Few shoes have seen as much scientific scrutiny as his Nike Alphaflys and Vaporflys. Here are what the studies have found.
, had upended the less-is-more maxim governing racing flats by winning—sometimes sweeping—nearly every major marathon it entered. And in the month after those first mysterious photos, Kipchoge, wearing Vaporflys, would claim his first marathon world record in 2:01:39 at the 2018 Berlin Marathon.
The highly cushioned Vaporfly was a paradigm shift, sending shoe developers, footwear researchers, and runners on a quest for shoes promising biomechanical efficiency. “We’d been saying forever that minimal was better,” Dimoff says. “We needed these specific study numbers to explain why people should trust, suddenly, this very tall shoe.”
They designed and built the air units first, and then began cobbling prototypes around them. Systems of components came next, with partial builds going through further mechanical testing. By late 2016, wear-testers were already putting the first of hundreds of prototypes through paces on treadmills and across Nike’s campus.
Midsole foams—EVA, TPU, and PEBA—vary in their capacity for compliance and resilience. And none give back as much energy as they get. At its best, the standard EVA foam used in most shoes returns around 65 percent of the energy put into it, Burns says. The Adidas Boost 2’s fairly unique TPU foam, measured in the original Vaporfly 4% study, returns a laudable 76 percent. And in that same study, the Vaporfly’s ZoomX foam returns an unprecedented 87 percent.
“Everybody at the time made a huge deal about this carbon-fiber plate, but that foam is the magic, that’s the game changer.”The foam’s weight, or lack thereof, is what makes all this possible. “For a very resilient spring, the longer it is—the stack height of a shoe—the more energy you can store,” Burns says. But increasing the stack comes with a weight penalty. Studies have quantified this “cost of cushioning.” Every 3.
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