The tech that made a 2-hour marathon possible

At this year's London Marathon, two runners completed the route in under two hours, becoming the first people to ever do so on an official course. It's a feat that Outside magazine's Alex Hutchinson once thought wouldn't be accomplished until 2075. The Verge's senior policy reporter (and marathoner) Lauren Feiner talks to Alex about "super shoes" and the other surprising technological advances that led to this moment. Further reading: The Fairphone 6 Plus is the midrange phone we desperately needed The real reason your phone is getting more expensive What to expect at Apple’s September 9th launch event Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Superhuman Speed. I'm Lauren Finer, The Verge's senior policy reporter. Today, we're dissecting the technology that's helped enable a handful of athletes to run a full marathon in under two hours. For context, that means running at an average pace of less than four minutes and 35 seconds per mile for 26.2 miles. It's a milestone of human achievement that some scientists once believed to be impossible. Elliot Kipchoge became the first person to break the two-hour barrier in 2019, but under highly curated conditions that made it ineligible for an official record. Then, earlier this year, two elite marathoners finally broke the barrier on an official course in the same exact race.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  As a much slower marathoner, I've always had a huge fascination with the technology that's helped advance the sport. To understand how this happened, I'm talking to Alex Hutchinson, a journalist and author of books like Endure about the science behind human performance limits. He's chronicled the research and technology that's advanced the sport and gone inside the lab where Nike designed its iconic Super Shoes. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  I'm senior reviews editor Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. Allison Johnson reviewed the Fairphone 6 Plus and liked it. It is the first Fairphone to officially launch in the US, and it's designed to be repaired cheaply and easily at home. IFixit gives it a 10 out of 10 for repairability, and Allison gives it an 8 out of 10 for being a phone. It's a good phone. Speaking of phones, Ronnie Mola has a report on the site about why phones, and computers, and lots of other things are getting more expensive. It's not just that demand from AI data centers is sucking up all the manufacturing capacity. Okay, it is that, but it's not just that. Ronnie talked to a bunch of manufacturers. They are increasing capacity and putting a ton of money into it, but that's going to take a little while. And in the meantime, they're recording record profits.

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  Everybody wins, except for us. And speaking of phones getting more expensive, tomorrow is Apple announcement day. It is the company's first event with John Turnus as CEO. We are expecting the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, maybe with a smaller dynamic island, maybe with a fancy new camera, and almost certainly with a higher price tag. We are also finally expecting the foldable iPhone, and if the leaks are accurate, it is a wide one like the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8. Congratulations to Apple for inventing the folding phone. We'll probably also see the watches. We might see the AirPods 5. We probably will not see the AirPods with cameras, at least not yet. As always, we will be live blogging during the event at theverge.com, and we will be going live afterwards on YouTube to give our reactions and answer your questions.

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  You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 8th, 2026.

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• 4:49Speaker 02

  All right, Alex Hutchinson, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me, Lauren.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for being here. Um, yeah, so we're here today to talk about the attempts and the recent successes in breaking the two-hour barrier in the marathon. So obviously, that's a crazy fast statistic, but can you kind of contextualize for us, you know, what is the significance of that number exactly?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a round number. That's its biggest significance, right? So you could say, why is a two-hour marathon more significant than a two-hour and one-minute marathon? Well, that's life. Humans are wired in that way, and so it's been, people have dreamt about the idea of a two-hour marathon since like, I'd say 1991 was the first significant prediction, at which point it seems like science fiction. For the last 15 years, I'd say people have taken it seriously and said, actually, I think this might happen someday. But, but I guess maybe the, the most useful context is, in 2014, Runners World asked me to do a big feature on the prospects for a two-hour marathon, and I spent months

• 5:56Speaker 04

  and talked to tons of people, wrote a big 10-page takeout, and on the last page, I said, I think a two-hour marathon will happen, and I think it'll happen in 2075. So don't count on me for betting tips, but that's, that's how big a deal it is. It's half a century early.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Wow, wow. So, you know, when did breaking the two-hour barrier start to seem within reach far before that number that you'd predicted?

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, actually, there's a long answer and a short answer. And the long answer is complicated and nuanced, and the short answer is shoes got really fast. It was the shoes. There was the introduction of a new design, what we now call Super Shoes, that started showing up in races in 2016, became available to the public in 2017. The most noticeable feature is a stiff carbon fiber plate in the sole, and they made runners a lot faster.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, can you walk us through a little bit of how exactly those Super Shoes work? Why that carbon plate is there, and what else is significant about it?

• 6:57Speaker 04

  I can't give you definitive answers because nobody agrees on that. It's, it remains, you know, 10 years after Super Shoes came out, nobody agrees exactly how they work. But the definition that shoe scientists use for what constitutes what they call advanced footwear technology is, you've got a thick sole on the bottom of the shoe, a very thick sole. That sole is made out of super light, super resilient foam. So it's, you can have a thick layer because it's not heavy, but when you press it down, like when you land, it bounces back and kind of pushes you forward. And embedded in that thick midsole is a stiff carbon fiber plate, which, depending on who you listen to, might be sort of springy, or it adds stiffness, or it's just providing stability.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  You can run tests and say, okay, well, what happens if we take away one of those features? Does the shoe still work? And it's like, no matter what you take away, it doesn't work as well as you expect. So nobody exactly knows how these things work together, but all the different brands have now figured out ways of combining, essentially, I mean, I guess, maybe the overall, the way these things work is that when you land, your, your weight compresses the shoe, and they've found a way of making it spring back in a way that pushes you forward right at the right moment to, so that you can run at a given pace that takes less energy. So in other words, or you can, you can spend the same amount of energy and run faster.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  And the very first Super Shoe was, was called the Nike Vaporfly 4%. And it was called the 4% because Nike arranged for external testing at the University of Colorado, and they found that pretty reliably, on average, people were 4% more efficient. They could run at a given pace for 4% less energy. And this was such a wild finding, such a totally out-of-the-blue finding, that they had put it right in the name of the shoe.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Wow. And I guess, can you contextualize for us just how different a Super Shoe is from, you know, your average trainer?

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Needless to say, and I'm underestimating or understating this dramatically, there was a lot of controversy when these Super Shoes came out. Because there's, you know, running is like the prototypical, pure, simple sport where anyone can compete. You don't need to have fancy gear. Until now, suddenly you do. And so there was a lot of talk about, you know, these things have springs on their feet. You're putting springs on your feet. This is like wearing roller skates. And one of the counterarguments to that is like, actually, all, all shoes have springs on your feet. So if you, if you wore a standard running shoe in 1985, it had a spring. That spring was the sole, and that sole was made out of a foam called EVA, which was relatively, compared to modern foams, it was relatively heavy and not very springy,

• 9:39Speaker 04

  but it was springy. And, and you know, that's where Nike Air shoes came in too. Like, they wanted something so that when you land, the difference between being barefoot and landing on a running shoe is, you land, it squishes down a little bit, and then it springs back and pushes you forward. That feels better, and it gives you some benefit. It saves you a little bit of energy. So it's not a difference in that we just invented something totally new. It's just that the technology, the materials and the design got radically better so that it can now do what previous shoes did, but way, way better.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  And so you were talking about the Vaporfly, and I know that was a big part of Nike's Breaking 2 project in 2017 that you covered. So can you tell us a little bit about what Nike was attempting to do with that attempt that was different from what had been done before?

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah. So I'll rewind a little bit more and say, 1991, a guy named Michael Joyner wrote a paper saying, hey, if we run the numbers on what people are capable of in our understanding of endurance, someone should be able to run like a 158 marathon. And so that was the idea that this should be possible. No one took it seriously till about, yeah, 2011. There was another scientific paper where we said, actually, now the world record's down to 203 or 20257. We're actually knocking on the door. When is this going to happen and what it's going to take? And so people started to think about, what are the ways that you could make people half a percent more efficient, a quarter of a percent more efficient? And could you add all those up and get to a two-hour marathon? And so that's the context in which I was like, okay, I'll do, I'll run the

• 11:13Speaker 04

  numbers for Runners World and I'll say 2075. So then Nike in 2016, they announced that they were going to be putting on an exhibition race where they were going to pick some of the best runners in the world and try and break two hours. And so immediately there was a lot of speculation and questioning, like, what are they talking about? How, you know, what levers can they pull that will get you from 203 to 159? And so there are a lot of levers that they were going to pull. And, and, and that's why they were holding an exhibition race, not a sort of street legal race in a major marathon. They wanted to control a bunch of factors, ranging from, they didn't want to have a set start time. They wanted to wake up in the morning and say, weather looks good, let's go, or

• 11:55Speaker 04

  weather doesn't look good, let's delay by a day or by six hours or whatever. They held it on a Formula One track in, in Monza, Italy, in order to get the, the most perfect flat or, you know, perfectly cambered curves, so that they're not wasting time going up and down. They wanted to get the temperature and the, and all this just right. So all of these are like little details. Then you start to get to bigger details, like, they wanted to have, I can't remember if it was six or seven pacemakers, running in an arrowhead formation ahead of the, the actual runners, to, first of all, to set the pace at a perfect way. So you're not going a little bit too fast or a little bit too slow. So you don't even have to think about the pace. Just run behind these pacemakers and then they're

• 12:35Speaker 04

  blocking the wind. And there's controversy on this too, but there's some data that suggests even at marathon pace, running behind another runner can save you as much as super shoes can be sort of in the neighborhood of 4%, 5%. You're not sort of, you're not really aware of when you're running on a still day, that you're spending energy overcoming air resistance, but you are. So they were putting together all of these factors. And then unbeknownst to anyone else, they had also developed these, what became the Vaporflies. So they had these shoes that were going to give them several percent that might be on its own enough to get to sub two. So, fast forward, they, they ran this big attempt, this big kind of exhibition attempt, in 2017, a guy named Elliot Kipchoge, a Kenyan runner,

• 13:20Speaker 04

  ran two hours, zero minutes and 25 seconds. So he didn't break two hours. And he also didn't break a world record because it wasn't an official race. He wasn't following, his pacemakers, you're not allowed to have pacemakers who drop out halfway and then come back in. But it was close enough that everyone was like, okay, now it can be done. Two years later, he ran, they did another exhibition event. Elliot Kipchoge ran under two hours in Vienna, under these same artificial conditions. So at that point, one school thought is like, hey, they've done it. It's over. The other school thought is, okay, they did this fake version. When's it going to happen in a, in a real, in a real, regular race, which is what we got to earlier this year?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what was different between those two attempts in 2017, 2019 for Kipchoge? Were, was it just, you know, a better day for him? Or were there other factors that played into that?

• 14:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question. There wasn't a lot of obvious difference. Like, you could look at the race and say, oh, in 2017, they had an arrowhead pointing forward. In 2019, they'd run a bunch of computational fluid dynamic simulations and decided that actually an arrowhead pointing backwards towards Kipchoge would minimize the amount of drag on him. So there were some subtle things like that. He had a different shoe. So what everyone, including me, thought would happen in, in 2016, 2017 was like, oh, they invented this new kind of shoe. Now, so there's going to be like a step change. Like, what, this is what happened in speed skating, for example. In the late 90s, they invented what's called the clap skate, which has a hinge on the, on the skate blade. All of a sudden, speed skaters got like 2% faster. And so you had to get the new skates. But

• 14:52Speaker 04

  then it changed, and then nothing, nothing changed after that. It was like one single change and then equilibrium again. What has happened with running shoes is that they keep, they keep getting faster. They, they keep, there's new, because no one really understands exactly how they work. People keep stumbling onto new ways of getting slightly faster. So the, the soles were getting thicker. There were different designs of, of carbon fiber plate, instead of, you know, changing the curvature, changing the angles. The materials kept getting faster. So you can do, you can just take a chunk of the, the foam that they use in the midsoles, and you can put it in a machine and squeeze it and see how much it springs back. And traditional running shoes might give you back like 70% of the energy. And then Adidas had come out with something in the early 2010s, Adidas

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Boost, that gave back like 80 something percent. And then Nike was getting materials that were giving you back like 90%. And then, so there was a bit of an arms race. People were locking up these obscure, you know, petrochemical suppliers who could produce these foams that would give you 1% or 2% more energy. So by, by 2019, Kipchoge had, Elliot Kipchoge had shoes that were personally optimized for him and that worked better. And, and it got to the point then where shortly after that, the governing body for world, for running world athletics imposed a stack height limit. They said, your shoe cannot be thicker than 40 millimeters because it's getting ridiculous. It looks like you're running around on pogo sticks. And we, we don't want every year there to be a new shoe.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  So at least you're going to have to innovate within the envelope of you only have 40 millimeters to play with.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Wow. And I know you got to kind of get a look at Nike's process up close during the Breaking Two attempt. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like, kind of being in the lab where they were developing these shoes and, you know, just measuring everything they could about these runners?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it's pretty neat. And I think, you know, Nike's certainly a leader. Adidas was doing the same in, in the lead up to, to this sub two. And all the, all the shoe companies do to some degree, but it's like, these runners are not going to the store to buy their shoes. They're not just filling out a form for the, you know, the Nike central deposit, saying, send me 10 pairs of these shoes. They're going in and they're being tested in a very, very careful, systematic way, a very personalized way with rapid turnaround. So they, when I, when I visited Nike, and this is like, gosh, 10 years ago, they had a rapid prototypers. So they could, they could make a pair of shoes, stick it on a runner's foot, go up to the treadmill, test it, say, ah, it's

• 17:25Speaker 04

  not quite right. Let's build another shoe with slightly different parameters and come back tomorrow and test that. And so I was there when they were testing the stiffness, rather, of the carbon fiber plate. So they were having each runner do a series of tests in three different shoes with a sort of soft, medium and stiff plate to try and zero in on, every runner's different. Every runner weighs, you know, it depends how much you weigh, how much force you put into the ground when you run. And so not every Nike athlete gets this level of attention. But for, for this sub two, or Breaking Two project, which they swore, they, they must've spent certainly millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars on. They, they were pulling out all the stops. And so it was really interesting to see, like,

• 18:06Speaker 04

  you know, right down to every thread of every piece of garment, they were trying to think about, how does this help or hurt the runner?

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• 19:18Speaker 02

  So then, you know, fast forward, after Kipchoge's 2019 success, then it was seven years we went without anyone breaking the two hour barrier in this controlled setting or in an official race until this year, where we had two runners break the two hour barrier in the same race. So, you know, how did that happen? Why did it take those seven years for this to happen on an official course? And what was so special about the London Marathon this year?

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. So first of all, this sort of phony war that happened after Kipchoge broke 2019 is interesting because as much as I like, I write about sports science and I'm very interested in the biomechanics and the physiology, but I also think psychology is is super important in in performance, right? Like, what do you believe is possible? And that's going to dictate in part what what is possible. Not that you can just dream of anything and achieve it. But so after after Kipchoge ran two flat 25, and then once he actually ran sub two in these exhibition races, I was confident that this would trickle out into the real world and that people would start running faster and maybe even break two hours. But by then

• 20:35Speaker 04

  I had revised my 2075 prediction. I knew it was coming sooner. And so we went through this phase for a few years where every time there was a major marathon, there was a few very fast marathons in the world, Chicago, Berlin, London, Valencia. Anytime there was a major marathon like that, I would get up at like 4am or 3am so that I could watch if the race was in Europe. Because I was like, this could be the day. We're going to break two hours now. And the marathon is a is a is a very tricky beast. And the weather has to be just right. The wind, the training has to have gone just right. So there were a bunch of races where it was like, it could have happened, but it was just too hot today. They ran really fast, but it was too hot, or it was raining, or so and so got injured

• 21:17Speaker 04

  just, you know, two weeks before. And after a while, then the pandemic came, which kind of messed up marathoning for a while. And so I got out of the habit of getting up at 3am to watch these races. And also, like, so there was a guy named Kelvin Kipton, who came along, you know, we thought this was going to be the age of Elliot Kipchoge. He was the best runner ever. But he was getting older. And all of a sudden, this really unheralded runner came and ran a very fast debut marathon, and then ran two, two hours and 25 seconds. So he broke Elliot Kipchoge's official world record. And 25 seconds, that's nothing. That's less than a second per mile that he has to get off. So we're like, Kelvin Kipton is going to break the two hour marathon next time. And then he got killed in a car accident. Extremely sad. He and his coach both both got killed. And there was this sense that,

• 22:00Speaker 04

  oh, man, we had this young guy who was going to go sub two, and now we'll never know what he was capable of. And so I would say the sub two hour watch kind of tapered off for a year or two. People, people, I can say for me, I kind of stopped thinking it was going to happen tomorrow. And so London, I took my eternal shame. I didn't get up at 3am and watch it. I didn't, I watched it on replay once I woke up, because nobody really thought it was going to happen. They weren't, no one was making a big fuss about it. So in comparison, a guy named Josh Kerr just broke the world record for one mile. And he announced that he was going to do it. And it was, it's a very, it was a 27 year old record or something like that, like a really tough record to break. He announced it last

• 22:43Speaker 04

  fall. He said, this is the day I'm going to do it. This is the place I'm going to do it. This is how I'm going to do it. Be ready, be there. I'll be there seven months later. And to his credit, to his eternal credit, he did it. And so there was a lot of hype and a lot of pressure. For the marathon, for Sebastian Sawai and Yomov Kajelchuk, who both went under in London this spring, nobody expected it to happen. And in fact, Yomov Kajelchuk, it was his first marathon. Nobody expected him to be anywhere near. Someone asked him in an interview, a few days before the race, like, is a two hour marathon going to happen? And he just laughed. He was like, oh, yeah, not going to happen anytime soon. I don't think so. It's not possible. And then he did it two days later. So there was an element of, it was a good day. And obviously, Sebastian Sawai asked the pacemakers to

• 23:28Speaker 04

  go fast. And so he must have thought it was possible. But it came out of the blue. And I think surprise, and I think that it was two things. It was a, it was a surprise to people, which is awesome. And it was a race. They were together until the final mile. And normally, when you have a race that's that fast, you don't get the pleasure of a head to head competition to you. So it was a special day.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Wow. Yeah, I guess, you know, seeing these two athletes go sub two hours at the same time, you know, what made you think then, it's, it's the shoes that did it? And you know, how much of it is just having these really special athletes?

• 24:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, so I think this is a really important point. I said at the beginning, there's a long answer and the short answer. The short answer is, which is that it's the shoes, is an oversimplification. I do think we wouldn't be having this conversation if the shoes hadn't been dramatically improved. So in that sense, the shoes are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition. The shoes on their own don't get you there.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  A few other things. One of which, like you said, is, these are generational athletes. These are, these are extremely special athletes who've been training in a way that makes this possible, in a way that, you know, comparing errors is often is really hard. But what was different about the best marathoners of the 70s? I mean, they were doing a lot of things. They were training very hard. But these guys are dialing in every detail. But there's also some other technological things that are going on. There's, there's been a revolution in fueling, in carb, some people call it the carbolution, a carbohydrate revolution. People are taking, during the race, while they're running, they're ingesting levels of carbohydrate that would have been dismissed as absolutely insane, you know,

• 25:16Speaker 04

  five years ago. It's not possible. It's not physiologically possible. The advice used to be, try, if it's possible, if you can do it without puking, see if you can get in 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour during exercise. These guys, and they both published their their fueling plans after, I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were in the neighborhood of 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour. Now, that probably doesn't mean a lot to the, if you haven't been thinking about marathon gels. But what that effectively means is that these guys are running for two hours. They're running at a pace that is effectively an all out sprint. So it makes it hard to even take a sip of water. But during those two hours, they're consuming the carbohydrate equivalent of like six

• 25:59Speaker 04

  plates of pasta. So, you know, just try to imagine running at that pace without slowing down and managing to put down six plates of pasta, or at least the carbohydrate equivalent. So, and this is, I guess, what, why are runners, because it's not just these two guys. A lot of people are running very fast right now. Is it just the shoes? What's interesting is that cyclists are going faster than ever too right now. And they don't have super shoes. And so that's why you have to look at other data points and say, well, there must be something else going on in the endurance world. It's not just super shoes. Cyclists are going faster. They would say, part of that is that people are fueling to a degree. And this fueling is a technological story. Because if you just, you know, if you, if

• 26:44Speaker 04

  you try and eat six plates of pasta, you're going to puke. If you try and drink just the liquid equivalent of sugar water, you're going to puke. But in the last 10 years, people have developed new sports drinks. One of them is a hydrogel based sports drink. So the carbohydrates are encapsulated in this gel. You swallow it, and the gel hides the carbohydrates essentially from your stomach sensors. You don't real, your stomach doesn't realize there's this huge quantity of sugar in your stomach. It passes into your intestine, the hydrogel breaks down, and it's absorbed into your bloodstream. So there's these technological attempts to squeeze more energy into the bloodstream as you're running. And that's another factor that has helped people go faster.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, now I'm just thinking about eating six plates of pasta during a race.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Don't try it. Don't try it.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  But let's talk about the shoes in the London Marathon. Both of those runners were wearing the Adidas Pro Evo 3. So can you tell us a little bit about those shoes? And, you know, how different those were from prior super shoes, including the Vaporfly that we've seen?

• 27:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I mean, I think in their essential skeletal structure, they're the same. It's, it's, you've got a carbon fiber element that's stiffening a thick, bouncy, trampolining midsole. So what makes these shoes special? They're lighter than any other shoe has ever been. I think if I remember correctly, they're the first competition shoe under 100 grams, which, which is basically, one of the quotes I saw in a few places was, they would send the athletes these shoes, and the athletes would pick up the box, and they think, oh, they forgot to put the shoes in the box. The box is empty. And then you open it. It's like, no, there's these big shoes in there. They're just extremely light. And so they're optimized in such a way that realistically, they're going to probably fall apart after

• 28:28Speaker 04

  27 miles. You're not going to want to run two marathons in them. Because they're optimized to be light and springy, but not durable. There's also been, you know, the latest round of innovation is trying to figure out, is there anything, anything on this shoe that is not useful? Is there a part of the sole that the athletes don't land on? Is there a part of the carbon fiber plate that isn't flexed? So it's not providing any sort of propulsion. Let's take that out, then. Let's cut it out. And so you have to do that with, you can, you can do that on an individualized basis for these super professional athletes. But but overall, the ethos is, let's just get rid of anything that doesn't help them

• 29:13Speaker 04

  run in a straight line very fast for a very, for only 26 miles. So the fundamentals haven't changed, but they're just really working the details right down to the, to the, to the very last inch.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for the recreational runners who bought this shoe, this shoe after the London Marathon for $500 a pair, you know, how much is this going to do for them?

• 29:38Speaker 04

  Well, I would say, first of all, those who managed to buy that shoe for $500, what it's going to do for them is make them rich, because they're going to turn around and sell it for 2000 bucks. Because the, these shoes are not intended for the recreational market. And so the only reason Adidas is selling them is because the rules are, if you runners, if your elite runners are wearing a shoe, you have to make them on sale to the public in a reasonable time. So those things went on sale, there were, I don't know, 500 or 1000 available for sale. And they were sold out within, you know, five seconds. So lucky you if you got one of those shoes. Now, there's a level down, the not quite so rarified level of shoe that's a little more durable, that lots of people are buying.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  And in fact, I would say this is one of the hugest surprises to me over the last 10 years is that no matter how fancy the shoes get, no matter how expensive the shoes get, no matter how advanced the technology gets, and you think, this is just for the, you know, the 0.1%. This is not for, for the likes of you and me. Wrong every time. Runners have a bottomless appetite for these high tech shoes. And I think there's, there's two things to say about that. One is that

• 30:52Speaker 04

  If you're a runner and you're entering races and seeing how fast you can go, we all love the prospect of free speed. And if someone says this shoe is going to make you a minute or two minutes faster, it turns out that even though we might all say, oh, I'm only competing against myself, we all want that free speed. The other thing is that they feel really good. So all of a sudden, you're running on these sort of ethereal clouds of foam. And so a lot of people would say, you know, running used to beat up my shins, my knees used to hurt. Now it feels better. Now, if you spend 300, 400 bucks on a pair of shoes, you're going to say your knees feel better no matter what. Like, you don't want

• 31:35Speaker 04

  to feel like you're an idiot. So the research, the research says, yeah, they're going to make you faster, a little bit faster. And you can decide whether that's meaningful to you or not. But there's also less research back, but lots of people would say, you know, don't take my super shoes away from me because they make running more enjoyable to me. I've been running for 30 years and this is the best my legs have felt or whatever. So there's definitely an experiential aspect, too.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I've heard you say that you have kind of complicated thoughts about the use of these shoes and kind of the purity of the sport. Can you just expand on that a little bit? And, you know, where you think the line is between leaning into innovation and then just straight up cheating?

• 32:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do have complicated thoughts about this. And like, look, I'm a lifelong runner.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  You know, I got a review pair of Vaporflies in 2016, but until a few months ago, I had not bought a single pair of super shoes because I just, they force you to think, to confront some of these questions I was just mentioning about what is it, am I competing with myself? Or am I trying to compete against some external benchmark? Whether that's trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon, or trying to compete, trying to beat the guy down the street, or the guy, you know, someone I've been racing against. And there's a hypothetical pure version of like, I'm really just competing against myself, which is what I aspire. Like, that's what, as an old guy, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not competing for a scholarship or anything like that. I'm out there running for myself. And so this idea that I'm going

• 33:05Speaker 04

  to start spending hundreds of dollars every couple of months to get a shoe that is going to make me faster with no effort of my own. I mean, the whole, the whole purpose of running is to make you, to make yourself faster, not to like, if someone's like, hey, for a hundred bucks, you can start 50 meters in front of the start line, then you're going to go faster. It's like, well, no, why would I do that? Like, my, my goal isn't, is to run 5K, not 4.95K. But at the same time, it becomes a collective action problem, right? Like, you can't unilaterally disarm if you're racing, if you want to qualify for the Boston Marathon. After super shoes came out, twice now, I think they've, they've made the Boston Marathon

• 33:48Speaker 04

  qualifying times five minutes faster for everybody. Or something along those lines, because everyone's doing it. And so if you have this sort of like, well, I'm too cool for, for super shoes, then you're like, well, you better run 10 minutes faster than you would otherwise have needed to because everybody else is, is, is using super shoes. So I guess

• 34:08Speaker 04

  the best way to describe my, my attitude to it would be conflicted, because I totally understand the, the need to wear them when others are wearing them. And also the fact that they actually feel pretty, pretty nice. But I also think, and I don't have a bright line to offer, or like, this is where it becomes too much. But yeah, you look at a $500 shoe that only lasts for two races. If you're buying that, you want to think really carefully about whether that's what running is about for you.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's a great place to leave it. Alex Hutchinson, thank you so much for joining us.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Thanks, Lauren. It was fun.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  That's it for The Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]. And to support everything we do here and get ad-free podcasts, subscribe to The Verge. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchek. See you next time.

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