Are Super Shoes So Super?
Reading Time: 5 minutesI’m a Slow Runner. I Love These Shoes That Make Me Feel Fast., Whether they can propel you to your goals depends on a lot of factors., Carbon-plated super shoes: There are downsides. I love mine anyway.
By all accounts, I’m a slow runner. I’ve finished in the last hour before the cutoff in many of my races. Granted, these are 100-mile ultramarathons that took me over 20 hours to finish. But the top runners still completed the course in half the time it took me.
Which might make it a surprise that I own two pairs of carbon-plated trail running shoes. These belong to the same class of footwear that legendary Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge wore Oct. 12, 2019, when he became the first person to finish a marathon in less than two hours. (His time was 1:59:40.2, to be precise.) He was wearing the Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT%—a pair of shoes made with a particularly bouncy foam and a carbon fiber plate beneath each footbed.
These shoes, which have fully entered the mainstream of the running world, are expensive. The Nike Alphafly 2 shoes currently retail at $285. The latest Vaporfly shoes are ‘just’ $260. And one pair is often not enough, since many runners prefer to have a fresh, lightly broken-in pair for a big race day.
I can wholeheartedly say these shoes are worth it for me—but they come with a whole slew of caveats. Shoes are always incredibly personal, and that goes double for ‘super shoes,’ which will not be the best choice for every runner. (These don’t make a great gift unless you know that your recipient loves a particular brand of super shoes.) And if you’re looking to improve your running performance in 2024, it’s worth considering several factors before you shell out for carbon-plated shoes.
It’s clear that this type of footwear does improve athletic performance, particularly in road running, and for elite runners. The Nike Vaporfly 4% was the first shoe with a carbon fiber plate to come on the market, in 2017 (after the 2016 Rio Olympics, where the top three male finishers in the marathon all wore them); soon after, researchers sought to figure out how the technology was changing the sport. A study looked at the finish times among top runners for 10K, half-marathon, and marathon races from 2012 to 2019. The arrival of the super shoe correlated with an impressive change in performance over time, as runners made the switch: The field of elite female athletes saw their times improve by an average of 2.6 percent, while male runners saw an improvement of 2 percent on average.
To put it in perspective, this uptick in performance equates to only around two minutes along the length of a marathon for an elite runner. However, when you’re going for the win, those two minutes represent a huge margin. (There were just six seconds separating first and second place for women at this year’s New York City Marathon.)
How does the performance improvement come about—and for whom? Multiple studies led by Dustin Joubert, an assistant professor of kinesiology at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, show improvements in running economy for elite runners trying these shoes out on treadmills.
Carbon plates in shoes aren’t simply springs, though they do return some energy to the runner as they move. They also help the feet and ankles move more smoothly. The effect of this is apparent in an improvement in a metric called running economy: our metabolic, cardiovascular, biomechanical, respiratory, and neuromuscular efficiency during running. It can be measured in a lab by looking at how much oxygen runners consume, and it can predict performance in distance runners. Joubert set out to compare running economy across different carbon-plated shoes and against a non–super shoe control pair. He and his co-authors had 12 runners try the shoes on a treadmill for five minutes at a time, running at a pace of about six minutes per mile. (The test was done with athletes whose personal best in a 5K is 16 minutes.) They found that, on average, carbon-plated shoes increased the running economy of the athletes by around 2.5 percent. The shoes varied in their helpfulness, though. And they did more to improve the running economy of athletes who had a worse technique to start with. That suggests that some of the advantages of super shoes could trickle down to amateur runners.
That said, you need to be moving quickly to get the full benefits of the shoes. This year, Joubert published a study in which he and his colleagues had runners test the shoes while moving at a pace of eight to 10 minutes per mile. The slower runners’ performances were still increased with carbon-plated shoes, but the improvement was smaller when compared to the elites from the first study. On average, those running in super shoes at about 7.5 mph saw an improvement of around 1.4 percent in running economy, while those doing 6 mph improved by just under 1 percent. That’s still not slow for many runners, especially in a long race—in my best 100-km race, I was running at an average speed of about 4 mph.
Then, there’s the fact of growing concern around how super shoes may lead to an uptick in injuries because of the ‘novel biomechanical demands on the foot and lower extremities,’ as a paper published in February puts it. Adam Tenforde, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School, and his co-authors examined five case studies in which athletes developed severe foot pain associated with using shoes with carbon plates. In three cases, the athletes had switched to the shoes somewhat abruptly, but in two they had logged many training miles while using carbon fiber–plated footwear. Tenforde used the paper to call for more collaborative research between manufacturers and scientists looking at how these new shoes affect our gait and biomechanics. (Whatever you do in the meantime: Don’t run in super shoes on race day only, and don’t do all your sessions in them either.)
So, why do I love my super shoes? So far, I’ve avoided any injury, as well as the discomfort from wearing them for hours that some runners report. And although performance improvements may be lower for the slower among us, they are still noticeable. On the trail, I’ve now run a few different races in super shoes, and while I didn’t finish high up the field, I felt a little faster than when I wear other pairs of trainers. I’m planning to run a road marathon in them this coming spring. On the road, with fewer distracting variables like terrain and altitude, I expect that a carbon-plated shoe will help me shave a few minutes off my marathon personal best.
That expectation is no small thing—positive self-talk, and a strong belief in your abilities and your gear, is really important for running a long race. When I wear springier shoes with bouncy cushioning that I know are designed to improve my running economy, I tell myself that I will perform better. So do many of my other runner friends, including the faster ones. In fact, a lot of runners say they ‘feel’ faster as soon as they put on these shoes, without having run in them at all. It’s impossible to quantify, but I know that over hours and hours on the trails, I get a boost from that feeling. And for me, that alone is worth the investment.
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