Helmut Winter: Stats reveal elite marathon times have dropped 1:45 for men, 3:00 for women in last 2 years possibly due to VF

Glad to hear you have been validated, rojo.

When will the 2016 Olympics Marathon results be nullified?

Look at the 100th best performance int he world for every track and field event from a decade ago to now, every event is getting better. The marathon has had more and more people running sub 2:10 every year since forever. Look at 2004 when only 52 individuals broke 2:10, and then as this research shows in 2012 there were 171 individuals to do it. Was 2012 not before the Vaporfly 4%? I'M PRETTY SURE IT WAS! 2012 had more than the year of 2018, 2018 had vaporfly's, so riddle me how more people ran sub 2:10 in 2012 than in 2018 with vaporflies if the vaporfly 4% makes you SO much faster. And the slower you go the more people there are. So there are nearly as many people in the 2:10:00-2:11:45 range as there are under 2:10. So if vaporfly 4% makes you a minute 45 faster, then everyone above that would have gone sub 2:10, so you'd have twice as many sub 2:10's than the year before they came out, and that is not what we are experiencing.

Stop your witch hunt. Times get better. There are more people in this world attempting to run fast as time goes on. World records get broken, what was fast 20 years ago is not as fast as now.

Saying it's 1:45 faster due to the vaporfly is a joke, it's AT BEST maybe 20 or 30 seconds over a marathon, or zero seconds over a marathon. Any improvements are so negligible it doesn't even matter.

The times in every event are absolutely not getting faster to this extent, however when you look at the amount of money being pumped into marathons that has to be a factor as well, in addition to the increase in availability to dope by those without major resources. EPO is dirt cheap on the black market. You can buy it from China for about $250-500 and have enough to move your HCT from 40% up to 55+% for your A race.

Of course there are those that say it doesn’t do anything, but the people who say that either have never tried it or don’t want to tell the truth.

This is a spurious correlation.

Other things that could contribute: people have to hit a standard for the trials or olympics meaning more people are trying to run fast in 2019 compared to previous years. (With the US being the 4th deepest marathoning nation in the world with the trials push this changed the stats for world wide marathoning when compared to 2018 and 2017. In 2019 the US 300th runner was almost on par with Japan to the 300th male runner where in 2018 the US 160th runner was about equivalent to Japan's 300th runner). Why didn't the Japanese improve but the US did? They both had the same shoes! Maybe because people were trying to get the trials standard and since the US makes up a large enough portion of elilte it has increased the world wide average of top marathoning since

Now what I just said I believe is the real reason times have improved but just like your analysis correlation cannot prove causation and neither of our thesis can do that

Another thing to remember when thinking about this is that the benefits of the shoe is not equal for different runners. The CU Boulder study that gave the Vaporfly the 4% label showed a four times difference in benefit from the lowest to highest responders (1.59% to 6.26% for 18 subjects, all 31 or sub-31 10K runners). So the order in a race or a performance list will be jumbled up compared to if everyone was in standard flats. Some might be only getting 1:00, while someone else 4:00 from those shoes.

Maybe the shoes. Definitely peds. But not better training or superior talent.

Aren't times getting faster in nearly every event? wrote:

So there are nearly as many people in the 2:10:00-2:11:45 range as there are under 2:10. So if vaporfly 4% makes you a minute 45 faster, then everyone above that would have gone sub 2:10, so you'd have twice as many sub 2:10's than the year before they came out, and that is not what we are experiencing.

Stop your witch hunt. Times get better. There are more people in this world attempting to run fast as time goes on. World records get broken, what was fast 20 years ago is not as fast as now.

Saying it's 1:45 faster due to the vaporfly is a joke, it's AT BEST maybe 20 or 30 seconds over a marathon, or zero seconds over a marathon. Any improvements are so negligible it doesn't even matter.

"Aren't times getting faster in nearly every event? ", you make some good posts. I loved your 2004 to 2012 comment. It makes one thing but 9 years is a long time.

But let me use your own argument against you. We are in fact experiencing what you claim isn't happening in regards to the 2:10s.

What you wrote is true. Before the Vaporflys, there were almost exactly the same number of people running sub-2:10 as running 2:10-2:11:45.

In 2016 when the Vaporflys didn't really exist except for a few people, 114 runners broke 2:10 in the marathon. And 119 people ran between 2:10-2:11:45. So that's 233 total. And guess how many people broke 2:10 this year? 219. So Helmut's guestimate of 1:45 is dead on the money. Nearly all of those 2:11:45 guys are now 2:10:00 people thanks to the shoes.

Doesn't prove anything. Correlation isn't causation.. still correlates with the year nations use to pick their national team or is the year leading up to trials.

1:45 feels high to me if only because Kipchoge ran 2:04 with his outsoles flying out of his shoes in 2015. I also don't think Guye Adola is running 2:02 flat back in the day or 2:03 flat last year just through a simple shoe switch. Something like 1:15 feels more realistic, and let's bear in mind some of these other brands have already narrowed the gap with prototypes.

They help quite a bit, it is obvious at this point that they do. 209 has become a garbage time lol.

You can basically find anything you want out of the data if you look hard enough. Guess what else happened in 2017........

The Solar Eclipse over the US!!!!!!

The solar eclipse should be banned for improving marathon times by 1:45 and 3:00.

Most of the improvement has occurred over the last few months though, not the last 2 years (or 3+ since vaporfly prototypes have been available).

The 100th fastest and top 100 average times in 2019 were over a minute faster than in 2018 (pretty much entirely due to great times post berlin: the average the day after berlin was within a few seconds of the 2018 average, and the 100th best time was still slower than the 100th best time in 2012).

So if this is all due to the vaporfly, why did the improvement only occur in the last half of 2019, and not in 2017 or 2018?

Next%

It’s the Roger Bannister effect. People realize they should be running faster because everyone else is, so they do. The Next% is only giving them a way of doing it, but it isn’t the only factor playing in here. Rojo would have you believe the mental side of things doesn’t play a roll but that belief just goes to show how little he really understands running.

DirtyT wrote:

It’s the Roger Bannister effect. People realize they should be running faster because everyone else is, so they do. The Next% is only giving them a way of doing it, but it isn’t the only factor playing in here. Rojo would have you believe the mental side of things doesn’t play a roll but that belief just goes to show how little he really understands running.

The people who claim things like this tend to be hobbyjoggers who have knocked a few minutes off their times wearing their shoes.

I've been watching debates at a local level and it's odd that the people who are spending so much money on these shoes are the ones who are claiming they make zero difference (while they're running minutes faster than they were before they got the shoes.)

What are your PRs?

DirtyT wrote:

What are your PRs?

How is that relevant to anything?

I'm not the one defending a shoe which is obviously causing times to drop.

John Wesley Harding wrote:

The Vaporfly-deniers are a joke at this point.

This study is the joke. He looks at trends in a population and draws unsupported conclusions about individual runners and shoes.

The bigger joke is: where are the track performances in these shoes? Don't tell me the 10,000m is so different from marathon that someone couldn't bounce their way to 26 flat. This would have already happened if these top road racers really believed in the shoes.

Rather, records have been smashed on the track in plain old distance spikes in the past few years, and the most plausible explanation is the same as for the road events: higher participation rates and more thorough development of athletes. Modern elite marathon is in a boom not unlike women's steeple, with a "talent pool" bigger than ever and a growing international pro circuit for incentive.

The road boom also corresponds neatly with the final death spiral of distance track, culminating in the elimination of the 5,000 and 10,000. Remember when 26:30 guys were a dime a dozen? What if their event hadn't existed? They'd be on the roads running 2:04, or quicker, and today's scene wouldn't look so unusual.