beast and the GFS-100. This was in the late 80's. The plate was pure layered carbon fiber pretty similar to what Nike is using. The purpose was strictly energy return. That is what we were going after and that is what we researched and tested. We even knew that the plates could be "tuned" depending on how you layered the fibers. I know this because i was the developer of these shoes.

Ultimately they didn't do well as the shoes were too stiff due to limitations of the EVA foam back then which was already pretty stiff on it's own. The plates were pretty expensive as well and difficult to cut and even source them. Nike research solved the foam problems and it seems as if it's the foam that's providing much of the magic while the plate provides some stiffness that the foam has lost. I find it interesting how Nike has solved the problems and created the exact kind of shoe we were attempting to design, develop and produce 20 years ago.

That "carbon" fiber he's pointing out in the Fila shoe is nonsense. not really even carbon fiber in the sense of what Brooks and Nike (and now the other brands) have done. Really that stuff was just marketing bullshit and nearly every brand has done that over the years.

Well, gotta show my age here, and I believe correct you. Worked in a running store in the late 70s thru the 80s in south jersey. Anyway, we sold the Etonic Alpha 1 - had a graphite plate throughout the heel and under the arch. (Navy/gold color scheme w/ mesh-type upper.) Later, in the 80s, Etonic came out w/ a smaller plate in the Quasar, I believe. Brooks introduced a shoe called the Graphite in the mid-80s. Neither brooks or Etonic did too well w/ these cause up-and-coming Nike was grabbing the market with the likes of the internationalist, the air Columbia, the Bermuda, and later the V series: Vector, Vengence, and Vortex. Ive searched and searched but can find no trace of the Etonic Alpha 1 - no pics, info, nothing. I know I’m not 70s relapsing cause I raced in them - ~82-83.

Oh yeah, not debating the composition- these earliest plates were graphite - very thin and used for stability purposes - except the Quasar - it was actually red - not sure of its composition

Wildhorse wrote:

Rehash of things that are already known by anyone interested in the shoe controversy, gets several facts wrong, adds nothing new to the conversation.

For instance, Kipchoge's WR wasn't run in standard Next%s nor was the Next% available to all: he ran a Next% tooling under a 4% flyknit upper. So yes, it was a prototype, and yes, it was not available to all.

https://images.app.goo.gl/78PzTE1uXq7PMS2o7

For a short amount of time, Nike was selling the Next% on their website under NikeID (or whatever it's called now) with whatever upper of the three iterations you preferred. Flyknit, Mesh, or Vaporweave.