New generation of ‘super-shoes’ help marathoners break records

Kelvin Kiptum and Tigst Assefa, respectively, set records for the men’s and women’s marathon this year. But the real winners might be Nike and adidas.

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and you are listening to Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. JR is the producer. He has uploaded the full lesson content to PlainEnglish.com/624. That’s where you will find the transcript and all the other lesson resources to go along with today’s main story.

Speaking of today’s story: There is a new world record in the men’s marathon. And there is a new world record in the women’s marathon—both were set this year, within weeks of each other. Setting a marathon record is an outstanding feat—not just for the runner, but for shoe companies, too.

In the second half of today’s lesson, I have for you possibly the least useful phrasal verb we’ve ever discussed—but if we don’t talk about it today, then we never will. It’s “lace up.” And we have a quote of the week, too. Let’s get going.

Super-shoes help propel runners to marathon records

A marathon is a road race of 42 kilometers, 195 meters. In imperial measurements, that’s 26.2 miles. Legend has it that a Greek messenger ran from the city of Marathon to Athens to announce victory in a battle—and then , having arrived and given his message, he died from the exertion.

That story may or may not be fully true. But here’s something that is true: marathoning—the sport of running 26.2 miles—is more popular than ever . There are over 800 official marathons around the world. The biggest—New York, London, Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo—they attract tens of thousands of runners each year, the vast majority amateur.

But some runners run to set world records. And a new generation of super shoes is helping them do it.

How fast do you think the world record is? In 1908, the world record was two hours, fifty-five minutes. The record steadily fell until 1970, when it reached two hours, nine minutes—a reduction of 46 minutes in 62 years.

Then, elite male runners seemed stuck at about 2:09. For well over a decade, it seemed that humanity had reached its peak performance.

And then a curious thing happened starting in 1999. The world record started to fall more quickly than in the recent past. And now, five minutes have come off the record in the last ten years—an astonishing pace, considering what had come before.

Last month, Kenya’s Kelvin Kiptum set a new world record in the Chicago marathon: two hours, thirty-five seconds. Could it be that men are getting faster again?

Maybe. But there’s another factor that has emerged in the last two decades, and that is the super-shoe.

Kelvin Kiptum was wearing Nike’s new Alphafly 3 running shoes—they’re so new, they’re not even available to purchase in stores yet. They’re part of a new generation of shoe technology that’s changing the world of marathoning.

And it’s not just on the men’s side. In that same Chicago marathon, Ethiopian Sifan Hassan won the women’s race wearing the same shoe, the Alphafly 3 prototype. She ran the second-fastest marathon ever.

When was the fastest, for a woman? It was just weeks before in Berlin. Tigst Assefa, also from Ethiopia, set the women’s record wearing adidas’s high-end marathoning shoe.

The new generation of marathon shoes differs from running shoes you might find in a typical sporting goods store. They are extremely lightweight. The adidas shoe is just 138 grams, 40 percent lighter than the company’s other premium racing shoes.

The sole—the part between your foot and the road—is also thicker, but made with ultra-light foam. By making it lighter and thicker, the foam sole absorbs more pressure on every step—and it also returns more energy to the runner. That’s a fancy way of saying, it’s bouncier. So every time a runner pounds her weight onto the ground, the shoe helps her bounce up into her next step.

The new shoes also feature a carbon plate inserted into the sole. The carbon plate does two things. First, it prevents the shoe from bending—when a shoe bends, energy is wasted. So the carbon plate makes the shoe more rigid.

And the plate is a curved shape, so it makes the shoe rock forward and back. So again, when a runner’s weight presses down onto the pavement, the shoe nudges the runner forward with its curved shape. This saves energy.

You won’t be surprised to learn these shoes are expensive. The adidas shoe is $500; the company only released a few hundred of them at first . A new batch will be released this month. Nike’s latest generation will be available next year. But if the price took your breath away, wait until you hear this part: they can only be used once.

The shoes are rated for a single marathon-level race, including pre-race training and warmups. So every time elite runners compete, they’ll lace up a new pair of $500 trainers.

Is any of this cheating? An international body called World Athletics maintains the record books for track and field. They publish strict guidelines for what shoes are acceptable during officially sanctioned races. One of their criteria is that shoes must be available to the public. These new shoes are careful to comply with the rules. Runners only wear commercially available shoes that meet the standards, so that if they break records, they definitely count.

So in my opinion, it is not cheating. But the technology is forcing us to re-consider what it means to break a marathon record. These runners are elite athletes; we don’t take anything away from them. But whenever a record falls, there is almost as much attention on the shoe as on the runner.

I don’t know what that messenger in ancient Greece was wearing, but I doubt it included a carbon fiber plate.

I should mention a few things. One, I do know that someone has run a marathon in less than two hours. That was Eliud Kipchoge, probably the best marathoner ever. He ran it in Vienna in 2019, on a course and under conditions that were specifically designed to help him break two hours. He did it in one hour, 59 minutes, 40.2 seconds.

It didn’t count as an official record because of the assistance he got—someone on a bicycle rode beside him to give him water, for example. But a man did run a marathon with his own two legs in under two hours, which is incredible.

The second thing I should mention is that this same thing happened in swimming about fifteen years ago. Speedo made a suit that caused records to fall at the 2008 Olympics—that swimsuit was banned and they came back with another one a few years later that met the guidelines.

Quote of the Week

Here’s a quick quote for today: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” That is from William James, a philosopher and psychologist. I’m working on that! I think I’m getting better. Here it is again from William James: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”