It causes a “ teeter-totter” effect, which effectively helps return energy to the runner each time their foot strikes the ground. These plates aren’t actually a new concept but their specific scoop shape is being credited for the latest performance enhancement. The inclusion of a carbon fibre plate, running from heel to toe within the Vaporfly’s foam sole, has been the headline-grabbing innovation. They include the shoe’s weight, its material composition, the thickness of its heel, and what’s called its “longitudinal bending stiffness”, which in simple terms is how flexible the shoe is from heel to toe. Several footwear features are behind this performance boost. Nike’s track spikes are considered to be delivering significant running economy boosts to athletes, too. For the top 50 female marathon runners, that figure was closer to 2.6%. In the years since the 2016 advent of the Vaporfly, the times of the top 50 male marathon runners have improved by about 2% on average. The new super shoes are a dramatic improvement on all previous running trainers. While super shoes are clearly disruptive to old records – some of which have stood for decades – this technology should simply be seen as another entry in sports’ long list of performance-enhancing innovations. Research in sports biomechanics helps explain exactly what’s happening inside these shoes. This has divided opinion in the athletics world, with some arguing the shoes are unfair while others argue they’re just like synthetic running tracks: an inevitable technological leap for endurance runners to capitalise upon. The new shoe technology was introduced to road running in 2016 and track running in 2019, and since those key dates virtually all endurance running world records, from the 5,000m to the marathon, have been broken. Today, another revolution is afoot: the development of the so-called “super shoe”, which is driving another spike of record toppling in endurance running. Long distance runners began clocking far faster times on the synthetic tracks, smashing multiple world records in the process. In the 1960s, when traditional cinder athletics tracks were replaced by spongy, synthetic surfaces, endurance running experienced a revolution.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |