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Peter Frick-Wright (Host): This is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast

Announcer: The first man to run a marathon in under two hours. One final lung-busting stride for Kipchoge, one giant leap for human endeavor.

Peter: Five years ago, in October, 2019, Eliud Kipchoge became the first person to run the marathon in under 2 hours. It didn’t happen in an official race, but in an elaborately planned time trial. And because he had alternating teams of pacers working with him for the duration of the event, Kipchoge’s performance didn’t count as an official world record. But still. He maintained a 4:34-minute-per-mile pace for 26.2 miles. It was unprecedented.

Tape: And to Roger Bannister, Neil Armstrong, Edmund Hillary, we can now add the name of Eluid Kipchoge.

Peter: But Kipchoge had an advantage that previous generations of elite marathoners didn’t. He was wearing the Alphafly, the latest iteration, at the time, of Nike’s infamous line of “super shoes.”����

Super shoes, by and large, combine a special, lightweight foam, with a carbon fiber plate that springs the runner forward with each step. According to Nike, that first iteration made runners 4% faster, on average—and that might not sound huge, but it’s a five-minute difference for an elite marathoner.

The day after Kiopchoge’s run in Vienna, a previously untouchable marathon record–Paula Radcliffe’s women’s mark of 2:15:25 from 2003–was broken by Bridgid Kosgei in Chicago.

Kosgei was also wearing a Nike super shoe, and broke the record by over a minute.��

Announcer: Now on a record-eligible course here in Chicago, Bridgid Kosgei will defend her Chicago Marathon championship and shatter the world record in the marathon.

One of the best parts of watching the summer olympics is seeing world records broken in sports that have been part of the olympics forever, stuff that you’ve probably done yourself, like running, and swimming.

But when you start introducing gear that fundamentally distorts the playing field–makes runners as much as five minutes faster than the competition, what are we actually watching? Running? Or competitive shoe making? And what do these kinds of advances mean for people like you and me?��

Earlier this spring, Nike invited ���ϳԹ���’s running correspondent, Fritz Huber, to the facility where it develops the kinds of cutting edge technology that athletes use at the olympics. And we told Fritz not to come back without a perfectly straightforward, easy answer: is this stuff good or bad?��

And he did his best.

Nike: Behind me, we have 85,000 square feet of sport research. 85,000 square feet of state of the art technologies, capabilities.

Fritz Huber: At first glance, the Nike Sport Research Lab just looks like an upscale gym: There’s a full-sized basketball court, an astroturf soccer pitch and a 200-meter running track.��

Nike: This is NSRL Form. It is basically a marvelous motion capture system that we developed that allows us to track a runner on a treadmill.

Fritz: But what distinguishes the Nike lab from your typical college campus fieldhouse is that it also functions as a vast research facility and product testing center. The place is tricked-out with motion capture cameras, underground force plates and various other instruments for capturing data and gathering athlete feedback.��

The lab was crucial in helping Nike develop the first super shoe–a shoe which soon had runners breaking records, and set off a huge debate.��

Was the shoe helping break records? And if so, was it fair? After all, at first, only Nike-sponsored athletes had access to the new technology. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, the top three finishers in the men’s marathon were all secretly wearing a Vaporfly prototype.��

Eventually, World Athletics, the sport’s global governing body, responded by setting a limit on the thickness of shoes used in competition, and mandating that they could not have more than one rigid plate. The rules were intended to curtail a potential arms race among shoe companies, but they didn’t prohibit any racing shoes already on the market, and some critics said that the rules didn’t go far enough.��

In any case, the genie was already out of the bottle. Today, every major shoe company has their own super shoe.��

When I brought up the super shoe controversy to the director of the Nike lab, Dr. Matthew Nurse, he defended the Vaporfly effect. He pointed out that, despite its dramatic design, the shoe was still constructed out of the same basic components that running shoes have been made from for decades.������

Dr. Matthew Nurse: We’ve all been baking with flour, eggs, and sugar–all the companies for a long time. We just made a better recipe. And there’s a natural evolution to technology in sport. Tiger for a long time held on to a wooden driver while everybody started outdriving him. People moved to different tennis rackets . . .

Fritz: Okay, but in golf and tennis, the equipment is part of the sport. But not with running. In theory, you don’t even need shoes. So the Vaporfly’s radical effectiveness is tarnishing the purity of the competition, right? Well, maybe. Nurse suggested that one way to assess whether technology was benefitting a sport was to not only look at broken records, but to also look at whether that technology benefits the everyday runner. And it turns out, super shoes aren’t just fast, they might also help prevent injury.

Dr. Nurse: The dropout rate in running is really high, especially after pain and injury. If we can sort of mitigate some of that pain, or even just amplify that experience, the things we do for Eliud to run a two-hour marathon just make the everyday consumer a little better.

Fritz: The argument is that super shoes aren’t just for elite runners. Even if you’re a mid-pack marathoner, they’re still a good choice to cut down on soreness and injury in training. And that’s justification enough.

Brett Schoolmeester, a senior product director for Nike Running, brought up a different point. He thinks that super shoes not only brought more runners into the sport, but that the super shoe revolution contributed to a new generation of distance runner celebrities.��

Brett Schoolmeester: I think there's a lot of people who know who Eliud Kipchoge is. They're aware of what's going on in elite level marathoning right now. They're inspired to start trying the marathon. They're wearing these shoes. Uh, more and more people are benefiting from that. Like, that to me is not debatable. Like, that's a good thing. Like, the sport is getting more popular. People are invested. They want to see these athletes achieve great things. It inspires them. They get active. I don't think we should ever apologize for that.

Fritz: So Nike maintains that the new technology is good because it increased participation and interest in the sport. But, it would be absurd to expect the company responsible for the super shoe revolution to also be critical of its impact. So, after the Nike tour finished, I called up someone who has been publicly more ambivalent about how running has changed in recent years. Geoffrey Burns is a sport physiologist at the University of Michigan and an elite ultrarunner. He says that with every gain in technology, something else is lost.

��

Geoffrey Burns: Yeah, I think we've lost a bit of the fourth dimension–and that’s time. So if I go to a race and there's a course record holder, I'm racing that person, their 4-dimensional self, right? Say they set the course record in 2003 and I'm here in 2024. I'm racing the 2003 version of that person. And so, in running, very distinct from other sports, was so controlled and so removed, that we got to compete against the past, present and future versions of both ourselves and other people.

And once you introduce equipment that changes that, then we now have a confounding variable, And I think that is, that's one of the sad things is that we kind of lose the metaphysical in our sport, which made it unique.

Fritz: To be fair, there have been some changes in running over the years. Tracks used to be made out of cinders, for example, rather than synthetic rubber. And GPS watches and heart-rate monitors have made it easier to pace yourself in long distance races. But nonetheless, compared with a sport like cycling, the basic technology of running shoes has remained the same since the sport entered the mainstream in the 1970s.��

Geoff: then from that point on, there were not any big innovations. Like we, essentially, EVA foam, the dominant foam used in running shoes up until very recently came about in the mid 1970s. And that's persisted for 50 plus years.

Fritz: In the interest of full disclosure, Geoff says that these days, despite his qualms about losing the fourth dimension, he runs most of his workouts in super shoes. In his opinion, the shoes’ potential physiological benefits might be one of the strongest arguments in their favor:��

Geoff: When we run, we have the physics of a pogo stick, essentially. We are springs that bounce along. And those spring-like physics degrade as we get older and older. I'm very curious, and I would bet long on this, that super shoes can help older runners stay in the sport longer.

Fritz: Of course, you could say the same thing about motors in bikes. But no one’s suggesting that we allow e-bikes in the Tour de France.��

Geoff: And that then circles back to maybe the fundamental question of: How much do we want the solution of athlete problems to be synthetic? And there’s no correct answer to that.

Say you're a three hour marathoner and you cross the line and the clock says 2:59:55. And you just met your goal. Well, of that 2:59:55, some of that was done via technology, technological innovation. The shoes are an easy thing to point to. So there's some aspect of that performance that was engineered. And that's true in every single sport, probably more so. And it comes down to, to what extent people want that. And there’s no correct answer to that.

Fritz: Some people want as much new technology as they can get their hands on.�� Tech is cool. After all, one of the things that makes Formula One so popular is that the cars are miracles of engineering. Likewise, many fans of pro cycling are really into the design and technology of the racing bikes. And regardless how one feels about the super shoe revolution, it’s hard to argue that it didn’t give running a boost in popularity and media attention. But at what cost?��

Geoff: After the super shoes, the number of times running, marathon running specifically, was like front page headlines and articles are being written about the shoes and the controversies and all of this stuff running was having the day that it hasn't had since like maybe the 1970s. And the constant stream of records. And it's exciting. Yeah, it definitely makes it popular. But to get back to this idea of the soul, it's like if you're selling your soul for clicks, for likes, for that immediate gratification, you are eroding the foundation that its beauty is built on, then something's going to give and the whole thing's going to fall down eventually.

Fritz: How you feel about super shoes ultimately comes down to how you feel about the role of technology in a fundamentally low-tech sport. The shoes may help us run faster with less pain and discomfort. But managing pain and discomfort is kind of the whole point of endurance sports.

While opinions may vary, in the case of the super shoe, the verdict has fallen. It’s here to stay, broken records and all.��

But what happens when a disruptive new technology ��DZ����’t win the popular vote? Can you push back on innovations once athletes start breaking records?

After the break, how professional swimming did exactly that.

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Announcer: Phelps in lane three… take your mark. BEEP.

Fritz: A decade before super shoes helped crush so many running records, professional swimming was dealing with its own gear-inspired controversy. Instead of super shoes, it was full-body “super suits.”��

Elizabeth Beisel: The suit just made people insanely fast that are already fine athletes, but it was like the suit almost made the swimmer.

Fritz: Three-time Olympian Elizabeth Beisel wasn’t happy about it.

Elizabeth: I think it made the biggest difference for those athletes that were good, but not great.

Fritz: In 2008, Speedo launched its infamous LZR racing suit–a revolutionary design that was co-developed with NASA to minimize drag and compress a swimmer's body–almost like an aquatic corset. In response, other companies came out with their own versions, introducing materials like neoprene to increase buoyancy in the pool. At the time, one criticism was that the innovation tended to offer greater benefits to larger swimmers.��

Elizabeth: I was at that meet in 2009. At World Championships. I was only 16, so for me it wasn't necessarily a huge difference maker cause my body wasn't developed yet; I was just like a little string bean. But I remember our team being named in 2009, and there were people that you had never heard of that after that meet you never heard of again.

Fritz: At the 2009 World Championships in Rome, the super suits were kingmakers.��

Elizabeth: Like every single heat at World Championships, whether it was prelims or finals, there was a world record being broken. And I remember by the end of the meet.�� No one even cared. We'd be sitting in the stands at prelims and somebody would break the�� 200 fly world record. And we'd be like, ‘Oh, all right, cool.’ Like it was like, it took away every magical moment of being an athlete and breaking a world record. It was just like, Oh, another Tuesday. Like who cares?

Fritz: One of those records was set by the German swimmer Paul Biedermann, who was competing in the Arena X-Glide suit–a suit with a unique, full polyurethane coating that effectively turned the wearer into a human seal. In the men’s 200-meter final, Biedermann, who’d finished fifth in the previous year’s Olympics, pulled off the upset against a reigning Olympic champ you may have heard of.��

Announcer: “Biedermann is ahead of Phelps’s world record. Not only is he going to beat Phelps, he’s going to smash his world record. Paul Biedermann of Germany! One, forty-two, flat!”

Fritz: That 1:42 flat? It still stands as the men’s 200-meter free record today.

So many world records being broken at the 2008 Olympics and the 2009 World Championships was a problem. So FINA, swimming’s global governing body, decided to act. They put in place strict rules limiting swimsuit buoyancy and what materials could be used. Also, crucially, they limited how much of a swimmer’s body the suits could cover–no more human seals. The new rules went into effect in 2010 and were generally well-received:

Elizabeth: I think it was absolutely the right decision to ban the suits.

Fritz: Even Michael Phelps, who was once the most prominent athlete wearing Speedo’s LZR, was in favor of the new regulations. Here’s Phelps in an interview with The Swim Channel in 2009:

Phelps: I think there was so much controversy with the whole thing that it took the excitement away from the sport and everyone was worrying about suits.”

Fritz: But the decision to ban the suits wasn’t just about maintaining the purity of the sport. Putting limits on the new technology was good for swimming itself.��

Stu Isaac: Now, when you saw Michael Phelps in 2008 win eight gold medals wearing a LZR, every little kid wanted a LZR.

Fritz: This is Stu Isaac, a former competitive swimmer who eventually became a senior vice president for sales and marketing at Speedo:

Stu: They wanted to be like Mike, to borrow another athlete's catchphrase.

Fritz: As a consultant for USA Swimming, Stu has helped develop tech suit regulations for competitive youth swimmers. Because even though full body seal suits are banned, tech suits that adhere to strict regulations are still allowed. They’re just prohibitively expensive. And Stu is both concerned about a level playing field, but also keeping the sport accessible.

Stu: Should a 12 year old be spending $500 on this? Well, then in research, the real concern that was coming was did this make the sport even more inaccessible because of that cost? And did this create the perception of a silver bullet?

Fritz: Stu kept hearing the same story over and over again. Parents would approach their kids’ swim coach…��

Stu: . .�� and say: “Well, my daughter's getting pretty good. She just made her A cuts. Can you give me some advice on which of the tech suits they should get?” And the coach said, you don't need to spend $500 on your daughter. Just make sure she gets the practice every day on time.

Elizabeth: I don't think you need a tech suit when you're a kid.

Fritz: Elizabeth Beisel again.

Elizabeth: Like, that's ridiculous to me. I think you should have perfect beautiful strokes that have been refined for years. There’s obviously an exception to everything, but, overarching theme. I think that's a waste of money. Spend it on joining a good swim team and getting good coaching. And your child will be just fine if they don't get their first tech suit until they're 15.

Fritz: It’s hard to think of a better example of a precocious age-group swimmer than Elizabeth; as a youth prodigy from Rhode Island, she won junior nationals as an 11-year-old. At 15, she was the youngest member of the United States swim team that competed at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.��

When I spoke to her and Matt Barbini, the director of High Performance at USA Swimming about the role of technology in sport, Matt brought up another aspect of the debate: that if left unchecked, elite technology can actually hinder the development of elite talent.

Here’s Matt:��

Matt Barbini: When you start adding in $500 suits, you're reducing our population. Our national teams and our Olympic teams are 100 percent objectively bottom up selected. We don't go around measuring kids’ hands and feet to see if they're going to be good swimmers. We need a lot of people in the water to feed that. Our system requires a large membership base.

Fritz: In addition to keeping the teams full, Matt also wants teams full of swimmers with solid fundamentals. Not swimmers who are dependent on tech.��

Matt: You also see people that get married to equipment just in training. Everybody has swum with people that are great when they wear paddles and a pull buoy. Or they're awesome with fins. I was really good with fins, but I’d take them off and I couldn't kick, so I think you can create this extra dependence on technology. So I think the purity of the sport is one thing, but it's also the sustainability of the sport and teaching people the right things.

Fritz: USA Swimming felt the same way. In 2020, the governing body implemented rules that banned premium tech suits for swimmers age 12 and under.��������

As for the elite side of the sport, both Matt and Elizabeth suggested that the appeal of swimming, like running, was in its lack of bells and whistles. As opposed to sports where technology is part of the competition. When you watch Formula One, for example, you’re watching teams make decisions like what tires to use based on a variety of factors and variables. In other words, they are making strategic choices on the fly, and they might get it wrong. But you don’t have that in swimming.��

Matt:If you strap the best swimmer into the best suit, they're probably going to win. And that's not real fun to watch when you know the outcome. I don't think it has a role in our sport. For swimming, I just feel like it just alters the results without any other variables. I want more thinking to go into it, or more strategy.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Everything you said Barbini, I was like: Yes! Yes! Yes! Especially with the sport of swimming. It's such a blue collar sport. You have to put in so many hours and time into it. You have so much pride in what you do and when you're racing somebody that might have that six percent advantage and didn't work as hard, or whatever, you lose the spirit of the sport. I mean, I saw it first hand at the World Championships in 2009. Nobody was getting excited. Nobody even turned around to see the world record. It just took away all of the excitement and the beauty of working hard and achieving something that you thought was impossible. It just made it too easy.

Fritz: Professional swimming may have banned the use of full-body neoprene, but swimsuits will continue to evolve. Likewise, running shoe companies will continue to upgrade their super shoe designs within the parameters of the rules. A certain amount of innovation, in other words, is inevitable.��

And there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, anyone who swings a golf club or laces up a pair of running shoes today is to some extent benefiting from the innovations of the past. But, as the example from swimming shows, we don’t have to embrace every form of technological performance enhancement.��

As for the matter of which innovations we should adopt and which ones we should push back against, maybe the best way to answer that is to think about what makes a sport compelling in the first place. We want to see athletes improve and we want the gear to get better, but not at the expense of meaningful competition.��

Elizabeth: You think back to what we were racing in in the 1920s. I love the progression that we've seen.�� Like, obviously I don't want something as stark as 2009, that was just like too much, but I think seeing the sport grow and seeing us get better as athletes– whether it's through training equipment or a slightly better suit–that I'm fine with.

It's just giving access to something that completely changes the game for one athlete and not necessarily the other is too much for me.

But I love trying new things in training and this really works for me and this doesn't. Like that's the beauty of the sport. But I think everything in moderation in life is probably best.

Peter: Fritz Huber, is a regular contributor to ���ϳԹ���. He mostly writes about running.

This episode was written and reported by Fritz with production help and editing by Sarah Craig.

Additional editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright, and Robbie Carver. Music and sound design by Robbie as well.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.