They look like marshmallows with laces. One brand calls theirs “Cloud”. They are cartoonish versions of shoes. Big, light, airy and soft, they feel as if you should sleep on them, not run in them, but these pillows for your feet have changed athletics. More has led to less: bigger shoes, quicker times. The chunky, high-tech shoes – dubbed “super shoes” – have produced race times the world has never seen before.
From November 1, the legal thickness of foam in the heel – the stack – of track running and jumping shoes will drop from a maximum of 25 millimetres to 20. The maximum 40-millimetre stack for road shoes, worn in the marathon and race walking, will remain. These are different. There’s one, and sometimes two, curved carbon fibre plates in the sole that stabilise the foot and roll the runner onto their toes. The track shoes have a layer of foam of increasing thickness through the midsole to the heel to add to spring and energy transfer. The thickness of the foam varies for running, hurdling and jumping events, but all have a foam layer where previously there often was none.
Kelvin Kiptum broke the men’s marathon record last October at the Chicago Marathon – he was wearing Nike’s latest iteration. Sifan Hassan won the women’s race also wearing the World Athletics-approved Nike Dev163 prototype shoes. She ran the second-fastest ever time.
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