More proof that "doping" has become a meaningless word.
If shoes are considered "doping," why aren't all marathons (and indeed, all athletic events) run barefoot and naked[1]? If those are the "rules," then surely they should at least be consistently applied...
[1] Presumably reduced thermal stress due to clothing improves athletic performance, therefore is "doping" by this metric.
Exactly. The whole super shoe discourse is really tired at this point.
Shoes changed. Now all of the shoes have carbon plates. The athletes are still incredible… nobody is getting one of these shoes and becoming some super star overnight.
We let the athletes drink hyper specialized drink mixtures based on studying their sweat content and even adjusting the drinks for their perspiration level during the race.
The shoe foam and carbon plates sell more expensive shoes.
Totally agree. At the end of the day, if you’re not running naked and barefoot, your clothing and shoes affect your performance. I wear fancy expensive socks that prevent blistering. Is that cheating because I’m not suffering on a long run? Is wearing a brace to avoid injury cheating?
The way I see it, if your shoes are supporting your biomechanics in a way that optimizes energy and prevents injury, that is both fine and should be encouraged. I run, my nephew is a track athlete, my son plays football. Injury is a huge barrier to performance and a good experience… anything that avoids it is good.
Athletic orgs can regulate what level of technologic advantage to allow, i.e. FINA banning shark suit for swimming and eventually regulating what level of tech suit assistence is allowed. High level athletes frequently spend a few 100-1000s dollars on new/fresh equipment without diminished performance (lots of performance fabrics foams), which feels pretty unfair when it comes to global competition. I love equipment porn, but TBH I think they should be limited to training (i.e. enable more sessions / prevent injury), but requirements for competition should be as barefoot / naked as possible.
Doping is this context is just introducing something exogenous to enhance properties/performance, like drugs or industrial process. It seems apt, if anything people should embrace usage more, I like doping my food with spices.
Usually this happens when the marketing departments are involved with the sport and want to keep that up. No one wants to end up like baseball with the same old wooden bat and ball. You want to market like golf. Have the pros hit the brand new marketing dept named driver every year that sells for $600. Never mind the effect on the rest of the sport when equipment iterates unchecked like this until it hits some breaking factor elsewhere.
Any high level athlete wills try to optimize their equipment and baseball is no exception here. They've tweaked sizes, weight and wood types in bats to try and gain a performance advantage. Maple bats were non-existent until the late 90s and now are now used by the vast majority. The axe-handled bat has also become popular in recent years.
Balls are chosen by the league rather than the players, but these have changed too in recent years. It's not clear if these changes were accidental, or intentionally designed to increase scoring.
Of course none of these equipment adjustments are going to turn your beer league slugger into Babe Ruth, but they're probably in that same ~4% improvement ballpark that super shoes offer.
Ok, but on the other hand, if the only way to compete in professional sports is to have the research team of a megacorp behind you, several million in the bank and contort your body in ways that are unhealthy and completely impractical for everyday life, what is even the point? Like, what would the winner of the competition actually represent?
Admittedly, shoes don't pass the third point as you can just step out of them after the competition, even if they were unhealthy. But still - if extremely optimized hi-tech running shoes are allowed, why not go one step further and add motorized rollers? Where would be the difference?
(This is an actual issue in biking, btw. You could also ask why relentlessly optimizing your bike for low weight and air resistance is allowed, but adding hidden motors is not)
The reason is the same reason these issues come up in Motorsports. In reality, technology matters. And sponsors (Nike, Pirelli, etc) are attracted to the sport in part for that reason. Sports don’t exist at the level they do without sponsors. So it’s a synergistic thing. The governing body has to come up with rules, and try to enforce them.
Why don’t they use recumbent bikes at the Tour? They are way faster, way more aerodynamic. But the rules prohibit it because bike companies think (almost certainly correctly) that they won’t sell like normal bikes due to the myriad issues with them.
People may think that something as simple as running is “pure” but they are just uninformed. Aerodynamic skin suits are useful in running (and have been used to win gold at the Olympics).
Most competitions will only allow runners to use publicly available shoes. The idea being that if you want the best shoes you still need to spend a couple hundred dollars, but you don't need the research team or megacorp to make a custom shoe for you.
I thought cycling competitions have a minimum weight/aero limit specifically to prevent people from buying their way to better times past a certain point? Is that not the case?
About halfway through the article, I'm trying to understand how they measure energy usage.
When I herniated a disc, because my hamstring atrophied, because I got a knee scope, I could not find a single doctor or physical therapist to explain it and such straightforward words, I had to do months and years of research myself to figure out what was happening. I probably saw a good 8 to 10 different "professionals" on this.
This taught me to not trust doctors. They're probably slackers and they probably don't care.
Much more likely, they know so much about this issue that they struggle with finding simple words. Similarly how I often overcomplicate answers to technical problems of my family.
What is more likely: that doctors are slackers that have no idea what they are doing, or that their education path prioritized doing things over explaining anatomy to laymen.
It’s not that they have no idea what what they’re doing, it’s that they typically are mapping patient problems to a set of scripts. I’m analogizing shell scripts, not using shorthand for prescriptions.
In nearly all cases this works out pretty well, most people will have some improvement when the right script is applied, and doctors are pretty good at mapping problems to scripts.
But for edge cases, that approach is not going to work. Human propensities to slack notwithstanding, the business model discourages doctors from spending all day debugging one patient that isn’t responsive to their scripts.
We do this in software, too. “Really rare race condition, one in a million chance, not going to rathole, deprioritized.”
They're just people working jobs and in what's become a pretty troubled industry.
For reasonably smart, reasonably disciplined people, going to med school and getting licensed is not some transformative experience that forces them all to become brilliant diagnosticians and healers. It's just a bit of a long grind to score what's hoped to be a well-paying and traditionally respected job.
And then once you finish that grind and have the job, you still need to balance it with a regular old life of resposinilities and crises and kids and vacations; and in fact, because of the grind many people necessarily shift their personal and mental focus towards those other things.
Meanwhile, the job sucks in a lot of ways and doesn't deliver on the childhood fantasies of what it must be like. Colleages and administrators make it miserable quite often, and patiets sure do too.
The upshot is that no: many doctors are not all that brilliant and attentive to start with, and many who may sometimes be so are slackers. Shortcuts win, knowledge outside routine/common stuff fades, etc
Just like all jobs.
It's great when you can find the diamond in the rough for your own care, but don't assume they're all diamonds just because they went to med school for a while.
I think the issue mentioned by parent comment is that doctors don't care to investigate the causes of what they're treating. They're trained to isolate and fix the issue at hand, not to think through what is causing the whole cascade of events.
Not on topic, but related. I made a video explaining my side project - Buckaroo for my less technical friends and family. In 6 minutes I give a high level overview of why data scientists use NumPy and Pandas, how they use Jupyter Notebooks, and why Buckaroo makes their life better. I'm proud of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfAkz6L5rMI
Humans crave certainty. Doctors, politicians, executives, salespeople, and so on are rewarded for conveying certainty even — especially — when reality is uncertain. It’s not that doctors don’t care to ferret out the truth, but that the market rewards them for claiming that they have the truth regardless of whether they actually have it in their grasp.
I have, in my adult life, had precisely one physician convincingly show that he cared about me. The overwhelming majority are obviously phoning it in, with varying levels if pleasantness.
I remember my mom asking this when she was learning to drive a stick-shift in her 60s - "If both the gears and the clutch help in changing the speed, what's the difference between them?"
I had a huge problem in explaining this in simple terms without having to go into the the huge amount of detail.
In general relying on excessive detail or jargon is symptomatic of not really understanding something when required to explain things in simple terms. I believe Richard Feynman said as much.
The general idea is people hide behind that detail/jargon precisely because they don't REALLY understand it enough to explain in simple terms what it is. That doesn't mean everything IS simple of course.
I assume you know now but in simple terms: the clutch connects the engine to the gearbox (transmission), so how well the clutch is engaged (connected) helps control speed. Gears multiply (increase or decrease) power from the engine depending on the gear you've selected.
2 things. Doctors know a whole damn lot. Secondly, what doctors don’t know far outnumber what we do know. Lots of time, the best we have is hand wavy explanation that connects the biology we sort of know to the pathology the patient is coming up with
weird to call it 'doping' but that must have tested better for click throughs.
Anyway the fly's are pretty damn cool. I ran a marathon last year and a half earlier this year in the cheaper ones are broke my PRs both times. I don't train in them, they are reserved just for events.
Yeah mostly cost related as others have suggested, I also use more cushioned shoes for training to help reduce fatigue for the back-to-back weeks of long runs.
I thought the same thing about gait but gave it a shot anyway. Didn't throw me off all that much, and I still enjoyed running in the firmer fly's. I did do a few trial short runs before the long run just so I was not going in cold.
To give an idea of shoe wear. I'll easily run through 1 pair in a year if I'm training for a marathon (just to run it). If I'm training to beat PRs then I'll go through almost 2.
The article doesn’t mention a couple things. The shoes reduce mechanical stress and impact. Runners can train harder and get more aerobic stimulus with less wear and tear on their legs. Also, the last miles of a marathon are faster and easier because muscles aren’t as broken down.
This seems to be the same debate in a smaller format. How much energy should a runner's equipment be allowed to catch and release and still be in the same category with unassisted runners?
Definitely a reasonable response. Yes, super shoes are equivalent to a fully mechanized leg that doesn’t exist. It’s basically like being Rosie the robot from the jetsons with wheels for feet. Can’t believe we let them get away with it.
As the article says, since everyone responds differently to different materials, the only truly fair playing field is to run naked and barefoot. Obviously that isn’t going to happen so someone will always be left out of having the best gear for them.
"shoe dopeing" is a valid term because cost and availibility of the most performance enhancing foot ware is not universal and a several percentage point advantage defines the difference olympians,and nobodys
so it's olympic level "pay to win".....dopeing
or is this another semantics marathon?
Readit News
If shoes are considered "doping," why aren't all marathons (and indeed, all athletic events) run barefoot and naked[1]? If those are the "rules," then surely they should at least be consistently applied...
[1] Presumably reduced thermal stress due to clothing improves athletic performance, therefore is "doping" by this metric.
Shoes changed. Now all of the shoes have carbon plates. The athletes are still incredible… nobody is getting one of these shoes and becoming some super star overnight.
We let the athletes drink hyper specialized drink mixtures based on studying their sweat content and even adjusting the drinks for their perspiration level during the race.
The shoe foam and carbon plates sell more expensive shoes.
The way I see it, if your shoes are supporting your biomechanics in a way that optimizes energy and prevents injury, that is both fine and should be encouraged. I run, my nephew is a track athlete, my son plays football. Injury is a huge barrier to performance and a good experience… anything that avoids it is good.
Doping is this context is just introducing something exogenous to enhance properties/performance, like drugs or industrial process. It seems apt, if anything people should embrace usage more, I like doping my food with spices.
Balls are chosen by the league rather than the players, but these have changed too in recent years. It's not clear if these changes were accidental, or intentionally designed to increase scoring.
Of course none of these equipment adjustments are going to turn your beer league slugger into Babe Ruth, but they're probably in that same ~4% improvement ballpark that super shoes offer.
It turns out that there are many kinds of "doping" and even an article on the supposedly mythical practice of "abortion doping", so there you go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping
Admittedly, shoes don't pass the third point as you can just step out of them after the competition, even if they were unhealthy. But still - if extremely optimized hi-tech running shoes are allowed, why not go one step further and add motorized rollers? Where would be the difference?
(This is an actual issue in biking, btw. You could also ask why relentlessly optimizing your bike for low weight and air resistance is allowed, but adding hidden motors is not)
Why don’t they use recumbent bikes at the Tour? They are way faster, way more aerodynamic. But the rules prohibit it because bike companies think (almost certainly correctly) that they won’t sell like normal bikes due to the myriad issues with them.
People may think that something as simple as running is “pure” but they are just uninformed. Aerodynamic skin suits are useful in running (and have been used to win gold at the Olympics).
Most doping is developed by countries to get medals at the Olympics.
When I herniated a disc, because my hamstring atrophied, because I got a knee scope, I could not find a single doctor or physical therapist to explain it and such straightforward words, I had to do months and years of research myself to figure out what was happening. I probably saw a good 8 to 10 different "professionals" on this.
This taught me to not trust doctors. They're probably slackers and they probably don't care.
What is more likely: that doctors are slackers that have no idea what they are doing, or that their education path prioritized doing things over explaining anatomy to laymen.
In nearly all cases this works out pretty well, most people will have some improvement when the right script is applied, and doctors are pretty good at mapping problems to scripts.
But for edge cases, that approach is not going to work. Human propensities to slack notwithstanding, the business model discourages doctors from spending all day debugging one patient that isn’t responsive to their scripts.
We do this in software, too. “Really rare race condition, one in a million chance, not going to rathole, deprioritized.”
For reasonably smart, reasonably disciplined people, going to med school and getting licensed is not some transformative experience that forces them all to become brilliant diagnosticians and healers. It's just a bit of a long grind to score what's hoped to be a well-paying and traditionally respected job.
And then once you finish that grind and have the job, you still need to balance it with a regular old life of resposinilities and crises and kids and vacations; and in fact, because of the grind many people necessarily shift their personal and mental focus towards those other things.
Meanwhile, the job sucks in a lot of ways and doesn't deliver on the childhood fantasies of what it must be like. Colleages and administrators make it miserable quite often, and patiets sure do too.
The upshot is that no: many doctors are not all that brilliant and attentive to start with, and many who may sometimes be so are slackers. Shortcuts win, knowledge outside routine/common stuff fades, etc
Just like all jobs.
It's great when you can find the diamond in the rough for your own care, but don't assume they're all diamonds just because they went to med school for a while.
I had a huge problem in explaining this in simple terms without having to go into the the huge amount of detail.
Maybe it's something like that?
The general idea is people hide behind that detail/jargon precisely because they don't REALLY understand it enough to explain in simple terms what it is. That doesn't mean everything IS simple of course.
I assume you know now but in simple terms: the clutch connects the engine to the gearbox (transmission), so how well the clutch is engaged (connected) helps control speed. Gears multiply (increase or decrease) power from the engine depending on the gear you've selected.
Anyway the fly's are pretty damn cool. I ran a marathon last year and a half earlier this year in the cheaper ones are broke my PRs both times. I don't train in them, they are reserved just for events.
I thought the same thing about gait but gave it a shot anyway. Didn't throw me off all that much, and I still enjoyed running in the firmer fly's. I did do a few trial short runs before the long run just so I was not going in cold.
To give an idea of shoe wear. I'll easily run through 1 pair in a year if I'm training for a marathon (just to run it). If I'm training to beat PRs then I'll go through almost 2.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/blade-runners-do-...
This seems to be the same debate in a smaller format. How much energy should a runner's equipment be allowed to catch and release and still be in the same category with unassisted runners?
If anything, nothing but “barefoot” shoes should be permitted.