271–280 of 304 posts
That would capture if those willing to pay more are self-selecting for being better, training more, etc. And if today the effect is stronger than a year ago, perhaps because of rumors of it making you faster.
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Last I tried I had to immediately cancel on principal since the pricing was deliberately obscured. Credibility was lost before I could even read the articles.
If The New York Times, a 166 year old newspaper with a tradition of fine reporting, can lose all its credibility over that ... I don't even know what to say. You sound like a terrible customer and I'm sure they're happy not to have you?
And okay, maybe it's not all credibility, but it certainly loose the ability to do business with me.
Just go to nytimes.com, click subscribe, and try figure out what it's actually going to cost? Because I honestly can't figure it out.
The aggressive opinion on regulating these shoes seems over the top to me, the next best shoes, the relatively unheralded Nike Streak, provided a 3% performance improvement, and more runners achieved a personal best with those shoes. And improvements with the vapor fly 4% were smaller for faster runners. Also many runners choose shoes based on injury prevention and comfort - if a shoe gets you to the starting line un…
If it were just "the shoes make you faster" there would be nothing to discuss. The debate centers around a qualitative difference: "The shoes have a 'spring' in them that make you faster." It's similar to a mini version of prosthetics such as Pistorius's that were banned from Olympic competition, as they are basically big metal springs on the end of your legs. The Vaporfly was explicitly designed to use this spring p…
Look at the top shoes on the list - the Nike streak is a super lightweight shoe without Nike's new foam and it is second fastest. This should tell you weight alone is probably the most important factor. Two other highly rated shoes are Adidas shoes with boost foam, a type of foam similar to Nike's zoomx with a better cushioning to weight ratio. So the newest generation of foam probably provides a small benefit apart from the she's weight alone.
Runners capable of running a three hour marathon probably know the single most important factor in a running shoe for speed is weight. If they still choose to run in Saucony Guide or Hokas there's probably a good reason. What percent of runners who switched to the Saucony Guide were injured and used the shoes to recover, and what percent of runners in heavier shoes with more cushioning and stability features made it to the Starting line vs runners in Nike streaks? It's possible the heavier shoes provide protection from injury or greater comfort - there's a reason runners don't race marathons in track spikes.
I don't think the plate provides much benefit apart from weight and cushioning, my guess is that it is there for the feel of the shoe and without it the new foam would feel too mushy.
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If The New York Times, a 166 year old newspaper with a tradition of fine reporting, can lose all its credibility over that ... I don't even know what to say. You sound like a terrible customer and I'm sure they're happy not to have you?
I'm sure they prefer having another customer, and would probably try to educate them about principal vs principle. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/principal
I could also excuse myself as not being a native English speaker :)
But I'll go with the autocorrect excuse in this instance..
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The easiest way to remedy all the cheating with bikes and equipment in cycling would be to PROVIDE official bikes the equipment every single day, and make it rotate randomly. Otherwise, you are always playing catching up to discover the latest tricks they devised.
That would wreck the economics of pro cycling because most of the teams are partly sponsored by bike manufactures. Those manufacturers want to be exclusively associated with particular winning teams for marketing purposes.
As in many things in road cycling there is a certain point of diminishing returns (a $550 seatpost hand blessed by some artisan in italy is not significantly better than an aluminum Thomson).
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The fact that the rest of humanity didn't bother with persistence hunting may also be a clue that we weren't designed for that either.
Or it's a clue that we figured out that building a trap or using a weapon to kill an animal from greater distance burns a lot less calories.
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I like your comment and agree with it. The purpose of such sports, especially the Olympics, is to test for genetic (and, I'll add environmental & epigentic) advantages. Your thoughts on Caster Semenya's "advantages"?
Events like the Olympics - and athletics as we know it - will lose the public’s attention if the most publicsed events (e.g. men’s 100m) become giant genetics microoptimization pissing contests - but it’s the direction the sports-science industrial complex is heading in anyway; but I hope it will lead to less contested sports becoming more popular.
I could see a future where we've settled on the perfect genetic template for specific disciplines so we progress on to brain chemistry and/or psychology in order to reproduce the spirit aspect which separates the merely genetically blessed from the world class athletes.
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I don't run competitively, but in the gym I feel like spending on better shoes takes away a false limit due to inappropriate technology. Unless you are running barefoot, I can see how a runner might feel the slower number is just false due to an arbitrary limitation. There is a decent chance, if you can afford it, that these shoes might help you progress faster as well. In the end it's all about how effectively your…
> I don't run competitively, but in the gym I feel like spending on better shoes takes away a false limit due to inappropriate technology. Explain to me how, in a gym setting there are, "better" shoes that "take away a false limit due to inappropriate technology" What does that mean? Honestly, I thought the best shoes to use in the gym were just a pair of All Stars. I would use the weight room barefoot, but they yell…
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"unfair advantage" is particularly hard to define. We are not born equals, so there are already folks among us who have unfair advantage due to their genes, their upbringing, their social background, etc... I would say the definition is still blur. What if you have a medical condition that impairs you in some ways but make you stronger for doing one type of tasks? Is that unfair?
It's reasonable that amputees with prosthetic legs would be banned from normal competitions because they weren't born with those legs; they were manufactured. But what if it was discovered that people born without an appendix somehow performed better? Would they be banned? It would seem unfair to ban them. But it could lead to competitors surgically removing their organs, which would go against the spirit of the spor…
The other parents in the state were teaming up to try to get him banned for unfair advantage (!)