Nike’s New Shoe Could Propel Marathoners To An Impossible Feat

By Margaret Rhodes for WIRED. The marathon world record stands at two hours, two minutes, and 57 seconds. Nike wants to chisel that time down to less than two hours and has designed a shoe to do it. Today Nike unveils the Zoom Vaporfly Elite, a concept running shoe that three world-class runners will wear this spring during the Breaking2 initiative to run a sub-two-hour race. Given the trajectory of human athletic performance — in 1906, the best marathoners clocked in at just under three hours — a sub-two-hour run seems achievable, if not inevitable. But scientists, athletes, and designers agree this is a mighty goal. “It’s ones of those big barriers of human potential,” says Tony Bignell, VP of footwear innovation at Nike. The Vaporfly Elite is the sportswear giant’s vehicle for crossing that threshold and perhaps even upstaging the Adidas Adizero Sub2, the new marathon shoe from its chief rival. RELATED: Inside Nike’s Quest for the Impossible Two-Hour Marathon Nike began this endeavor in earnest in 2014, although its designers say they started dreaming about such a shoe more than a decade ago. A confluence of factors make now the time to go for it: Bignell says advances in 3-D knitting and cushioning technology, and athletes already close to breaking the two-hour barrier, help. “We’re at a point where we now feel that we have the science,” says Matthew Nurse, VP of the Nike Sports Research Lab. If Nike w...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news