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"Others have truly flat feet, whether they're lying down or standing up."įor that reason, says Plaatjes, who treats many of Boulder's elite runners for various injuries, says that the "wet test" of getting your foot wet and stepping on concrete to see if your footprint shows your entire foot against the ground isn't accurate in identifying truly flat feet versus arches that collapse under the weight of standing. "Some runners' feet have high arches when they're lying down but that flatten out when they stand up," says Mark Plaatjes, world champion marathoner and owner of Boulder, Colorado's In Motion Rehabilitation and In Motion Running store. In his memoir, Shoe Dog, Nike’s other cofounder, Phil Knight, who ran for Bowerman at Oregon, described his former coach filling a cement mixer with shredded tires and different chemicals in search of the perfect rubbery material for a sneaker sole.Not all feet are created equal, and if you're someone with flat feet, the type of flat foot you have will determine which types of shoes are best for you.
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One of Nike’s foundational legends involves co-founder Bill Bowerman, the track coach at University of Oregon and an inveterate tinkerer, pouring liquid urethane into a waffle iron to produce the grippy “waffle tread” the company used on running shoes. The way companies like Nike and its rivals create performance footwear has changed to such a degree as to make earlier efforts seem practically primitive.
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We get to study down at the molecular level of wiring up athletes and stopping and studying very specific fractions of inches and spaces, because frankly that’s where gold medals are won or lost.” Origins in waffle irons “The difference today is we have an incredibly deep dataset. To make its products for the 2020 Olympics, Nike says it incorporated data and insights culled at the Nike Sport Research Lab, which uses scanners and sensors to analyze athletes in motion, providing the designers with sophisticated digital models. ”It’s always been an endeavor for the past 50 years to improve the performance of athletes,” Hoke said in an interview. These products keep getting more technologically advanced in part because the design capabilities behind them do too. Pack a carbon-fiber plate in it, as Nike did, and it seems it can make a notable difference for a runner over the course of a marathon. ZoomX, for instance, is Nike’s name for Pebax, a foam created by chemical company Arkema that Runner’s World found to offer much better energy return than others on the market. The footwear all top athletes wear today comes loaded with springy, stabilizing features such as rigid plates and resilient foams, but some materials can work better than others. World Athletics was responding to concerns that Nike’s shoes conferred an unfair advantage. The Air Zoom Alphafly Next% is slated for release in February, in time for the four-month window to elapse before the Olympics, it has just one plate, and Nike says the sole height is right at World Athletics’ limit, making it eligible according to the company. They dictate a shoe must have been commercially available for at least four months before it can be used in competition, it can have no more than one embedded plate, and the sole can be no thicker than 40 millimeters. Nike unveiled its Olympic shoes two days before World Athletics, the governing body of track and field, released its new rules on the shoes runners can wear in competition. The upper is a material Nike calls Atomknit, a stiffer version of its knitted Flyknit that Nike claims locks the foot down better.Ītomknit also appears in Nike’s other new track spike, the Air Zoom Viperfly, a shoe for sprinters that also uses a carbon-fiber plate and has a Zoom Air pod in the forefoot. In the forefoot is what Nike calls a Zoom Air pod, an update of Nike’s usual “air” bags, but with a structure in the center to hold it in a flattened shape, providing better energy return according to Nike. Its Air Zoom Victory track spike will feature the same ZoomX foam from its marathon line along with a carbon-fiber plate, making for what Nike says is a lightweight shoe with the most energy-return of any spikes it’s made. But they illustrate the leading role technology and data play in creating athletic footwear today.Īt July’s games, Nike’s track runners will have two new shoes Nike says leverage what it has learned from its marathon shoes for shorter, faster races. Whether they’re enough to earn gold for the athletes who’ll wear them remains to be seen. In the wake of all the controversy over its Vaporfly and Alphafly marathon running shoes, which some argue work so well they create a mechanical advantage, the company has unveiled a range of new products it says enhance performance, including the next version of its Alphafly.