'Shoe doping' changed marathon times in ways we still don't understand | Hacker News Reader

'Shoe doping' changed marathon times in ways we still don't understand

nytimes.com

57 pointscainxinth86 comments

More proof that "doping" has become a meaningless word.

If shoes are considered "doping," why aren't all marathons (and indeed, all athletic events) run barefoot and naked[1]? If those are the "rules," then surely they should at least be consistently applied...

[1] Presumably reduced thermal stress due to clothing improves athletic performance, therefore is "doping" by this metric.

Exactly. The whole super shoe discourse is really tired at this point.

Shoes changed. Now all of the shoes have carbon plates. The athletes are still incredible… nobody is getting one of these shoes and becoming some super star overnight.

We let the athletes drink hyper specialized drink mixtures based on studying their sweat content and even adjusting the drinks for their perspiration level during the race.

The shoe foam and carbon plates sell more expensive shoes.

So you’re saying the athletes have perks that optimize their performance, not _boosting_ performance which is doping.

What's the difference between "optimizing" and "boosting?" Be specific.

Medical inducement of physiological changes that wouldn’t occur naturally without intervention.

So like for example training? Should we ban anyone who has run before (any distance, ever in life) for doping?

Training definietly induces physiological changes that wouldn’t occur naturally without doing it.

Training is not a medical inducment

it is if a doctor prescribes it

No, it’s still not. Medical interventions or treatments are not definitionally “something a doctor says.” Generally it’s the use of atypical substances or physical modification to create a response in the body that wouldn’t otherwise naturally occur. Broadly speaking it’s the “stuff the fda would be able to regulate,” which exercise is clearly not.

i beg to differ. Medical intervention refers to any action or process undertaken by healthcare professionals with the aim of diagnosing, treating, preventing, or improving a person’s health condition or functioning.

https://medcraveonline.com/MOJPH/MOJPH-09-00314.pdf

What is "medical inducment"? It is not a term I'm familiar with.

Seriously - internet grammar and spelling pedantry?

I didn’t even notice the spelling. What i was asking is what is “medical inducement” or “medical intervention” in your opinion.

Training was considered to be "bad sportmanship" in the early days of soccer, when it was amateur gentlemen sport clubs playing against each other.

Training isn’t a medical intervention. A medical intervention is typically a drug, surgery, or other intervention. I think the term is probably on the surface understandable as not being exercise, diet, or other normal every day use of the body unless you’re being particularly “internet obtuse.”

> Training isn’t a medical intervention.

You didn’t say medical intervention in your previous post. You said “Medical inducement” which is a term i’m not familiar with.

Let me think now about it again. Sounds like you just declared anyone doping who is taking multivitamin suplements. It is a medical intervention (a drug), it induces a physiological change, wouldn’t occur naturaly. Sounds like it is doping!

Or anyone who had a dental cavity filled. It is a medical intervention (a surgery), it induces a physiological change, wouldn’t occur naturaly. Clearly beneficial to an athlete, since someone without tooth ache can concentrate more. Ban them all those dopers!

> unless you’re being particularly “internet obtuse”

Look, it is not me who offered a simple definition of what is and isn’t doping. Simple answers are almost always wrong. There is a reason why real doping regulations are hundreds of pages long. If they could write a one sentence rulebook they would. They are just trying to ban real doping without also baning dental fillings, training and multivitamins.

I would like to see this as companion event to the Olympic, just to se how layperson's would fare

No, doping is a specific set of techniques that use proteins (EPO) or specially extracted blood to boost the red blood cell count in the blood, increasing oxygen carrying capacity.

Anything else is just marketing.

I began to think about various things that are called "doping", including a process to treat fabric-covered aircraft.

It turns out that there are many kinds of "doping" and even an article on the supposedly mythical practice of "abortion doping", so there you go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping

Totally agree. At the end of the day, if you’re not running naked and barefoot, your clothing and shoes affect your performance. I wear fancy expensive socks that prevent blistering. Is that cheating because I’m not suffering on a long run? Is wearing a brace to avoid injury cheating?

The way I see it, if your shoes are supporting your biomechanics in a way that optimizes energy and prevents injury, that is both fine and should be encouraged. I run, my nephew is a track athlete, my son plays football. Injury is a huge barrier to performance and a good experience… anything that avoids it is good.

Ok, but on the other hand, if the only way to compete in professional sports is to have the research team of a megacorp behind you, several million in the bank and contort your body in ways that are unhealthy and completely impractical for everyday life, what is even the point? Like, what would the winner of the competition actually represent?

Admittedly, shoes don't pass the third point as you can just step out of them after the competition, even if they were unhealthy. But still - if extremely optimized hi-tech running shoes are allowed, why not go one step further and add motorized rollers? Where would be the difference?

(This is an actual issue in biking, btw. You could also ask why relentlessly optimizing your bike for low weight and air resistance is allowed, but adding hidden motors is not)

I thought cycling competitions have a minimum weight/aero limit specifically to prevent people from buying their way to better times past a certain point? Is that not the case?

Ah, that's possible. Also only read about the "motor doping" incidents in some articles.

Most competitions will only allow runners to use publicly available shoes. The idea being that if you want the best shoes you still need to spend a couple hundred dollars, but you don't need the research team or megacorp to make a custom shoe for you.

The reason is the same reason these issues come up in Motorsports. In reality, technology matters. And sponsors (Nike, Pirelli, etc) are attracted to the sport in part for that reason. Sports don’t exist at the level they do without sponsors. So it’s a synergistic thing. The governing body has to come up with rules, and try to enforce them.

Why don’t they use recumbent bikes at the Tour? They are way faster, way more aerodynamic. But the rules prohibit it because bike companies think (almost certainly correctly) that they won’t sell like normal bikes due to the myriad issues with them.

People may think that something as simple as running is “pure” but they are just uninformed. Aerodynamic skin suits are useful in running (and have been used to win gold at the Olympics).

Usually this happens when the marketing departments are involved with the sport and want to keep that up. No one wants to end up like baseball with the same old wooden bat and ball. You want to market like golf. Have the pros hit the brand new marketing dept named driver every year that sells for $600. Never mind the effect on the rest of the sport when equipment iterates unchecked like this until it hits some breaking factor elsewhere.

Any high level athlete wills try to optimize their equipment and baseball is no exception here. They've tweaked sizes, weight and wood types in bats to try and gain a performance advantage. Maple bats were non-existent until the late 90s and now are now used by the vast majority. The axe-handled bat has also become popular in recent years.

Balls are chosen by the league rather than the players, but these have changed too in recent years. It's not clear if these changes were accidental, or intentionally designed to increase scoring.

Of course none of these equipment adjustments are going to turn your beer league slugger into Babe Ruth, but they're probably in that same ~4% improvement ballpark that super shoes offer.

Athletic orgs can regulate what level of technologic advantage to allow, i.e. FINA banning shark suit for swimming and eventually regulating what level of tech suit assistence is allowed. High level athletes frequently spend a few 100-1000s dollars on new/fresh equipment without diminished performance (lots of performance fabrics foams), which feels pretty unfair when it comes to global competition. I love equipment porn, but TBH I think they should be limited to training (i.e. enable more sessions / prevent injury), but requirements for competition should be as barefoot / naked as possible.

Doping is this context is just introducing something exogenous to enhance properties/performance, like drugs or industrial process. It seems apt, if anything people should embrace usage more, I like doping my food with spices.

I’m curious how this will find acceptance, regulation or rejection. Acceptance like the clap skate in speed skating (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clap_skate) or if they will be regulated like the swim suits in competitive swimming (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-technology_swimwear)

They’re already somewhat regulated, there’s a maximum stack height for competition

These shoes are developed by the Nike's of the world who give them away to African athletes for marketing campaigns.

Most doping is developed by countries to get medals at the Olympics.

https://archive.is/F1Ia0

About halfway through the article, I'm trying to understand how they measure energy usage.

When I herniated a disc, because my hamstring atrophied, because I got a knee scope, I could not find a single doctor or physical therapist to explain it and such straightforward words, I had to do months and years of research myself to figure out what was happening. I probably saw a good 8 to 10 different "professionals" on this.

This taught me to not trust doctors. They're probably slackers and they probably don't care.

Much more likely, they know so much about this issue that they struggle with finding simple words. Similarly how I often overcomplicate answers to technical problems of my family.

What is more likely: that doctors are slackers that have no idea what they are doing, or that their education path prioritized doing things over explaining anatomy to laymen.

I think the main issue with doctors is they only give each patient a few minutes of their time. There's not much "deep work" in the medical field.

You really need to be your own advocate to get thorough treatment for anything non-routine from many primary care physicians.

That’s my theory. They are good at obvious things but if something is a little tricky nobody puts the time in to figure it out. And nobody talks to each other. I always read about “care teams” but I have never seen such a thing.

There are care teams at specialized and high cost situations, main examples being a major surgery to treat well understood condition. But for normal folks living with non life threatening conditions, this is almost impossible to find unless you're very rich.

It's interesting to characterize this as an issue. If 20% effort can solve 80% of the problems...

Then there are the 5% of problems that could be solved with 20% effort, but there is enough money in it to convince the patient to pay for more attention even if they don't need it.

Let's hope that 80% of doctors don't gravitate to the 1% of patients that can afford to pay for exclusivity.

People with enough money to see 10 different specialists in search of a satisfying answer are probably already moving outside of the treadmill medicine realm.

It’s not that they have no idea what what they’re doing, it’s that they typically are mapping patient problems to a set of scripts. I’m analogizing shell scripts, not using shorthand for prescriptions.

In nearly all cases this works out pretty well, most people will have some improvement when the right script is applied, and doctors are pretty good at mapping problems to scripts.

But for edge cases, that approach is not going to work. Human propensities to slack notwithstanding, the business model discourages doctors from spending all day debugging one patient that isn’t responsive to their scripts.

We do this in software, too. “Really rare race condition, one in a million chance, not going to rathole, deprioritized.”

They're just people working jobs and in what's become a pretty troubled industry.

For reasonably smart, reasonably disciplined people, going to med school and getting licensed is not some transformative experience that forces them all to become brilliant diagnosticians and healers. It's just a bit of a long grind to score what's hoped to be a well-paying and traditionally respected job.

And then once you finish that grind and have the job, you still need to balance it with a regular old life of resposinilities and crises and kids and vacations; and in fact, because of the grind many people necessarily shift their personal and mental focus towards those other things.

Meanwhile, the job sucks in a lot of ways and doesn't deliver on the childhood fantasies of what it must be like. Colleages and administrators make it miserable quite often, and patiets sure do too.

The upshot is that no: many doctors are not all that brilliant and attentive to start with, and many who may sometimes be so are slackers. Shortcuts win, knowledge outside routine/common stuff fades, etc

Just like all jobs.

It's great when you can find the diamond in the rough for your own care, but don't assume they're all diamonds just because they went to med school for a while.

The pisser is that doctors mostly continue to act authoritative rather than collaborative. Regardless of how much education one has received, someone that spends a total of 20 minutes thinking about something (starting from a context without specific details) really should not be sitting there asserting one prescriptive take-it-or-leave-it answer like they've got the whole situation all figured out. Rather they should be engaging with questions to explain their reasoning and inform you of the larger context, since your health decisions are ultimately your own responsibility to make, especially in this brave new world of the "nobody's fault" medical system.

A girl next to me on the plane was studying for med school interviews.

I tried to imagine what questions they might ask, I looked over and the first question on her sheet was “why do you want to be a doctor.

This is not an intellectual interview, it’s a class and commitment signaling exercise.

Not on topic, but related. I made a video explaining my side project - Buckaroo for my less technical friends and family. In 6 minutes I give a high level overview of why data scientists use NumPy and Pandas, how they use Jupyter Notebooks, and why Buckaroo makes their life better. I'm proud of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfAkz6L5rMI

I think the issue mentioned by parent comment is that doctors don't care to investigate the causes of what they're treating. They're trained to isolate and fix the issue at hand, not to think through what is causing the whole cascade of events.

I remember my mom asking this when she was learning to drive a stick-shift in her 60s - "If both the gears and the clutch help in changing the speed, what's the difference between them?"

I had a huge problem in explaining this in simple terms without having to go into the the huge amount of detail.

Maybe it's something like that?

In general relying on excessive detail or jargon is symptomatic of not really understanding something when required to explain things in simple terms. I believe Richard Feynman said as much.

The general idea is people hide behind that detail/jargon precisely because they don't REALLY understand it enough to explain in simple terms what it is. That doesn't mean everything IS simple of course.

I assume you know now but in simple terms: the clutch connects the engine to the gearbox (transmission), so how well the clutch is engaged (connected) helps control speed. Gears multiply (increase or decrease) power from the engine depending on the gear you've selected.

> Gears multiply (increase or decrease) power from the engine

Ah, so when you want a lot of power - such as to tow something heavy - you'd want a high gear for high power, right?

But fuel consumption will be highest in 6th gear, because more power means more power consumption - I'll save money by using a lower gear, yes?

Honestly I'm not sure how people who've never learned about gear ratios understand this stuff. Maybe a combination of "have you ever ridden a bike? It's like that" and "always pull away in first gear" and "when the engine makes a vreeeee sound change up, when it makes a wubwubwub sound change down."

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821494

If I understand things correctly then my intuition for the answer to their mom's question would be gears wear out much less quickly than a clutch would if it were engaged all the time. Can anyone who knows more chime in?

Edit: ah wait no it's two multipliers isn't it, you're reducing overall power output when engaging the clutch?

Gears are multipliers. A clutch is basically two spinning plates - one on the gearbox/transmission, one on the engine.

When you press the clutch pedal in, it moves the plates apart so they don't touch. When you let the pedal out, the plates move together, slip and rub for a bit, and then grab.

While they are all the way apart or all the way grabbed, they don't wear. While you are in between, they are rubbing and wearing, and trying to get the engine/transmission to spin the same speed.

Thank you!

> Gears multiply (increase or decrease) power from the engine depending on the gear you've selected.

Gears change how many times the wheels turn for every engine revolution.

Engine power is the product of angular velocity (rpm) and torque.

Gears are tangentially related to engine power output since they allow a user to select how fast the engine is spinning, but an engine outputs the same amount of power at a specific RPM regardless of what gear the transmission is in. 1800 RPM in 1st gear and 5th gear will generate the same amount of kW (or HP, if you prefer)

Understood, but in this (hypothetical) example his mother probably doesn't know exactly what angular velocity or torque are, so making things even simpler with a laymans "power" serves to get the point across.

One could include torque in the explanation to which the follow-up is probably "what's torque?".

The simpler one goes for that initial understanding, in most cases, the less technically correct one is; by design that helps the newbie learn and build up to a more technically correct understanding later on.

I have, in my adult life, had precisely one physician convincingly show that he cared about me. The overwhelming majority are obviously phoning it in, with varying levels if pleasantness.

Humans crave certainty. Doctors, politicians, executives, salespeople, and so on are rewarded for conveying certainty even — especially — when reality is uncertain. It’s not that doctors don’t care to ferret out the truth, but that the market rewards them for claiming that they have the truth regardless of whether they actually have it in their grasp.

2 things. Doctors know a whole damn lot. Secondly, what doctors don’t know far outnumber what we do know. Lots of time, the best we have is hand wavy explanation that connects the biology we sort of know to the pathology the patient is coming up with

weird to call it 'doping' but that must have tested better for click throughs.

Anyway the fly's are pretty damn cool. I ran a marathon last year and a half earlier this year in the cheaper ones are broke my PRs both times. I don't train in them, they are reserved just for events.

Why don’t you train in them?

They’re expensive and last less time than regular trainers

don't they throw off your gait if you're not used to them at said events?

If you feel like sponsoring them, I'm sure they'll be happy to adopt a "cost is no object" attitude. Otherwise the obvious conclusion is that the training mismatch is less costly than frequently replacing expensive shoes.

Can’t speak for others but as an amateur marathoner, this didn’t happen to me. The biggest thing I noticed wasn’t even that I sped up but that it reduced pain for the next day vs practice marathons I had run in my trainers. If I get richer I’ll switch to using race shoes for all runs for health reasons, not speed ones.

Yeah mostly cost related as others have suggested, I also use more cushioned shoes for training to help reduce fatigue for the back-to-back weeks of long runs.

I thought the same thing about gait but gave it a shot anyway. Didn't throw me off all that much, and I still enjoyed running in the firmer fly's. I did do a few trial short runs before the long run just so I was not going in cold.

To give an idea of shoe wear. I'll easily run through 1 pair in a year if I'm training for a marathon (just to run it). If I'm training to beat PRs then I'll go through almost 2.

The article doesn’t mention a couple things. The shoes reduce mechanical stress and impact. Runners can train harder and get more aerobic stimulus with less wear and tear on their legs. Also, the last miles of a marathon are faster and easier because muscles aren’t as broken down.

Compare to

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/blade-runners-do-...

This seems to be the same debate in a smaller format. How much energy should a runner's equipment be allowed to catch and release and still be in the same category with unassisted runners?

So riding my cybernetic robot legs that can run 60 mph while I’m relaxing would be ok?

If anything, nothing but “barefoot” shoes should be permitted.

As the article says, since everyone responds differently to different materials, the only truly fair playing field is to run naked and barefoot. Obviously that isn’t going to happen so someone will always be left out of having the best gear for them.

Even still some people are going to just have natural attributes that make them more efficient, less injury prone etc.

If you take away Kipchoge’s shoes he’s still gonna be fast.

I'm sure there is a niche audience for that, too.

Definitely a reasonable response. Yes, super shoes are equivalent to a fully mechanized leg that doesn’t exist. It’s basically like being Rosie the robot from the jetsons with wheels for feet. Can’t believe we let them get away with it.

"shoe dopeing" is a valid term because cost and availibility of the most performance enhancing foot ware is not universal and a several percentage point advantage defines the difference olympians,and nobodys so it's olympic level "pay to win".....dopeing or is this another semantics marathon?

How does that compare to wearing no shoes though? If you don't have foam in the first place, it cannot absorb energy.

There was a footrace in the 1975 movie "Man Friday" that always made me think. The first man brags that he'd finished the race first.

But the second man says he ran with more joy -- with the maximum euphoria, fully embracing the act of running, celebrating the body's ability to speed....

Every high end sport should have athletes with a support team of scientists and engineers pushing the limit of human capacity.

Think of it more like F1 racing than running naked at the high end.

It can break the sport on the other hand as this iteration almost always outpaces how the rest of the sport is balanced. Baseball roid era effectively shortened the length of the outfield. Golf today is going through a similar issue with pros hitting the new high tech drivers a lot further than when they built these tournament golf courses. Hazards like bunkers on a golf hole are placed based on where you might hit your drive and now the pros are just sailing over them making it easy for themselves. There’s now talk of deadening the golf ball to compensate.

Yes, altering the game to counter extreme engineering and confine the space is perfectly reasonable.

Making the ball heavier is totally reasonable for both sports, or maybe lighter for baseball so it doesn’t have the inertia to travel as far.

Does anyone know how they measure the energy used while running?

You breathe into a mask and oxygen uptake / co2 exhaust is measured. This is of course contaminated by things like your individual efficiency but for relative measurements it’s fine.

My understanding is that they hook a runner up to a machine that measures their oxygen consumption, have them run a given pace in a given shoe, and measure how much oxygen they consume as a proxy to how much energy they’re using.

With the super shoes, they use less oxygen to run at a given pace

Example abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30374945/

the article linked to from TFA, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-017-0811-2?... (2017), says:

> We measured submaximal oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide production during minutes 3–5 and averaged energetic cost (W/kg) for the two trials in each shoe model.

normally respiration gives very good results, better than other proxies such as accelerometry or heart rate measurement, but TIL that there's an even better method: doubly labeled water (DLW)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5426207/ (2017)

> ...after the subject ingests a dose of ²H2¹⁸O, there is an equilibration of the 2 isotopes with total body water (TBW) followed by their elimination from the body, which occurs at different rates. Deuterium (²H) is lost from the body via only water (H2O) while ¹⁸O is lost both via water and carbon dioxide (CO2). The rate of CO2 production (rCO2) is calculated as the difference between the elimination rates of ²H and ¹⁸O...

the advantage is not needing to be masked during activity; the disadvantage is dealing with isotopes

EPO doping and paying the doping lab is still more lucrative. You have to pay a lot of people, but everyone keeps silent.

Because EPO is a natural hormone, in theory you can get away with using moderate amounts without needing to bypass the tests. Take bioidentical EPO before bed (possibly IV instead of IM for shorter detection time) and by the time you wake up it's hard to distinguish from natural variation.

This is what the "biological passport" is designed to prevent but I'm not sure if it actually works

would be funny if runners develop a stride optimised to harvest the energy from the foam

That already happens automagically and subconsciously. Your body is lazy, so it tries to use as little energy as possible for what you force it to do, and with movements repeated thousands of times, over time, it will find a way to do them in a most energy-efficient way. And if you always run in the same shoes, it will eventually find a way to optimize for those shoes.

Unfortunately, the process is blind, and sometimes it finds a local maximum while limiting you, and sometimes that local maximum can cause injuries. That's why getting a good trainer to have a look at your running style is a good idea if you want to start running more.

Meta Comment: The NY Times is so user hostile.

I’m a subscriber. I pay a stupid amount of money as I need it professionally. But apparently I’ve never read the Athletic outside of Apple News. So not only do I need to hit the stupid paywall and re-login… but they insist on delivering you to some sort of on-boarding experience.

If I had followed a link from equally bizarre Instagram, I never would have found the article again after clicking though the onboarding experience.

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