Between January 1, 2023 and May 30, 2024, the world record in 29 different World Athletics recognised track and field disciplines was broken.
Sixteen of them were shattered by female athletes, 13 by men. And while some came in throwing and jumping-based sports, the vast majority were in some kind of running discipline.
The insinuation is that runners are getting faster, fitter and stronger, but there’s arguably another factor that can be used to offer some more context: so-called ‘super shoes’.
Brands like Nike and Adidas are no strangers to fluffy hyperbole about their product ranges – particularly when it comes to sporting footwear. They’ll tell you about ergonomics and physiology, about how wearing them can improve the performance of even the most casual of athletes.
For years, their PR campaigns were little more than unsubstantiated marketing prose. Today, they might just be bang on the money.
Track World Records: Year By Year
When we look at the World Athletics list of records in just the disciplines contested at the Olympic Games, we see some fascinating takeaways that don’t require you to be a detective of any means to identify the patterns.
Here’s the events we’re considering:
- 100m
- 200m
- 400m
- 800m
- 1,500m
- 5,000m
- 10,000m
- 110m hurdles
- 400m hurdles
- 10km (road)
- Half-marathon (road)
- Marathon (road)
First things first, let’s take a look at the year in which the world records for these events were broken. Here’s the visual for women’s track and road racing:
Although there’s a wide spread through the decades, you will also notice that the main concentration of new world records has been set since 2018.
Here’s the same data for the men:
Again, there’s a wide spread, but look at the concentration of new world records set since 2016 – remember, these are disciplines that have been contested for more than a century, in most cases.
At this point, you might be jumping to all sorts of conclusions: are athletes simply getting faster? That would be one of them.
Well, here’s an interesting counter. Now we’ve combined the men’s and women’s together, in three categories that we’ve engineered:
- Sprints – 100m through to 400m (and hurdles)
- Middle Distance – 800m through to 5,000m
- Long Distance – 10,000m and further
Now let’s plot those different categories against another on the same visual:
Here, we can see a spread of years over which world records have been broken in each category. And while both sprints and middle-distance have that wide spread across the decades, for long-distance running the upshot is clear:
For one reason or another, runners have been getting faster and fitter – and able to maintain higher speeds for longer periods of time.
In 2020, Joshua Cheptegui broke the 10,000m world record – the first time in 15 years that a new men’s milestone had been set at the distance. In the women’s event, Beatrice Chebet ran the fastest-ever recorded time in May 2024….shaving some seven seconds off the previous best.
In the half-marathon, both the men’s and women’s records have been set in recent times – Peres Jepchirchir taking the spoils in 2020 for the ladies, and Jacob Kiplimo in 2021 for the men.
And then we move onto the marathon world records, which – at the time of writing – were set in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Kelvin Kiptum, who so tragically passed away in 2024 after a road accident, set the fastest men’s time of 2:00:35 in Chicago in October 2023.
Jepchirchir, meanwhile, showed her credentials at the 26m distance in 2024, knocking a whopping 45 seconds off the previous best time at the London Marathon.
The men’s marathon record has been broken three times in all since 2018, and the women’s four times since 2017.
Long distance runners are getting faster – it’s undeniable. Are they training better? Have they found the perfect nutritional balance in their diet? Are they making marginal gains unique to each individual?
Or, as has been posed by a number of doubters over recent years, are they simply taking advantage of technical developments in running shoes that are allowing them to run faster for longer – the perfect blend of human endurance and scientific capability?
Super Shoes to the Rescue
It won’t surprise you to learn that 2016 was something of a ground-zero year for long-distance running – as evidenced by the improvement of world record times since then.
This was the year that the first pair of so-called ‘super’ running shoes was released. Nike’s Vaporfly 4% utilised two innovations – deeper midsole foam and a carbon plate – that are ten-a-penny these days, but at the time they were new and funky enough to change the game for runners of all abilities.
But controversy came with it. At the 2016 Olympics, two of the podium finishers in the men’s marathon event wore Vaporfly – they were labelled cheats, with similar language to that usually only reserved for dopers and drug cheats.
Although some casual athletes have reported improvements in their times since wearing shoes like Vaporfly 4%, there’s a possibility that this is a placebo-type effect – they unknowingly run harder in a bid to prove the technology right, or that with practice they have simply improved anyway….irrespective of the shoes on their feet.
And studies have shown that the slower you run, the less of an improvement you will see by wearing super shoes. So, if you’re just starting out or battling some kind of debilitating injury, splashing out £300 on a new pair of trainers may induce nothing more than a sense of money wasted.
Subsequent research has shown that high-quality athletes that wore Vaporfly 4%, specifically those capable of running at between 5:22 a mile and 6:54, improved their performance by….you guessed it, 4%. And for top-tier athletes, that equates to minutes off a marathon time, not mere seconds.
The conclusion was clear: science could be used to improve running shoe technology, and in turn enhance the performance of elite athletes.
Battle lines were drawn. Nike set about creating the follow-up to Vaporfly 4%, while other sportswear brands – ASICS, Puma, New Balance and Adidas – began developing their own lines of performance running shoes, alongside specialist firms like Hoka and Saucony.
Knowing that super shoes were proven to enhance performance was an outstanding piece of publicity, with runners of all shapes and sizes the target of marketing campaigns that tried to sell the idea of cruising around a 26 mile course with the most consummate of ease.
New Evidence
But later research has rather contradicted some of the findings that have come before. A survey group was monitored for its running performance before (wearing a traditional pair of running shoes) and after, when they switched to super shoes.
In some instances, individual runners showcased no gain in speed or stamina whatsoever – and in others, their times actually regressed when switching to the expensive models.
For reasons that are hard to fathom, some runners enjoy no gains at all when wearing super shoes – leading some scientists to label athletes as ‘non responders’, categorised as those with no gains, or even drawbacks, from wearing to super shoes, to ‘hyper responders’; those whose performance increases exponentially.
Trade journal Footwear Science went one further, commissioning a major study to see if all super shoes produced an improvement in running performance, or if some brands were more successful in that regard than others.
The results were mixed. Some brands of shoe, on average, saw an improvement in running economy measured at lass than 1%. Others, such as Nike’s Air Zoom Alphafly Next %, delivered average enhancements in the region of 3%. Marginal gains, but gains nonetheless.
How Do Super Shoes Improve Performance?
The naysayers amongst us will no doubt deny that it’s the shoes themselves that are improving speeds and times – how can a bit of footwear help to produce such consistent world record times?
The answer, according to the scientists, is that the design and build of super shoes is such that it enhances the running economy of the individual – that, over the course of longer distances, can save them tens of seconds. That may not sound like much on paper, but in competitive running every second really does count at the top level.
Running economy is measured as a form of efficiency, reducing the amount of energy that needs to be expended in order to run at fast speeds. As such, an athlete may find themselves harbouring more energy at the business end of races – enabling them to finish faster and thus bring down their overall time.
“A super shoe is going to have new foam that’s more compliant and resilient, or springier, and it’s going to have a rigid moderator, like a carbon plate,” reveals Dustin Joubert, a kinesiology professor.
“If you improve economy, you reduce the oxygen cost and the energy cost to run at a given speed.”
Another perk of super shoes is that they help to protect the myriad muscles, tendons, ligaments and other body parts in the feet and legs from injury and fatigue – improving endurance and durability, and minimising the risk of a runner hitting the infamous ‘wall’ as lactic acid build-up sets in.
When you consider the running shoes that athletes of years gone by, it’s little wonder that world records are being smashed left, right and centre. Back in the day, a thin layer of cushioning on the heel was revelatory – today, ergonomic design dictates that it’s the front of the shoe where much of the padding needs to be.
Of course, not every long-distance runner is concerned about wearing shoes at all! In 1960, Abebe Bikila won the gold medal at the Rome Olympics in the marathon discipline in bare feet….imagine how fast he might have gone in a pair of super shoes.
To the Future
Ask some in the know about these things, and they’ll tell you that the speeds and abilities of long distance runners had plateaued many years ago.
Of course, you get generational talents that are going to challenge world records, but for the most part it was as if the limits of human physiology had been reached.
And then along came super shoes….
Kiptum was wearing them (Nike AlphaFly 3, to be precise) when he smashed the men’s marathon world record in Chicago. He was the first in history to smash the 2:01:00 mark.
WORLD RECORD: We have a new man in town. Kelvin Kiptum just broke Eliud Kipchoge’s World Record with an unofficial time of 2:00:35! UNBELIEVABLE! pic.twitter.com/XfeMEzPveZ
— Chicago Marathon (@ChiMarathon) October 8, 2023
That same weekend, Sifan Hassan broke the Chicago Marathon in the women’s race while wearing the same shoes at Kiptum – proof, if any were needed, that Nike were ahead of the game.
But the battleground continues to evolve, and now spectators are as interested as watching what the athletes are wearing on their feet as their times on the stopwatch. At the 2024 London Marathon, Alexander Munyao and Jepchirchir both won wearing Adidas’ Adizero Adios Pro Evo – the latter, of course, breaking the world record. Promotional material couldn’t get any better than that for the German firm.
According to Adidas’ literature, the Adizero Adios Pro Evo is built with ‘carbon-infused ENERGYRODS 2.0 to provide lightweight stiffness for a snappy, efficient stride’, while ‘Ultralight LIGHTSTRIKE PRO cushions every step with two layers of our most resilient foam.’ They look like moon boots, to the naked eye, but weigh just 138g.
It might all sound like marketing bluff, but the proof of the pudding – as they say – is in the eating.
Adidas and Nike will be working tirelessly behind the scenes on their next generation of super shoes, while Puma have launched their most statement piece yet – the evoSPEED Berserker spikes, while aimed at sprint athletes, will use much of the same tech as long-distance shoes.
Released our new Puma Berserker spike for the big 2024 season today with the Puma family in Paris! This shoe is the peak of shoe tec! Looking forward to race in it soon💪 pic.twitter.com/IL0WMMkAO3
— Karsten Warholm (@kwarholm) April 10, 2024
Karsten Warholm, the 400m hurdles world record holder, will be wearing a pair of Berserkers at the Paris Olympics, despite having once denounced super shoes as ‘bull****’ – in fairness to the Norwegian, he has admitted to hypocrisy having previously lambasted his fellow competitors for their choice of footwear.
It’s proof positive that in competitive sport, winning is everything – no matter what it takes….or what you have to wear on your feet. But even so, will super shoes ever plateau in the same way that human endurance has?
And will athletics’ governing bodies be forced to act – bringing in regulation that restricts the technical details of a super shoe, or banning them altogether? It’s a move that would cause outrage, but the advantage being enjoyed by those wearing the top brands is impacting the sheer integrity of the sport.
Andy Dixon, the editor of Runner’s World, commented:
“It’s like comparing apples with pears [new world records against old times]. If the shoe is giving you three or four minutes, then this idea of a world record being a metric for human excellence is definitely skewed. Some people have even suggested that there should be an asterisk by records set with super shoes.”
With pairs of super shoes exchanging hands for £400 a pop, perhaps – as ever – money will talk the loudest of all.