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1/23: Tired Tires
After a few folks asked for some details about the footwear worn by our Olympic marathon qualifiers, we asked =PR= Footwear Buyer, Dave Miller, to sound off on the topic....
A week ago in Houston, Texas a spectacle of elite fitness and footwear collided at the 2012 Olympic Marathon Team Trials. Among the 152 women who finished the race and the 85 men who finished the race, there were many shoes on display. Some athletes who came in a bit injured from the long months of training opted for more substantial shoes in the hopes of staving off the effects of the hard industrial grade concrete. Those who came in opted for the same shoes they had done their marathon pace work in since summer; the tried and true model. One constant exists for all finishers with regards to their footwear: they wanted to run the race in the shoes that would maximize their chances of finishing well. While I could go through person by person and catalog the individual models of shoes, I assume all parties will find compromise with a breakdown of the shoes that made it to the podium.
Gold – On the women’s side Shalane Flanagan broke the previous Olympic Marathon Trials record in stunning fashion wearing the Nike Streak 4. On the men’s side, Meb Keflezighi won his first Olympic Marathon Trials gold wearing the Sketchers Go Run. Both of these shoes have more substance than some of the paper thin flats that are so tempting from a weight perspective, yet so costly from a fatigue standpoint.
Silver – Desiree Davila of the Hansons-Brooks team gave great chase in the T7 Racer. Having worked so well for her in Boston of 2011, she opted to stick with the shoe that had delivered. For Ryan Hall, the Asics Hyperspeed has been the staple marathon flat for the past several years. While going on a tear and running a minimum of 2 marathons a year, Hall appears efficient enough to be able to sustain brutal efforts in this streamlined flat.
Bronze – Kara Goucher found her way onto her first marathon team wearing the Nike Lunaracer. As the shoe that was the launching point for the Lunar foam technology in their footwear, Nike has produced one of the most consistently trusted marathon flats for the past 5 years. The Lunaracer is far more forgiving than most flats that share similar numbers on the scale due to the space age foam. Abdi Abdirahman came from seemingly nowhere to capture the final ticket to London for the men wearing the yet unreleased Lunarspeed Light. To those who have followed US track & field Abdi has been a familiar face since the 2000 Olympics where he represented the Red, White & Blue in the 10,000 meters, though his success with the marathon had previously not been as notable as on the track.
For all of these athletes, they had to make decisions along their training to determine what shoes would work best for their training, and ultimately their goal race. One could hazard to say that most of the participants had run countless miles at marathon pace to adjust their legs and mind to the task of trying to run 26 miles full tilt on concrete, yet have shoes that were light as a feather, with enough cushioning so that their legs could respond over the final .2 of a mile to outlast their competitors. It is their hope that at the end of the race, in the last step to have nothing left; to have perfectly extended themselves over a rather trying distance.
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