{"id":31481,"date":"2026-06-06T02:06:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T02:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/31481\/"},"modified":"2026-06-06T02:06:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T02:06:23","slug":"can-better-running-shoes-really-make-you-faster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/31481\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Better Running Shoes Really Make You Faster?"},"content":{"rendered":"

But promoting a new shoe with an academic study elicited skepticism.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Nike had just put out an ad that said, \u2018Our shoes are 4 percent better,\u2019 or, \u2018Our runners say that their runs feel 4 percent easier,\u2019 nobody would have paid attention,\u201d Kram said. \u201cWhen you put out a study, that\u2019s different. That\u2019s making a pretty bold claim.\u201d Even as athletes began to set world records in the shoes, \u201chealthy doubt was hard to kill,\u201d the journalist Matt Hart wrote in his book \u201cWin at All Costs.\u201d \u201cOwing to the fact that Nike had funded the study.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople said we were shills,\u201d Kram said. \u201cBut then the study got replicated.\u201d In 2019, a New York Times analysis found<\/a> that the advantage conferred by the Vaporfly might actually be even higher than concluded by Kram.<\/p>\n

Vaporfly\u2019s success ushered in an era in which every brand was hurrying to develop a super shoe that combined high-stack supercritical foams with carbon fiber plates. It also put a new emphasis on scientific analyses, as every company looks for ways to prove, with hard data, that its shoe has something that the others don\u2019t. \u201cA lot of those people have worked with Rodger and me, so it\u2019s becoming omnipresent at the shoe companies,\u201d Hoogkamer said.<\/p>\n

Some brands, like Under Armour, have built state-of-the-art laboratories in pursuit of a competitive advantage. Tom Luedecke, Under Armour\u2019s senior director of footwear innovation, described its newly constructed mechanical testing lab in Baltimore as \u201cworld-class, and as good or better than everyone else in the industry,\u201d crediting it with the success of the brand\u2019s Velociti Elite line of marathon-running shoes. Other brands have deepened their relationships with universities to leverage their resources and expertise.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking with these labs makes us a lot smarter,\u201d said Kevin FitzPatrick, the vice president for running at New Balance.<\/p>\n

Not every brand relies on external data. When Adidas revealed its Adios Pro Evo 3, which Sabastian Sawe wore in April when he ran the London Marathon in under two hours, it boasted that the shoe \u201cimproves running economy by 1.6 percent compared to its predecessor.\u201d But they didn\u2019t share any studies or data, which raised eyebrows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But promoting a new shoe with an academic study elicited skepticism. \u201cIf Nike had just put out an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21254],"tags":[21290,25324,30234,30233,30232,30231,1383,4526,21440,30235],"class_list":["post-31481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-adidas","tag-adidas","tag-adidas-ag","tag-brooks-sports","tag-new-balance-athletic-shoe-inc","tag-nike-inc","tag-puma-ag","tag-research","tag-running","tag-sneakers","tag-vis-photo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}