Never ask from whence a “marketing crew” gets its numbers. – Anon.
In today’s super shoes, women are running faster than Abebe Bikila could travel barefoot.
Twenty-three year-old Kelvin Kiptum can see a sub-two-hour marathon from his front porch.
Frankly, it’s all a tad mindboggling.
Is this just natural wonderfulness by highly-trained gifted athletes? Is it performance-enhancing drugs? Or are these formerly superhuman performances just a result of a new breed of footwear? You know, Super Shoes.
Natural for folks, especially old folks who wish they could have run in the damn things during their prime, to ask, what the Fonz is going on?
Then somebody shoves a Nike ad in front of my face, what about this?
Nike was making much the same claims in 1980, what about that?
So, many questions. Like I’m a combination of Bill Bowerman and Ken Jennings.
To my mind, such as it is, my old Flagstaff training partner, Dr. E.C. “Ned” Frederick, comes close.
And he is a real scientist doing the actual research.
Here’s what he had to say.
In 1980 Jamie Larsen and I were testing the latest Air racers in Missoula, Montana in Brian Sharkey’s lab, trying to “tune” the pressure in the air bags to maximize the energetic benefits for each runner. The ergogenic benefit of the air shoes had been established and published previously. In that 1979 study at the University of Tennessee, we noticed that some runners had a much larger benefit than others.
As the ill-fated 1980 Olympics loomed on the horizon we were asked (N.B.: as independent consultants at that time, NSRL opened in August of 1980) if it would be possible to tune the air racers for individuals. I won’t reveal names for public consumption but the subjects in this tuning experiment were all elite marathon contenders, flown into Missoula for the study. Events (Mt. St. Helens’ eruption and Politics) intervened to cut the study short, but we were able to find in some cases a slight benefit to tuning the air pressure, and similar order of magnitude benefits (1% to 2% range) were measured.
At the time of this Mariah ad, I’m not sure what we knew for certain other than the ~3% average benefit in the “Tailwind” study. It would have been careless and misleading to extrapolate that benefit to the Mariah, so I’m not sure where the marketing crew came up with those numbers. We had some hypotheses but didn’t really understand what was happening with the air shoes or certainly why or how the benefit was happening or why some folks had more of a benefit that others, but it was probably fair to say in 1980 some runners might be able to run faster. Certainly, subjective wear-test accounts also were supporting that assumption.
We know a lot more about this now and so I struggle to be able to just slam the door on my understanding of the ergogenic effects of running shoes in 1980. But it seems clear Nike was trying to tell a similar story back then, as well as in 2017 and beyond. That story was based to some extent on science and the best methods and metrics we had at the time, both then and now.
The underlying problem in the popularization of the science behind all this is the mystery of the “responders”- a special case of the “your mileage may vary” dilemma. Even in the more recent +4% study (as well as in our first studies back in the day) some runners show a larger benefit than others. This means that an average of 4% or whatever is a group average and won’t apply to all runners or even to all responders in all comparisons, i.e., +4% compared to what!?
Just to set the record straight.
A major driver for Nike setting up the NSRL was to figure out how to “can” the benefits we had measured in the Tailwind study and subsequent studies. That was the major motivation, but soon other benefits came into the mix. It’s still a major driver apparently. The Advanced Footwear Technology (AFT) “Supershoes” have injected some major energy into the sneakerology world. At last Summer’s biennial Footwear Biomechanics Symposium about 30% of the 100+ papers were on AFT’s and trying to figure out how and why.
The full research report of the “Tailwind” study was published in 1986; years after the research was done (took a while to get permission from Nike to publish the full report) . However, we presented the results at the American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting in 1980. The abstract (Frederick EC, Howley ET, Powers SK. Lower O2 cost while running in air cushion type shoe. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1980;12:81–82) from that proceedings kicked off a lot of action in the scientific community on the ergogenic effects of shoes, which is still a major focus of footwear research today.
I’ve been investigating this for 45 years now and it still sets my mind spinning, thinking about the possibilities.
Ned’s mind is spinning and mine is boggled.
Speaking for myself, and a majority of the old male runners I hear from, we just want to understand, because understanding is a step closer to credibility.
Such astounding performances. Is this just natural wonderfulness by highly-trained gifted athletes?
Is it performance-enhancing drugs?
Or are these formerly superhuman performances just a result of a new breed of footwear?
You know, Super Shoes.