Will running a marathon in high-tech super shoes help you run faster?

Nike made huge headlines when they came out with the Vaporfly series in 2017. Featuring a new kind of foam and a flexible carbon plate, Nike promised that their expensive new shoes would improve a marathoner's running economy by 4%.

With elites and recreational runners doing everything they could to improve by just one percent, these magic new shoes were pretty tantalizing.

But with all new technology comes controversy. Nike had already been supplying its best runners with Vaporflies as early as 2016, which was an Olympic year. Other athletes sponsored by other companies would be at a clear disadvantage if the 4% improvement numbers were really true and they complained to the governing bodies of the sport.

Rules changed and the copycats followed Nikes lead. Now in 2021, most of the major running shoe companies have some version of high-tech foam and carbon plate shoes and all of them need to be available to the public before they can be used in competition.

So what does this all mean for you? How much do high-tech shoes matter in your running and racing? I wanted to find out so I invited Michael Haischer on the Run to the Top to tell us what he found.

Mike is a doctoral student and lab manager at the Athletic and Human Performance Research Center at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, which just so happens to be my alma mater.

Mike and his team wanted to better understand the potential performance-enhancing effects of technological advancements in marathon racing shoes. So they examined the finishing times of the top 50 male and 50 female runners from all the World Marathon Major series in the past decade, both before and after the introduction of new Nike shoe models.

Did the Nikes make a difference? And if so, what implications does that have on the rest of us, who are not in the top 50?

We are about to find out.

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