Exactly. The whole super shoe discourse is really tired at this point.

Shoes changed. Now all of the shoes have carbon plates. The athletes are still incredible… nobody is getting one of these shoes and becoming some super star overnight.

We let the athletes drink hyper specialized drink mixtures based on studying their sweat content and even adjusting the drinks for their perspiration level during the race.

The shoe foam and carbon plates sell more expensive shoes.

Totally agree. At the end of the day, if you’re not running naked and barefoot, your clothing and shoes affect your performance. I wear fancy expensive socks that prevent blistering. Is that cheating because I’m not suffering on a long run? Is wearing a brace to avoid injury cheating?

The way I see it, if your shoes are supporting your biomechanics in a way that optimizes energy and prevents injury, that is both fine and should be encouraged. I run, my nephew is a track athlete, my son plays football. Injury is a huge barrier to performance and a good experience… anything that avoids it is good.

Athletic orgs can regulate what level of technologic advantage to allow, i.e. FINA banning shark suit for swimming and eventually regulating what level of tech suit assistence is allowed. High level athletes frequently spend a few 100-1000s dollars on new/fresh equipment without diminished performance (lots of performance fabrics foams), which feels pretty unfair when it comes to global competition. I love equipment porn, but TBH I think they should be limited to training (i.e. enable more sessions / prevent injury), but requirements for competition should be as barefoot / naked as possible.

Doping is this context is just introducing something exogenous to enhance properties/performance, like drugs or industrial process. It seems apt, if anything people should embrace usage more, I like doping my food with spices.

Ok, but on the other hand, if the only way to compete in professional sports is to have the research team of a megacorp behind you, several million in the bank and contort your body in ways that are unhealthy and completely impractical for everyday life, what is even the point? Like, what would the winner of the competition actually represent?

Admittedly, shoes don't pass the third point as you can just step out of them after the competition, even if they were unhealthy. But still - if extremely optimized hi-tech running shoes are allowed, why not go one step further and add motorized rollers? Where would be the difference?

(This is an actual issue in biking, btw. You could also ask why relentlessly optimizing your bike for low weight and air resistance is allowed, but adding hidden motors is not)

Usually this happens when the marketing departments are involved with the sport and want to keep that up. No one wants to end up like baseball with the same old wooden bat and ball. You want to market like golf. Have the pros hit the brand new marketing dept named driver every year that sells for $600. Never mind the effect on the rest of the sport when equipment iterates unchecked like this until it hits some breaking factor elsewhere.

I began to think about various things that are called "doping", including a process to treat fabric-covered aircraft.

It turns out that there are many kinds of "doping" and even an article on the supposedly mythical practice of "abortion doping", so there you go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping

They’re already somewhat regulated, there’s a maximum stack height for competition

These shoes are developed by the Nike's of the world who give them away to African athletes for marketing campaigns.

Most doping is developed by countries to get medals at the Olympics.

Much more likely, they know so much about this issue that they struggle with finding simple words. Similarly how I often overcomplicate answers to technical problems of my family.

What is more likely: that doctors are slackers that have no idea what they are doing, or that their education path prioritized doing things over explaining anatomy to laymen.

Humans crave certainty. Doctors, politicians, executives, salespeople, and so on are rewarded for conveying certainty even — especially — when reality is uncertain. It’s not that doctors don’t care to ferret out the truth, but that the market rewards them for claiming that they have the truth regardless of whether they actually have it in their grasp.

I remember my mom asking this when she was learning to drive a stick-shift in her 60s - "If both the gears and the clutch help in changing the speed, what's the difference between them?"

I had a huge problem in explaining this in simple terms without having to go into the the huge amount of detail.

Maybe it's something like that?

2 things. Doctors know a whole damn lot. Secondly, what doctors don’t know far outnumber what we do know. Lots of time, the best we have is hand wavy explanation that connects the biology we sort of know to the pathology the patient is coming up with

I have, in my adult life, had precisely one physician convincingly show that he cared about me. The overwhelming majority are obviously phoning it in, with varying levels if pleasantness.

Why don’t you train in them?

So riding my cybernetic robot legs that can run 60 mph while I’m relaxing would be ok?

If anything, nothing but “barefoot” shoes should be permitted.

It can break the sport on the other hand as this iteration almost always outpaces how the rest of the sport is balanced. Baseball roid era effectively shortened the length of the outfield. Golf today is going through a similar issue with pros hitting the new high tech drivers a lot further than when they built these tournament golf courses. Hazards like bunkers on a golf hole are placed based on where you might hit your drive and now the pros are just sailing over them making it easy for themselves. There’s now talk of deadening the golf ball to compensate.

My understanding is that they hook a runner up to a machine that measures their oxygen consumption, have them run a given pace in a given shoe, and measure how much oxygen they consume as a proxy to how much energy they’re using.

With the super shoes, they use less oxygen to run at a given pace

Example abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30374945/

the article linked to from TFA, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-017-0811-2?... (2017), says:

> We measured submaximal oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide production during minutes 3–5 and averaged energetic cost (W/kg) for the two trials in each shoe model.

normally respiration gives very good results, better than other proxies such as accelerometry or heart rate measurement, but TIL that there's an even better method: doubly labeled water (DLW)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5426207/ (2017)

> ...after the subject ingests a dose of ²H2¹⁸O, there is an equilibration of the 2 isotopes with total body water (TBW) followed by their elimination from the body, which occurs at different rates. Deuterium (²H) is lost from the body via only water (H2O) while ¹⁸O is lost both via water and carbon dioxide (CO2). The rate of CO2 production (rCO2) is calculated as the difference between the elimination rates of ²H and ¹⁸O...

the advantage is not needing to be masked during activity; the disadvantage is dealing with isotopes

You breathe into a mask and oxygen uptake / co2 exhaust is measured. This is of course contaminated by things like your individual efficiency but for relative measurements it’s fine.

Because EPO is a natural hormone, in theory you can get away with using moderate amounts without needing to bypass the tests. Take bioidentical EPO before bed (possibly IV instead of IM for shorter detection time) and by the time you wake up it's hard to distinguish from natural variation.

This is what the "biological passport" is designed to prevent but I'm not sure if it actually works

That already happens automagically and subconsciously. Your body is lazy, so it tries to use as little energy as possible for what you force it to do, and with movements repeated thousands of times, over time, it will find a way to do them in a most energy-efficient way. And if you always run in the same shoes, it will eventually find a way to optimize for those shoes.

Unfortunately, the process is blind, and sometimes it finds a local maximum while limiting you, and sometimes that local maximum can cause injuries. That's why getting a good trainer to have a look at your running style is a good idea if you want to start running more.