{"id":86829,"date":"2026-06-05T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=86829"},"modified":"2026-06-04T19:07:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T01:07:12","slug":"the-race-to-make-the-fastest-running-shoe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/the-race-to-make-the-fastest-running-shoe\/","title":{"rendered":"The race to make the fastest running shoe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In early 2024, Max Gr\u00fcttner, the head of performance concepts at Puma, was examining the results of tests conducted by the company\u2019s research and sports science department at its lab in southern Germany. His team was developing a new long-distance \u201csuper shoe,\u201d the Fast-R Nitro Elite 3, with a newly formulated thermoplastic polyurethane foam and a spoon-shaped carbon fiber plate. The early lab results looked promising \u2014 almost preposterously so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of the athletes Gr\u00fcttner\u2019s team had hooked up to research-grade treadmills showed improved \u201crunning economy\u201d \u2014 a measure of the amount of metabolic energy they used to maintain a consistent speed \u2014 while wearing the Nitro Elite 3, compared with other leading shoes. In theory, this meant someone could run a faster or easier marathon wearing Pumas than competing brands, which is the dream of every running-shoe designer. If this claim were validated, it could make the Nitro Elite 3 a must-buy for marathon runners all over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Puma had to test it at a lab that wasn\u2019t affiliated with the brand, so Gr\u00fcttner mailed prototypes of the Nitro Elite 3 to the Integrated Locomotion Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, run by Wouter Hoogkamer, an expert in biomechanics and energetics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoogkamer is highly respected in the footwear industry for a paper he wrote with Rodger Kram, a physiologist who ran the Locomotion Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder. The 2018 study revealed that Nike\u2019s then-unreleased super shoe, the Vaporfly, \u201clowered the energetic cost of running by 4 percent on average,\u201d which could help top athletes \u201crun substantially faster\u201d \u2014 a claim so provocative that it was met by calls from a major sports governing body for the shoes to be banned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoogkamer conducted a study of the Nitro Elite 3, testing its performance against the Nike Alphafly 3, the Adidas Adios Pro Evo and its predecessor, the Nitro Elite 2. Of the 15 athletes tested, Hoogkamer found that each \u201crecorded their best running economy in the prototype shoes.\u201d The study concluded that the Nitro Elite 3 could improve running economy by approximately 3.1 to 3.6 percent compared with state-of-the-art marathon shoes, an enhancement that could allow a three-hour marathon runner to shave about four and a half minutes off her personal best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gr\u00fcttner was thrilled. \u201cThey replicated our results,\u201d he said. \u201cNow it wasn\u2019t just our lab. It was an external lab.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoogkamer published the results alongside a \u201ccompeting interests\u201d addendum disclosing that the author \u201chas received research grants from Puma.\u201d Last year, Puma issued a news release that asserted it had scientific data to prove Puma\u2019s Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 was \u201cleading\u201d in the running category to promote the shoe\u2019s debut at the Boston Marathon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carson Caprara, the chief product officer at Brooks Running, a rival shoemaker, said that such scientific studies were useful learning tools for brands. But testing protocols, he said, are often too narrow: The Massachusetts Puma study and the Colorado Nike study both involved having athletes run on treadmills for only five minutes at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou glean a lot from five minutes, but you have to infer a lot as well,\u201d Caprara said. \u201cThat\u2019s maybe more about the press release and less about the complex truths that go into a shoe working to its full extent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Running shoes often boast about their scientific bona fides. A magazine ad for the Nike Air Max 1 from the mid-1980s trumpeted the company\u2019s \u201cpassion for science,\u201d adding technical jargon to appeal to the savvy runner\u2019s desire for some quantifiable performance edge. And many in the footwear industry studied sports science and biomechanics, like Matthew Nurse, Nike\u2019s chief science officer and longtime head of the Nike Sport Research Lab, who worked at the Human Performance Lab at the University of Calgary, in Canada. Gr\u00fcttner has a master\u2019s degree in sports science and kinesiology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it wasn\u2019t until Nike released the Vaporfly ahead of Eliud Kipchoge\u2019s sub-two-hour marathon attempt, in 2017, that a brand commissioned an academic study of its shoe technology. While developing a prototype in 2016, Nike engaged Kram, a member of Nike\u2019s scientific advisory board, to test the shoe\u2019s effectiveness against other leading marathon footwear. The result \u2014 that the Vaporfly was 4 percent better than the competition \u2014 was extensively reported in the press. The shoe was eventually released under the name \u201cVaporfly 4%.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt really added to Nike\u2019s credibility and validated our approach,\u201d said Ray Browning, then Nike\u2019s director of footwear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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

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

Marc Makowski, senior vice president for innovation at Adidas, said that the company goes through \u201can extensive testing process, looking at all kinds of impacts from a biomechanics perspective.\u201d Those tests take place both in Adidas\u2019s in-house lab at its Bavarian headquarters and \u201cin the field in places like Kenya,\u201d replicating conditions where athletes like Sawa live and train.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s amusing that the unattributed 1.6 percent number quoted by Adidas is just being treated as if it were fact,\u201d said E.C. Frederick, a biomechanist who founded Nike\u2019s first Sport Research Lab in the early 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFacts need to have, at least, an origin story,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Berend, an industry veteran who worked at Nike for over 15 years before becoming the head of design and innovation at R.A.D., an upstart shoe company based in Oregon, said he sees the upside in intense testing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI do think it\u2019s good for our industry to test this stuff,\u201d Berend said. \u201cGood for fans, for consumers.\u201d But he has seen a lot of grandstanding. \u201cCompanies pay huge amounts of money for lots of those studies to happen. I\u2019m not saying they\u2019re entirely inaccurate. But the real proof is when you put that product on real athletes, people who run every day, and they tell you, \u2018This is what I\u2019ve been looking for in a shoe.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n