The Science of How Nike Nearly Cracked the Two-Hour Marathon | WIRED

Elite distance runners have been closing in on a two hour marathon for more than a century but the sports last great barrier has proven elusive for decades the world's fastest times have fallen by mere seconds at a time that was until earlier this year when Elliot Kipchoge a chopped a staggering two minutes in 32 seconds from the world two previous best time coming just 25 seconds short of the two-hour mark but his time doesn't qualify for world-record status that's because capture gaez race wasn't an official marathon it was more like a carefully controlled experiment members of Nikes breaking two projects spent four years and millions of dollars preparing three athletes for this race optimizing everything from the shoes they wore to the course they raced on earth only cacio gain came anywhere near breaking to understanding the science behind capture gaez race helps explain how he came so close and why this one race could forever change the way elite athletes run marathons one of the most controversial elements of the breaking 2 project were the shoes Kip Cho gay and the other runners ran in customized versions of the vapor fly 4% a shoe with a thick springy sole and a carbon-fiber plate that Nike claims can increase running economy by an average of 4% but what does that 4% figure actually mean and where did it come from I'm Roger crumb I'm a professor in the integrative physiology department here at the University of Colorado Boulder and we call this little commotion lab Nike knew from internal testing that the vapor fly was fast but when they needed someone to check their math they called Crom his lab is known for accurately measuring the energy that athletes expend during exercise we built this one also ourselves in a machine shop when we first built it it was the first force measuring treadmill a postdoc named voucher Hogue kamar led the investigation comparing a prototype version of the vapor fly to to other shoes the Nike streak six and the adidas audio's boost two at the time the study was performed these two shoes or their predecessors had been worn in the ten fastest marathons of all time an Adidas shoe was worn by Dennis cameto and he set the world record now the audio is boost to wait about 50 grams more than either of the Nike shoes Soho camera used lead pellets to equalize the weight of all three that way he'd know that any energy saved with the vapor fly would be because of its springy sole and carbon fiber plate not its weight next the test subjects performed a series of five-minute runs in each of the shoes in different orders on different days while the researchers measured their oxygen consumption when kromm's Team calculated the metabolic cost of running in each shoe they found about a 4% difference between the vapor fly and the other two racing flats all 18 test subjects responded a little bit differently but each of them used between 2 and 6 percent less energy to run in the vapor fly there are however two big caveats number one Nike did fund this research but it was a well designed study and the data is pretty compelling the second caveat the shoe is 4 percent advantage applies to test subjects running under ideal conditions for 5 minutes at a time but the extent to which that advantage extends to an actual marathon is still unclear look at it this way a 4 percent boost in efficiency should mean that a marathon are usually capable of running a 2:05 race would be able to slip on a pair of these shoes and run pretty close to a two-hour race no problem but that's not what we see in the real world which suggests that something is lost between a five-minute treadmill run and a 26.2 mile road race the truth is a marathon boils down to a bunch of different factors and what you wear on your feet is just one of them so what other variables can you account for I think it's just a level of control we had we controlled the course extremely well because I think a lot of the knowledge around optimum conditions for these types of events is reasonably well known I mean we did some we did some fine fine tuning the racetrack at Monza gave Nike the control to optimize a bunch of factors known to affect running performance like temperature elevation nutrition even the turns in the course all of which when added together probably had a pretty big impact on keep show gaze race take turns for instance the more corners a course has and the sharper they are the more times a runner has to slow down or take longer route which adds up to valuable seconds over the course of a race the same goes for Hills a flat course is generally preferable to one with a lot of ups and downs consider the Berlin Marathon it only has a handful of sharp corners and it's flatter than a lot of other big city marathons like London or New York these qualities make Berlin a very fast course on average elite runners finish 81 seconds quicker in Berlin than they do at other races which probably explains why every marathon world record in the last 15 years has been set in Germany the junior circuit at Monza it's even flatter than Berlin and has no sharp corners in fact the big sweeping curves at Monza ensured that Kipchoge a and the other runners were always running the fastest shortest route possible the looped course also made it easier to deliver nutrition to the runners at regular intervals along the run about the only thing Monza didn't have going for it was whether running generates body heat and too much slows you down cold temperatures helped runners dissipate heat letting them run faster longer numerous studies suggest that the ideal temperature for professional marathoners is below 50 or even 40 degrees Fahrenheit but on race day at Monza temperatures were a little higher than ideal it was about 55 degrees and a little bit humid and I wonder if they would have been able to go faster if it had been 5 or 6 or 10 degrees cooler that's Michael joiner he's a physician researcher at the Mayo Clinic and an expert in human performance in 1991 he published a paper that predicted the ideal athlete running under ideal conditions could complete a marathon in one hour 57 minutes 58 seconds we asked him what he thought made the biggest difference in Capshaw his time and he had a very clear answer I think the three aspects of breaking to the contributed most heavily to the performance are the drafting the pace car providing a very steady pace the whole way and also the runners who were both causing the wind break but also participating in the drafting in traditional marathons Pacers have to start the race with the runners and that can only lead the pack as long as they're physically able so they always drop out long before the race is over but for braking to Nike cycled teams of Pacers in and out of the race over the of the entire run in a finely-tuned configuration never before seen in a marathon to determine the ideal arrangement for blocking wind Nike worked with aerodynamics expert Robbie Ketchel and the University of New Hampshire to test pacing formations in a massive wind tunnel they tried a house configuration an inverted Olympic ring and a wall shape with two rows of three Pacers but the data showed the best configuration was the Arrowhead shape you see here that kind of advantage can shave minutes from a marathon time but what about the pace car in the days after the braking to race a lot of people speculated that the pace car and the giant clock on top of it was providing an even bigger aerodynamic advantage than the Pacers which is not a crazy theory the sign was big and the athletes were running pretty close to the car Nike and Ketchel say the car and clock had a negligible effect on Kip Tobias performance of course Nike would say that but it's also probably true aerodynamics engineers Stephen Ferguson and Chris Beavis who are unaffiliated with the Nike project ran a full simulation of the benefits kept chaga would have experienced in the wake of the Tesla and the Pacers but according to their simulations almost all of the drag reduction came from the Pacers Ferguson and Beavis estimate the car clock and Pacers together might have saved Kip Choga as much as four minutes and 30 seconds compared to running on his own but the car and clock saved at most 26 seconds and that's under ideal conditions on race day they might have saved kept show gay half that as for how the braking to project will affect the way marathons are run in the future every single expert we spoke to said the big thing they expect to see going forward are more coordinated pacing efforts and/or if a team was unified under the same country or under the same sponsor then you had those four runners who did co-op the term we came up with it was cooperative drafting and if you had cooperative drafting even in the last fourth of the marathon or so that could make a big difference I think the other thing that'll be interesting will be to see if you get team races team Nike vs. team adidas or this country versus that country sort of like you have in cycling where people could work together as sort of the running equivalent of a peloton but the breaking to project also shows that the two our boundary won't fall from pacing alone overcoming the marathons 120 minute barrier will still require breakthroughs on multiple fronts and so the arms race between shoe companies will continue in the form of ever lighter bouncier more propulsive shoes expect race organizers to optimize the conditions under which marathons are run and most importantly look for elite athletes like Elliot Kip Shogun to continue pushing the limits of what's humanly possible the hope for an and under 12 was two minutes 57 seconds now we are only 25 seconds away [Music]

Channel: WIRED

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Id: c6FS3D4a_kA

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2017