You Don't Need Expensive Shoes To Get Faster

I laced up a test pair of orange Vaporfly 4% and drove to a nearby park. The path was smooth and mostly flat, the late afternoon air contained that bit of ‘perfect’, and my previous workouts gave me confidence that I wouldn’t be left throwing up.

- Brian Dalek

I nailed this run – there were 3:30/ km splits, and I felt good enough to hold some 4:00 kilometers for that steady-state running. Hopefully, it was a sign that I could finally break three hours in the marathon.

The only key difference between this speed effort and every other one before it was the shoes. I had been chasing three hours for a decade – so was that all I needed?

I decided I’d put too much faith in myself for years to give the credit to the impressive Vaporfly. So when I got home, I buried them deep inside my shoe cupboard.

Science of New Shoes

Since it launched, the Vaporfly has shown around a 4 per cent improvement in running economy – or the energy needed to run at a given pace – in several lab tests. An analysis done in 2018 by the New York Times of half a million marathon and half-marathon times uploaded to Strava (along with the shoes the runners were wearing) confirmed the 4 per cent claim, and found that runners of the same caliber were more likely to hit a PB wearing the Vaporfly than other shoes.