Lots of talk on the HoustonMarathon coverage about the Nike shoes...
Explaining how shoe design might help break two hours was tricky, says Kram, because while they had already completed testing on the new shoe, they couldn’t include their non-peer-reviewed data in a peer-reviewed journal. So they focused on the weight of the foam midsole, which, based on previous studies, they estimated could improve an athlete’s running economy by around one percent.
In May of the following year, Nike provided a teaser of an answer with Breaking2, where Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya came within 25 seconds of the two-hour mark on the Formula One Autodromo Nationale track in Monza, Italy.
Lost in the clamor over the benefit of the carbon plate was the role of the foam itself. In both their initial study and an early 2018 follow-up on the biomechanics involved, Hoogkamer and Kram pointed to one major contributor to the improvements in running economy: “For now, the elastic properties of the Nike Prototype shoes provide the best explanation for the metabolic energy savings.” In plain English: The new foam was noticeably springier, which made runners faster.
EVA makes an ideal midsole: in foam form it’s exceptionally light and provides great cushioning. Crucially, it’s also cheap, and it’s easy to make into a foam. And with decades of experience, shoe companies and the foam manufacturers who turn the raw EVA into sheets of midsole foam or compressed midsole blanks have learned little tweaks to the formula and manufacturing that offer a seemingly endless amount of variation to how a shoe feels in stride.
The final option is to blend EVA with other materials, or just use something different altogether. Shoemakers have for years tried to find alternatives, all the way back to Nike’s original Air Tailwind and its air cavity in 1978. In the 1980s, says Spencer White, vice president of human performance for Saucony, that company experimented with a material from DuPont called Hytrel.
Pebax is a brand-name play on the generic name: polyether block amide . Like TPU, it’s what’s called a block copolymer, a definition that’s essential to its advantages. To go back to Rancourt’s Lego analogy, Pebax is also made of blocks. But instead of being randomly arranged, Arkema can actually join chains of blocks of a single color, and vary the length of those chains, alternating hard and soft sections precisely to control the amount of cushioning and rebound.
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