Under Armour recently published a press release about how it tested prototypes in in-race scenarios with its Dark Sky Distance team. A 2014 article in the New York Times on the Saucony Human Performance and Innovation Lab depicts elite runner Ben True (who was sponsored by the company at the time) ripping 4:20 miles on a $100,000 treadmill while covered in tiny lights for gait analysis. Most shoe brands work with their sponsored elites for product testing, and at Nike the practice has its legacy in eventual co-founder Bill Bowerman making footwear for his athletes at the University of Oregon back in the fifties and sixties. The Vaporfly has a tweaked version of one of Nike’s slogans printed on its upper, informing us that it’s been “Engineered to the exact specifications of world-class runners.” On the one hand there’s nothing particularly new or unusual about this. The company makes a point of emphasizing how much this seismic innovation is indebted to input from elite athletes. For better or worse, it was impossible to deny that Nike had spawned an industry-wide shift in racing shoes. Soon, every major running shoe company developed a premium racer whose design seemed to follow the blueprint of offsetting max cushioning with a stiff plate.
As it turned out, however, all the noise about the ur-super shoe was empirically validated athletes of every level who wore it were suddenly running faster times. "The shoe absorbs a lot of pressure from the asphalt," he says in the documentary.When Nike was hyping the launch of its Vaporfly 4% running shoe in 2017, there was some skepticism about the company’s claims of having invented a product that would dramatically improve running economy. ZoomX is softer than its predecessors, offering athletes more comfort as it's compressed. Kipchoge said the shoe also helped him recover. "So for two athletes of equal ability on race day, the one with the shoes is going to beat the one without the shoes." "The runner runs the race, but the shoe enables him or her to run it faster for the same effort or ability," Geoff Burns, a kinesiology researcher at the University of Michigan, previously told Insider of Vaporflys. The addition of the carbon-fiber plate helps the foam compress and expand quickly. By comparison, the ethylene foam in older running shoe soles gives back 60% to 70%. After it gets squished, the resilient foam bounces back to its original shape, returning 85% of the energy that the runner used to compress it.
The foam in Vaporflys, which Nike named ZoomX, relies on a material called polyether block amide, or Pebax. The key is the shoes' lightweight carbon fiber and foam sole, which minimizes the energy lost per footfall. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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