JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A lot of us remember the Air Jordan Nike commercials from the late '80s and early '90s.
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SPIKE LEE: (As Mars Blackmon) Yo, Mars Blackmon here with my main man, Michael Jordan. Yo, Mike, what makes you the best player in the universe?
SUMMERS: A young Michael Jordan and a young and very persistent Mars Blackmon, the character created for "She's Gotta Have It," played by Spike Lee. In the ad, Mars is trying to get to the bottom of why Michael Jordan is so great. Then, the obvious question.
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LEE: (As Mars Blackmon) Is it the shoes?
MICHAEL JORDAN: No, Mars.
SUMMERS: This concept of shoes making an athlete great has always been more of a dream than a reality. But after this week's marathon in London, many are asking just how much did the runners' shoes matter? Not one but two runners broke what was once thought to be an unbreakable record, a full 26.2-mile marathon in under two hours. For more on this, we invited John Kuzmeski. He's a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies the technology being used in sneakers today. Hey there.
JOHN KUZMESKI: Hey, how's it going, Juana?
SUMMERS: I am well. OK. Let's start with this weekend's big news from the marathon. Our colleague spoke with the second-place finisher, Yomif Kejelcha Atomsa, who said it was the shoes for him that made a difference because they were so light.
YOMIF KEJELCHA ATOMSA: You no feel it. Also, you not feel it in the ground.
SUMMERS: So first of all, I just want to be clear. Running a marathon is a big deal. It's a huge feat, and doing it under two hours is pretty much unthinkable for most (ph) normal humans. What did you think when you heard about this?
KUZMESKI: Yeah. I think this was one of the great last barriers in track and field and running in general. It's akin to breaking the four-minute mile, and it's something that sports scientists have been hypothesizing on how to do for quite some time now.
SUMMERS: So, look, I'm a runner. I follow the sport really closely, and I feel like every so often, I pick up a running magazine or read running Reddit, and there are these big news stories about advanced shoe technology. How far have things gone?
KUZMESKI: Yeah. So advanced footwear technology is what we call them in the research space. More commonly, they're referred to as super shoes. But they started in 2016 with Nike's Breaking2 campaign where Eliud Kipchoge and a couple other runners attempted to break the two-hour marathon in these new AFTs which are a combination of low-compliance foams and a stiff carbon fiber plate in very, very light shoes.
SUMMERS: Nike made a pair of running shoes, the Alphaflys, that later forced the international governing body World Athletics to put rules on what runners were allowed to wear. But let's just say for experiment's sake here, limitations were out. How much faster can advanced sneakers make a runner?
KUZMESKI: That's a great question and really the crux of our field right now - one, playing within the rules, but also understanding that these limitations can be useful in a way, right? Just increasing the stack height of the shoe doesn't automatically make your leg longer, or the loading of the carbon fiber plate doesn't automatically make the shoe better. It's a complex recipe to make some of these shoes, and it's continuing to be a complex issue.
SUMMERS: I mean, you study sneaker technology. Where do you see it going in the future? What's on the horizon?
KUZMESKI: Yeah. I think what I'm really excited about is the personalization of these shoes and understanding what mechanical (ph) properties that cause the advancements in these shoes. So we don't know what the exact recipe is and how much each component contributes to it. So understanding that will allow for the shoes to become more personalizable. We can imagine that the, you know, 200-pound runner isn't going to interact with a shoe the same way that the 120-pound Sawe or Kejelcha interact with it at the highest levels. So being able to personalize these shoes and tune them better for specific people is where I see a lot of this going.
SUMMERS: I do have to ask for people who are not elite runners - people like me, who are maybe just a casual runner, weekend warrior type - can these kinds of shoes help?
KUZMESKI: Yeah, absolutely. There's been a couple studies that have shown that this works both at super-high paces and at lower paces, all the way down to the 10-minute range.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with John Kuzmeski. He published a study on sneaker technology in the Journal of Health and Sport Science (ph) last month, and he's a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Thank you.
KUZMESKI: Absolutely. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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