The Vergecast - The tech that made a 2-hour marathon possible

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

At this year's London Marathon, two runners completed the route in under two hours, becoming the first people to ever do so on an official course. It's a feat that Outside magazine's Alex Hutchinson once thought wouldn't be accomplished until 2075. The Verge's senior policy reporter (and marathoner) Lauren Feiner talks to Alex about "super shoes" and the other surprising technological advances that led to this moment. Further reading: The Fairphone 6 Plus is the midrange phone we desperately needed The real reason your phone is getting more expensive What to expect at Apple’s September 9th launch event Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is a life worth? Calculating dollars isn't the tough part. The tough part is the emotion and the stories you hear about life's unfairness. I'm Preet Bharara, and this week, Ken Feinberg, one of the nation's foremost mediators and special master of the federal 9-11 Victim Compensation Fund, joins me to discuss his reflections on the 25th anniversary of 9-11. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Superhuman Speed. I'm Lauren Feiner, the Virges Senior Policy Reporter.

Today, we're dissecting the technology that's helped enable a handful of athletes to run a full marathon in under two hours. For context, that means running at an average pace of less than four minutes and 35 seconds per mile for 26.2 miles. It's a milestone of human achievement that some scientists once believed to be impossible. Elliot Kipchogi became the first person to break the two-hour barrier in 2019, but under highly curated conditions that made it ineligible for an official record. Then, earlier this year, two elite marathoners finally broke the barrier on an official course in the same exact race. As a much slower marathoner, I've always had a huge fascination with the technology that's helped advance the sport. To understand how this happened, I'm talking to Alex Hutchinson, a journalist and author of books like Endor about the science behind human performance. limits. He's chronicled the research and technology that's advanced the sport and gone inside the lab where Nike designed its iconic super shoes. But first, here's what's happening on the verge today.

I'm Senior Reviews editor Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. Allison Johnson reviewed the Fairphone 6 plus and liked it. It is the first Fairphone to officially launch in the U.S. and it's designed to be repaired cheaply and easily at home. I Fixit gives it a 10 out of 10 for repairability, and Allison gives it an 8 out of 10 for being a phone. It's a good phone. Speaking of phones, Ronnie Mola has a report on the site about why phones and computers and lots of other things are getting more expensive. It's not just that demand from AI data centers is sucking up all the manufacturing capacity. Okay, it is that, but it's not just that. Ronnie talked to a bunch of manufacturers.

They are increasing capacity and putting a ton of money into it, but that's going to take a little while. And in the meantime, they're recording record profits. Everybody wins, except for us. And speaking of phones getting more expensive, tomorrow is Apple announcement day. It is the company's first event with John Turnus as CEO. We are expecting the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, maybe with a smaller dynamic island, maybe with a fancy new camera, and almost certainly with a higher price tag. We are also finally expecting the foldable iPhone, and if the leaks are accurate, it is a wide one like the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8. Congratulations to Apple for inventing the folding phone.

We'll probably also see new watches. We might see the AirPods 5. We probably will not see the AirPods with cameras, at least not yet. As always, we will be live blogging during the event at Theverge.com and we will be going live afterwards on YouTube to give our reactions and answer your questions. You can read more at the verge.com. That's 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, September 8th, 26. Support for the show comes from Shopify. You owe it to yourself to give that business idea a chance to become a reality. Shopify gives you the tools you need to make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, from household names to small businesses just getting started. Their templates and AI tools help you get a stunning site up and running fast. No coding needed. If questions come up, Shopify's built-in AI assistant sidekick is ready to help you build.

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to start your free trial today. That's right. You can start your free trial at Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for Vergecast comes from Anthropic. Finding your rhythm at work can be tough without the right tools. Claude can help make it easier, taking care of the details while helping you stay focused on the bigger picture. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Delegate tasks both big and small to Claude from routine bugfix, to developing new features and keep working while Claude handles them in the background. Checkpoints make it easy to save your progress and return to an earlier version whenever you need, while scheduled workflows can take care of recurring work-like daily reports, weekly summaries, and regular data pools.

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Thanks for having me, Laura. Thanks so much for being here. Yeah, so we're here today to talk about the attempts and the recent successes in breaking the two-hour barrier in the marathon. So obviously, that's a crazy, fast statistic. But can you kind of contextualize for us, you know, what is the significance of that number exactly? Yeah, I mean, it's a round number. That's its biggest significance, right? So you could say, why is a two-hour marathon more significant than a two-hour and one-minute marathon? Well, that's life. Humans are wired in that way. And so it's been, people have dreamt about the idea of a two-hour marathon

since like, I'd say 1991 was the first significant prediction, at which point it seems like science fiction. For the last 15 years, I'd say people have taken it seriously and said, actually, I think this might happen someday. But I guess maybe the most useful context is in 2014, runners' world asked me to do a big feature on the prospects for a two-hour marathon. And I spent months and talked to tons of people, wrote a big 10-page takeout.

On the last page, I said, I think a two-hour marathon will happen, and I think it'll happen in 2075. So don't count on me for betting tips, but that's how big a deal it is. It's half a century early. Wow. Wow. So, you know, when did breaking the two-hour barriers start to seem within reach far before that number that you'd predicted? Yeah. Well, actually, there's a long answer and a short answer. And the long answer is complicated and nuanced. And the short answer is shoes got really fast. It was the shoes. There was the introduction of a new design, what we now call super shoes that started showing up in races in 2016, became available to the public in 2017. The most noticeable feature is a stiff

carbon fiber plate and the sole. And they made runners a lot faster. Yeah. Can you walk us through a little bit of how exactly those super shoes work, why that carbon plate is there and what else is significant about it? I can't give you definitive answers because nobody agrees on that. It remains, you know, 10 years after Super Shoes came out, nobody agrees exactly how they work. But the definition that shoe scientists use for what constitutes what they call advanced footwear technology is you've got a thick sole on the bottom of the shoe, a very thick sole. That soul is made out of super light, super resilient foam. So it's, you can have a thick layer because it's not heavy, but when you press it down, like when you land, it bounces back and kind of pushes you forward. And embedded in

that thick midsole is a stiff carbon fiber plate, which depending on who you listen to might be sort of springy or it adds stiffness or it's just providing stability, you can run test and say, okay, well, what happens if we take away one of those features? Does the shoe still work? And it's like, no matter what you take away, it doesn't work as well as you expect. So nobody exactly knows how these things work together, but all the different brands have now figured out ways of combining essentially, I mean, I guess maybe the overall, the way these things work is that when you land, your weight compresses the shoe, and they've found a way of making it spring back in a way that pushes you forward right at the right moment so that you can run at a given pace, it takes less

energy. So in other words, or you can spend the same amount of energy and run faster. And the very first super shoe was called the Nike Vaporfly 4%. And it was called the 4% because Nike arranged for external testing at the University of Colorado. And they found that pretty reliably, on average, people were 4% more efficient. They could run at a given pace for 4% less energy. And this was such a wild finding, such a totally out of the blue finding that they'd put it right in the name of the shoe. Wow. And I guess can you contextualize for us just how different a super shoe is from your average trainer. Needless to say, and I'm underestimating

this dramatically, there was a lot of controversy when these super shoes came out because running is like the prototypical pure, simple sport where anyone can compete. You don't need to have fancy gear until now suddenly you do. And so there was a lot of talk about

these things have springs on their feet. You're putting springs on your feet. This is like wearing roller skates. And one of the counter arguments of that is like Actually, all shoes have springs on your feet. So if you wore a standard running shoe in 1985, it had a spring. That spring was the sole, and that soul was made out of a foam called EVA, which was relatively compared to modern foams. It was relatively heavy and not very springy, but it was springy.

And, you know, that's where Nike Air shoes came into. Like, they wanted something so that when you land, the difference between being barefoot and landing on it in a running shoe is you land, it squishes down a little bit, and then it springs back. and pushes you forward. That feels better and it gives you some benefit. It saves you a little bit of energy. So it's not a difference in that we just invented something totally new. It's just that the technology, the materials and the design got radically better so that it can now do what previous shoes did, but way, way better. And so you were talking about the vapor fly, and I know that was a big part of Nike's Breaking Two project in 2017 that you covered. So can you tell us a little bit about what Nike was attempting to do with that attempt that was different from what had been done before? Sure, yeah. So I'll rewind a little bit more and say, 1991, a guy named Michael Joyner wrote a paper saying, hey, if we run the numbers on what people are capable of in our understanding of endurance, someone should be able to run like a 158 marathon.

And so that was the idea that this should be possible. No one took it seriously until about 2011. there was another scientific paper where we said, actually, now the world records down to 203 or 2027, we're actually knocking on the door. When is this going to happen and what it's going to take? And so people started to think about what are the ways that you could make people half a percent more efficient, a quarter of a percent more efficient? And could you add all those up and get to a two-hour marathon? And so that's the context in which I was like, okay, I'll run the numbers for runners' world, and I'll say 2075. So then Nike in 2016, they announced that,

that they were going to be putting on an exhibition race where they were going to pick some of the best runners in the world and try and break two hours. And so immediately there was a lot of speculation and questioning. Like, what are they talking about? What levers can they pull that will get you from 203 to 159? And so there are a lot of levers that they were going to pull. And that's why they were holding an exhibition race, not a sort of street legal race in a major marathon.

and they wanted to control a bunch of factors, ranging from they didn't want to have a set start time. They wanted to wake up in the morning and say, weather looks good, let's go, or whether it doesn't look good, let's delay by a day or by six hours or whatever. They held it on a Formula One track in Monza, Italy, in order to get the most perfect flat or perfectly cambered curves so that they're not wasting time going up and down. They wanted to get the temperature and all this just right. So all of these are like little details. you start to get to bigger details. Like they wanted to have, I can't remember, six or seven pacemakers running in an arrowhead formation ahead of the actual runners to, first of all, to set the pace at a perfect way. So you're not going a little bit too fast or a little bit too slow, so you don't even have to think about the pace. Just run behind these pacemakers. And then they're blocking the wind.

And there's controversy on this too, but there's some data that suggests even at marathon pace running behind another runner can save you as much as super shoes can be sort of in the neighborhood of 4%, 5%, you're not really aware of when you're running on a still day that you're spending energy, overcoming air resistance, but you are. So they were putting together all of these factors, and then unbeknownst anyone else,

they had also developed these, what became the vaporflies. So they had these shoes that were going to give them several percent that might be on its own enough to get to sub two. So fast forward, they ran this big attempt, this big kind of exhibition attempt in 2017, a guy named Elliot Kipchogi, a Kenyan runner, ran two hours, zero minutes, and 25 seconds.

So he didn't break two hours, and he also didn't break a world record because it wasn't an official race. He wasn't following, his pacemakers, you're not allowed to have pacemakers who drop out halfway and then come back in. But it was close enough that everyone was like, okay, now it can be done. Two years later, he ran, they did another exhibition event. Elliot Kipchogi ran under two hours in Vienna under these same artificial conditions. So at that point, one school thought is like, hey, they've done it. It's over. The other school thought is, okay, they did this fake version. When's it going to happen in a real regular race, which is what we got to earlier this year? Yeah. So what was different between those two attempts in 2017, 2019 for Kipchoke were, was it just, you know, a better day for him or were there other factors that played into that? Yeah, that's a good question. There wasn't a lot obvious difference. You could look at the race and say, oh, in 2017, they had an arrowhead pointing forward. In 2019, they'd run a bunch of computational fluid dynamic simulations and decided that actually an arrowhead pointing backwards towards Kipchogi would minimize the amount of drag on him. So there were some subtle things like that. He had a different shoe. So what everyone, including me, thought would happen in 2016, 2017, was like, oh, they invented this new kind of shoe. So there's going to be.

like a step change. Like this is what happened in speed skating. For example, in the late 90s, they invented what's called the clap skate, which has a hinge on the skate blade. All of a sudden, speed skaters got like 2% faster. And so you had to get the new skates. But then nothing changed after that. It was like one single change and then equilibrium again.

What has happened with running shoes is that they keep getting faster. They keep there's new because no one really understands exactly how they work. people keep stumbling onto new ways of getting slightly faster. So the soles were getting thicker. There were different designs of carbon fiber plate instead of changing the curvature, changing the angles. The materials kept getting faster. So you can just take a chunk of the foam that they use in the midsoles, and you can put

it in a machine and squeeze it and see how much it springs back. And traditional running shoes might give you back like 70% of the energy. And then Adidas had come out with something in the early 2010s, Adidas boost that Kate gave back like 80-something percent. And then Nike was getting materials that were giving you back like 90%. And then so there was a bit of an arms race. People were locking up these obscure, you know, petrochemical suppliers who could produce these foams that would give you one or two percent more energy.

So by 2019, Kipchogi had shoes that were personally optimized for him and that worked better. And it got to the point then where shortly, after that, the governing body for running World Athletics imposed a stack height limit. They said your shoe cannot be thicker than 40 millimeters because it's getting ridiculous. It looks like you're running around on pogo sticks. And we don't want every year there to be a new shoe. So at least you're going to have to innovate within the envelope of you only have 40 millimeters to play with. Wow.

And I know you got to kind of get a look at Nike's process up close during the Breaking 2 attempt. can you tell us a little bit about what it was like kind of being in the lab where they were developing these shoes and, you know, just measuring everything they could about these runners? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty neat. And I think, you know, Nike is certainly a leader Adidas was doing the same in the lead up to this sub two.

And all the shoe companies do to some degree, but it's like these runners are not going to the store to buy their shoes. They're not just filling out a form for the, you know, the Nike Central. deposit saying send me 10 pairs of these shoes. They're going in and they're being tested in a very very careful, systematic way, a very personalized way with rapid turnaround.

So when I visited Nike, and this is like, gosh, 10 years ago, they had a rapid prototyper. So they could make a pair of shoes, stick it on a runner's foot, go out to the treadmill, test it, say, ah, it's not quite right. Let's build another shoe with slightly different parameters

and come back tomorrow and test that. And so I was there when they were testing the stiffness, rather, of the carbon fiber plate. So they were having each runner do a series of tests in three different shoes with a sort of soft, medium, and stiff plate to try and zero in on every runner's different. Every runner weighs, it depends how much you weigh, how much force you put into the ground when you run. And so not every Nike athlete gets this level of attention, but for this sub two or breaking two project, which they sport, they must have spent certainly millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars. on. They were pulling out all the stops. And so it was really interesting to see, like, you know, right down to every thread of every piece of garment they were trying to think about how does this help or hurt the runner.

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So then, you know, fast forward after Kipchoga's 2019 success, then it was seven years. We went without anyone breaking the two-hour barrier in this controlled setting or in an official race until this year where we had two runners. break the two-hour barrier in the same race. So, you know, how did that happen? Why did it take those seven years for this to happen on an official course? And what was so special about the London Marathon this year? Yeah. So first of all, this sort of phony war that happened after Kipchogi broke 2019 is interesting because as much as I read about sports science and I'm very interested in the biomechanics and the physiology. But I also think psychology is super important in performance, right? Like, what do you believe is possible? And that's going to dictate in part of what is possible.

Not that you can just dream of anything and achieve it. But so after Kepchogi ran 2 flat 25, and then once he actually ran sub two in these exhibition races, I was confident that this would trickle out into the real world and that people would start running faster and maybe even break two hours By then I had revised my 2075 prediction. I knew it was coming sooner. And so we went through this phase for a few years where every time there was a major marathon, there was a few very fast marathons in the world, Chicago, Berlin, London, Valencia. Anytime there was a major marathon like that, I would get up at like 4 a.m. or 3 a.m.

so that I could watch if the race was in Europe because I was like, this could be the day. We're going to break two hours now. And the marathon is a is a very tricky beast and the weather has to be just right. The wind, the training has to have gone just right. So there were a bunch of races where it was like, it could have happened, but it was just too hot today. They ran really fast, but it was too hot, or it was raining or so-and-so got injured just, you know, two weeks before. And after a while, then the pandemic came, which kind of messed up marathoning for a while. And so I got out of the habit of getting up at 3 a.m. to watch these races.

And also, like, so there was a guy named Kelvin Kippdom who came along. You know, we thought this was going to be the age of Elliot Kipchogi. He was the best runner ever. But he was getting older. And all of a sudden, this really unharalded runner came and ran a very fast debut marathon and then ran two hours and 25 seconds. So he broke Elliot Kipchogi's official world record. And 25 seconds, that's nothing.

That's less than a second per mile that he has to get off. So we're like, Kelvin Kiptham is going to break the two-hour marathon next time. And then he got killed in a car accident. extremely sad. He and his coach both got killed. And there was this sense that, oh man, we had this young guy who was going to go sub-two and now we'll never know what he was capable of. And so I would say the sub-two-hour watch kind of tapered off for a year or two. People, I can say for me, I kind of stopped thinking it was going to happen tomorrow. And so London, to my eternal shame, I didn't get up at 3M and watch it. I watched it on replay once I woke up because

nobody really thought it was going to happen. They weren't, no one was making a big fuss about it. So in comparison, a guy named Josh Kerr just broke the world record for one mile. And he announced that he was going to do it. And it was a 27-year-old record or something like that, like a really tough record to break. He announced it last fall. He said, this is the day I'm going to do it. This is the place I'm going to do it.

This is how I'm going to do it. Be ready, be there. I'll be there seven months later. And to his credit, to his eternal credit, he did it. And so there was a lot of hype and a lot of. pressure. For the marathon, for Sebastian Sowie and Yomov Kajelcha, who both went under in London this spring, nobody expected it to happen. And in fact, Yomov Kajelja, it was his first marathon. Like, nobody expected him to be anywhere near. Someone asked him in an interview a few days before

the race, like, is a two-hour marathon going to happen? And he just laughed. He was like, oh, yeah, not going to happen anytime soon. I don't think so. It's not possible. And then he did it two days later. So there was an element of, it was a good day. And obviously, Sebastian Salway asked the pacemakers to go fast. And so he must have thought it was possible. But it came out of the blue. And I think surprise. And I think that it was two things. It was a surprise to people, which is awesome. And it was a race. They were together until the final mile. And normally when you have a race that's that fast, you don't get the pleasure of a head-to-head competition to you. So it was a special day. Wow. Yeah, I guess seeing these two athletes go sub two hours at the same time, you know, what made you think then it's the shoes that did it? And, you know, how much of it is just having these really special athletes?

Yeah. I mean, so I think this is a really important point. I said at the beginning there's a long answer and the short answer. The short answer is which is that it's the shoes, is an oversimplification. I do think we wouldn't be having this conversation if the shoes hadn't been. dramatically approved. So in that sense, the shoes are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition. The shoes on their own don't get you there. Yeah. A few other things. One of which, like you said, is these are generational athletes. These are extremely special athletes who've been training in a way that makes this possible in a way that, you know, comparing errors is often is really hard, but what was different about the best marathoners of the 70s? I mean, they were doing a lot of things. They were training very hard, but these guys are dialing in every detail. But there's also some other technological things that are going on. There's been a revolution in fueling. Some people

call it the carbolution, a carbohydrate revolution. People are taking, during the race, while they're running, they're ingesting levels of carbohydrate that would have been dismissed as absolutely insane, you know, five years ago. It's not possible. It's not physiological. ologically possible. The advice used to be try, if it's possible, if you can do it without puking, see if you can get in 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour during exercise. These guys, and they both published their fueling plans after, I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were in the neighborhood of 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour.

Now, that probably doesn't mean a lot to the, if you haven't been thinking about marathon gels. But what that effectively means is that these guys are running for two hours. they're running at a pace that is effectively an all-out sprint. So it makes it hard to even take a sip of water. But during those two hours, they're consuming the carbohydrate equivalent of like six plates of pasta. So, you know, just try to imagine running at that pace without slowing down

and managing to put down six plates of pasta, or at least the carbohydrate equivalent. So, and this is, I guess, why are runners, because it's not just these two guys, a lot of people are running very fast right now. Is it just the shoes? What's interesting is that cyclists are going faster than ever two right now, and they don't have super shoes. And so that's why you have to look at other data points and say, well, there must be something else going on in the endurance world. It's not just super shoes. Cyclists are going faster. They would say part of that is that people are fueling to a degree. And this fueling is a technological story, because if you just, you know, if you try and eat six plates of pasta, you're going to puke. If you try and drink

just the liquid equivalent of sugar water, you're going to puke. But in the last 10 years, people have developed new sports drinks. One of them is a hydrogill-based sports drink. So the carbohydrates are encapsulated in this gel. You swallow it, and the gel hides the carbohydrates essentially from your stomach sensors. Your stomach doesn't realize there's this huge quantity of sugar in your stomach. It passes into your intestine. The hydro gel breaks down and it's absorbed into your bloodstream. So there's these technological attempts to squeeze more energy into the bloodstream as you're running. And that's another factor that has helped people go faster. Yeah. Well, now I'm just thinking about eating six plates of pasta during a race.

Don't try it. Don't try it. But let's talk about the shoes in the London Marathon. Both of those runners were wearing the Adidas Pro Evo 3. So can you tell us a little bit about those shoes and, you know, how different those were from prior super shoes, including the vaporfly that we've seen? Yeah. So, I mean, I think in their essential skeletal structure, they're the same. It's, it's, you've got a carbon fiber element that's stiffening a thick, bouncy, um, bouncy, trampolini midsole. So what makes these shoes special? They're lighter than any other shoe has ever been. I think if I remember correctly, they're the first competition shoe under a hundred grams, which is basically one of the quotes I saw in a few places was they would send

the athletes these shoes and the athletes would pick up the box and they think, oh, they forgot to put the shoes in the box. The box is empty. Then you open it. It's like, no, there's these big shoes in there. They're just extremely light. And so they're optimized in such a way that realistically they're going to probably fall apart after 27 miles.

You're not going to want to run two marathons in them because they're optimized to be light and springy but not durable. There's also been, you know, the latest round of innovation is trying to figure out, is there anything, anything on this shoe that is not useful? Is there a part of the soul that the athletes don't land on? Is there a part of the carbon fiber plate that isn't flexed? So it's not providing any sort of propulsion. Let's take that out then. Let's cut it out.

And so you have to do that with, you can do that on an individualized basis for, these super professional athletes. But overall, the ethos is, let's just get rid of anything that doesn't help them run in a straight line very fast for only 26 miles. So the fundamentals haven't changed, but they're just really working the details right down to the very last inch. Yeah. So for the recreational runners who bought this shoe after the London Marathon for $500 a pair, you know, how much is this going to do for them? Well, I would say, first of all, those who managed to buy that shoe for $500, what it's going to do for them is make them rich because they're going to turn around and sell it for $2,000 because these shoes are not intended for the recreational market.

And so the only reason Adidas is selling them is because the rules are if your elite runners are wearing a shoe, you have to make them on sale of the public and a reasonable. reasonable time. So those things went on sale. There were, I don't know, 500 or 1,000 available for sale and they were sold out within, you know, five seconds. So lucky you if you got one of those shoes. Now, there's a level down, the not quite so rarefied level of shoe that's a little more durable that lots of people are buying. And in fact, I would say this is one of the hugest surprises to me over the last 10 years is that no matter how fancy the shoes get, no matter how expensive the shoes get, no matter how advanced the technology gets. And you think,

this is just for the, you know, the 0.1%, this is not for the likes of you and me. Wrong every time. Runners have a bottomless appetite for these high-tech shoes. And I think there's two things to say about that. One is that if you're a runner and you're entering racing and seeing how fast you can go, we all love the prospect of free speed

and if someone says this shoe is going to make you a minute or two minutes faster, it turns out that even though we might all say, oh, I'm only competing against myself,

we all want that free speed. The other thing is that they feel really good. So all of a sudden you're running on these sort of ethereal clouds of foam. And so a lot

of people would say, you know, running used to beat up my my knees used to hurt, now it feels better. Now, if you spend $300, $400, $400, $400 on a pair of shoes, you're going to say your knees feel better no matter what, like you don't want to feel like you're an idiot.

So the research says, yeah, they're going to make you faster, a little bit faster, and you can decide whether that's meaningful to you or not. But there's also less research back, but lots of people would say, you know, don't take my super shoes away from me because they make running more enjoyable to me. I've been running for 30 years, and this is the best my legs have felt or whatever. So there's definitely an experiential aspect, too. Yeah. I've heard you say that you have kind of complicated thoughts about the use of these shoes

and kind of the purity of the sport. Can you just expand on that a little bit? And, you know, where you think the line is between leaning into innovation and then just straight up cheating? Yeah. I do have complicated thoughts about this. And, like, look, I'm a lifelong runner. I got a review pair of vaporflies in 2016, but until a few months ago, I had not bought a single pair of super shoes because I just, they force you to think to confront some of these questions I was just mentioning about what is it? Am I competing with myself or am I trying to compete against some external benchmark, whether that's trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon or trying to compete, trying to beat the guy down the street or the guy, you know, someone I've been racing against. And there's

hypothetical pure version of like I'm really just competing against myself, which is what I aspire. Like that's what, as an old guy, right? Like I'm not, I'm not competing for a scholarship or anything like that. I'm out there running for myself. And so this idea that I'm going to start spending hundreds of dollars every couple months to get a shoe that is going to make me faster with no effort of my own. I mean, the whole, the whole purpose of running is to, to make yourself faster. Not to, like, if someone's like, hey, for 100 bucks, you can start 50 meters in front of the start line, then you're going to go faster. It's like, well, no, why would I do that?

Like, my goal is to run 5K, not 4.95K. But at the same time, it becomes a collective action problem, right? Like, you can't unilaterally disarm if you're racing, if you want to qualify for the Boston Marathon. After Super Shoes came out, twice now, I think they've made the Boston Marathon qualifying times five minutes faster for everybody. or something along those lines because everyone's doing it. And so if you have this sort of like, well, I'm too cool for super shoes,

then you're like, well, you better run 10 minutes faster than you would otherwise have needed to because everybody else is using super shoes. So I guess the best way to describe my attitude would be conflicted because I totally understand the need to wear them when others are wearing them and also the fact that they actually feel pretty nice. but I also think and I don't have a bright line to offer or like this is where it becomes too much

but yeah you look at a $500 shoe that only lasts for two races if you're buying that you want to think really carefully about whether that's what running is about for you well I think that's a great place to leave it Alex Hutchinson thank you so much for joining us thanks Lauren it was fun

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