Nitpicking: to truly compare the running times they should use the same shoes and tracks.
There is a lot of effort put in to make athletes faster. I doubt Usain Bolt would be under 20s on a dirt track.
There is a lot of effort put in to make athletes faster. I doubt Usain Bolt would be under 20s on a dirt track.
First of all, to make use of these specialist shoes you already need to have perfect running mechanics. You already have to be good at recovering good amount of the energy using springiness in your tendons and muscle and then the shoe will help with it. If you just put your foot on the ground and then pick it up a moment later, it will do nothing for you. So that probably already makes these shoes do nothing for something like 3/4th of all runners.
Second, these shoes are extremely expensive and the sticker price doesn't tell the story. Not only they are something like 50% more expensive than top of the line other shoes, they also get used up very quickly, something like 5 times faster. So you could say they are probably about 7 times more expensive than even most expensive regular shoes.
Third, it just does not make any sense! When I run, I am racing against my own times. Yes, I want to be better at running and having better time gives me joy and makes me proud for my accomplishment. For my hard work I put into it. What difference does 1% of improvement make if that improvement was totally artificial? Rather than use these shoes I could just take calculator and calculate the result to include 1% artificial increase in performance and it would cost me much less.
It only makes sense if you are racing against other people and that does not include you or me.
That said, the effect, for me, only matters at full marathon distance. I don’t see any point in wearing any of those shoes for the average weekend 10ker.
I’m also a fairly avid runner and I’m going to call BS on that.
There’s a ~14 second difference in world record times between track and road in the 5k. Track surface technology is a real thing, just as shoe technology is.
There’s a big difference in shoe technology between road and track too, primarily in terms of the amount of super foam allowed which in terms of the shoe is generally what seems to provide the most benefit.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/20-000-ye...
That's why most professional sports organizations have specific standards for fields, tracks, equipment, etc.
On the last part the author was comparing Bolt's time to that of the collegiate record and The Freeze's PB, all three of which were probably set on higher-quality tracks.
But, some records might include factors likely wind direction, which might add an asterisk to indicate a special condition.