Why would athletes convinced that a technological innovation offers an unfair advantage EVER use that innovation in competition, rules notwithstanding?
When it comes to shoes banned only for pro runners, most hobbyjogger holdouts are deluding themselves about their eventual decisions. And using pro running as a moral yardstick is dubious anyway
Outside’s running-related websites published a story on September 14 about a new adidas racing shoe that the company purposefully designed to stand—or bounce—in violation of World Athletics regulations regarding a parameter known as stack height—basically how tall a shoe’s midsole is, whatever fascinating elements that midsole contains.
As such, the center of this shoe’s marketing demographic consists of hobbyjoggers (everyday people who compete in road races for personal glory and entertainment, not money or other awards) willing to drop a few hundred bucks on something that provides the rare and therefore exhilarating sense of fully sanctioned cheating: If something is banned in elite competition, then it’s clearly unfair for anyone to use at some philosophical level; but if it’s legal to manufacture and sell, is available worldwide, and is after all just one more type of shoe, not an outboard motor, then it clearly can’t be unfair to use, period.
That the story was distributed across at least two of Outside’s platforms (Outside Online and Women’s Running) underscores that the story, like many of Outside’s content, is intended to serve chiefly an advertisement. Like this one, these advertorials always push something only people above certain vanity and bank-account thresholds would be remotely interested in buying.
The best part of the piece is serial piffle-merchant Martin Fritz Huber referring to himself as a colleague of Alex Hutchinson, a genuine scion and fair-minded to his journalistic and investigative core, solely because both are regularly published on the same website. I suppose this is true in the sense that Huber would be a colleague of Pierre-Auguste Renoir if he stood three feet from a blank easel, stroked his chin thoughtfully, and splattered the canvas with a brief but furious volley of his own (or anyone’s) turds.
Nevertheless, the piece is worthwhile for what it reveals about the psychology of serious, but not elite, runners. Here’s the need-to-know:
This week, Adidas is launching the second iteration of the Prime X. The press release for the Adizero Prime X 2 Strung, which will retail for $300, touts the shoe as “illegally fast” and notes that the shoe’s designers were able to “unleash their full creative capabilities” since they didn’t have to worry about regulatory constraints. As a result, the Prime X has not one, but two carbon fiber plates—another feature prohibited by World Athletics rules. (The stack height is still 50 millimeters.) But who is this shoe intended for? According to the press release, the new Prime X, while illegal for elites, “is permitted for ambitious runners aiming to smash their personal bests.”
Given the unusual and superficially complex ethics in play, Huber—or whoever assigned him this piece—decided to consult a small sample of amateur runners about whether they would race in these shoes themselves. This sample for some reason failed to include any of white-supremacy victims Outside’s e-landfills frequently feature, just a roster of well-off white people. Oh, and one Asian-American, and Asian-Americans are the most affluent American citizens of all. Huh.
From Huber himself: “I’m not at risk of having my big city marathon victory canceled after the fact. And yet, I wouldn’t race in the Prime X. I’m not sure why I feel the need to adhere to standards set for professional athletes.”
Huber probably feels a subconscious compulsion to emulate professional athletes because so many of them pretend to be virtuous, but in fact are slimy corner-cutters and worse. Huber authored a June 2021 story with a title describing Shelby Houlihan’s just-disclosed doping-related ban as being fraught with “brutal uncertainty.” This from the outset was in fact as clear-cut a case of likely doping as any pundit will ever see, and for Huber to have believed or feigned otherwise makes him some combination of brutally stupid and brutally dishonest. And on this front he has plenty of company.
Ann Mazur, 2:44:48 marathoner, told Huber, “Since the stack height and carbon plate rules are already in place, I don’t think anybody should wear them in a race.” Mazur qualified for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials with twelve seconds to spare on a net-downhill course in fully legal “supershoes,” and expresses skepticism toward serious racers who have not yet “embraced the super shoe revolution.” But a shoe banned only for pro runners is a bridge too far? (The women’s Olympic Trials qualifying standard has since been lowered from 2:37:00 to 2:37:00, a hopeful step toward ultimately tightening it to 2:30:00.)
Huber also quotes Nicholas Thompson, the chief executive officer of The Atlantic. Why this guy? Maybe Huber just wants his readers to know he can get a semi-prominent media douchebag on the phone or by e-mail. Given what The Atlantic has become, I skipped this section simply because I don’t trust a single word out of the mouth (or e-mail account) of The Atlantic’s syphilitic peckerhead of a CEO. Men like Thompson always cheat in every way possible and, when caught, try to blame the results on villains such as climate change, long covid, and white supremacy.
Mario Fraioli is the former Web editor for Competitor Running (later Podium Runner, with everything ever posted to both sides now in effect long dead and buried). Fraioli, a 4:07 NCAA D-II miler in college, wisely abandoned the corporate media environment well before it become a scrum of hysterical nonsense in favor of starting the Morning Shakeout podcast and newsletter. Now competing at that distance and others as a masters (over-40) athlete, Fraioli had this to say: “While technology will continue to advance, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, and for me and my peace of mind that’s 40 millimeters.”
Jeremy Rellosa, despite being identified as a former gear editor, doesn’t seem to understand gear. He admits that the shoes make him faster across various distances, yet denies that that provides him “a real competitive edge”:
…he regarded the shoe as a viable way to cut down his 10K and half-marathon times. Rellosa says he never had any qualms about the ethics of racing in an illegal shoe, because, as he puts it, “I’m not elite, and don’t plan on ever reaching the levels of the elite runners who might actually get a real competitive edge from the crazy stack height and features of the Prime X 2.”
But Rellosa was a gear editor for Outside, so him coming across as ignoramus, a proud hypocrite, or both makes perfect sense. What he’s saying here is that it’s no big deal if slow runners like Rellosa gain an unfair advantage over other slow runners, because what’s at really stake?
Plenty, actually. There might be people who regularly see Rellosa at road races, think he’s a douche because he writes for New York Magazine and lives in Brooklyn, and would love to beat him but can’t afford the latest quasi-cheater-shoes or simply don’t want any part of them because they seem like too easily crossed a bridge to an unearned boost of unacceptable magnitude.
Hutchinson, a former 3:43 1,500-meter runner and 13:52 5,000-meter runner, told Huber, “What are the rules of the game? Whatever the people who make the rules say they are. If you don’t abide by those rules, you’re playing a different game.” This essentially reflects Fraioli’s comment: Maybe it’s all based on whimsy at some level, but the rules are firm and posted for all to see. It’s probably not a coincidence that Hutchinson and Fraioli are the only two runners Huber surveyed who were ever close enough to the elite level to at least sniff it coming off the competitive ocean on a strong breeze.
I agree with these two—with the caveat that everyday runners might also want to ask themselves whether adhering to whatever rules are applied to professionals, or any of their lifestyle norms, makes much sense anyway, given everything that professional runners do in the name of succeeding.
For one thing, pro athletes have been known to race in prototypes of shoe models that were not only unknown to everyone else before these athletes first used them, but also designed to break records while evading any existing rules pertaining to shoe technology. In January 2020, Letsrun declared Eliud Kipchoge, Galen Rupp, and Shalane Flanagan guilty of “mechanical doping” at the 2018 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics for this very reason.
“Will anything be done about it?” asked the headline of that story. Since the response proved to be “of course not,” does this mean that amateur runners exist who would feel comfortable using shoes—or other forms of performance-enhancing technology, for that matter—that had never been banned, but that no one else in the field knew existed? Even if they believed the technology would be banned as soon as it jogged onto the radar of World Athletics?
Also, it’s perfectly legal for runners load up on thyroxine (T4 or simply “thyroid hormone”), allowing them burn away annoying micrometers of subcutaneous fat while still being able to retain a normal-enough diet and ample power. It’s kind of a thing for them to be diagnosed with asthma so they can keep an inhalable beta-2 adrenergic agonist such as albuterol or salmeterol handy.
It would be instructive indeed to obtain a comprehensive list of “gray area” supplements and other methods the Dathan Ritzenhein-led athletes of On Running are using. And I mean just the “gray area” ergogenics, not any “red flag” candidates. (I also wonder if any runners at Niwot High School might be plucking items from that same list.)
Pro runners also use plenty of overtly banned substances. Sure, it’s against the rules, but everyone knows this has proceeded with little abatement for decades, and people nevertheless attach themselves eagerly to the pro scene, follow training plans created for and by pro runners, and in too many cases to count defend pro runners who have been singled out for doping. This quasi-spiritual allegiance to the money-earning, contract-signing category of perambulators has always struck me as somewhat tenuous. Then again, I used to hear a lot of stories suggesting this was unwise across multiple axes, starting well before the turn of the century.
In addition, at some point, if World Athletics decides it needs faster world records, shoes like Adizero Prime X 2 Strung might be declared legal for all. What then? Clearly, runners like Hutchinson and Fraioli would immediately feel comfortable using them as well, and would be able to coherently defend this choice based on their own past statements.
But there is another side to this. If World Athletics has gone so far as to declare a shoe illegal, then don’t at least a few runners out there conclude on this basis that it gives runners a boost they haven’t fully earned?
The set-up as it stands can be perceived as allowing hobbyjoggers to use EPO because it doesn’t matter to the pros if a 3:30 marathoner dopes his way down to a 3:15. And in fact, some hobbyjoggers do dope, as no one ever tests the urine of the people in 6,000th place for incriminating metabolites. So in a rough but arguable sense, the rules concerning both racing shoes and doping differ between amateurs and pros in the same general way: hobbyjoggers can both dope and shoe-dope ad libitum, while pros can’t do either. Yet most people would look askance at someone in their Monday fun-run group who announced that he had recently purchased some EPO from a Chihuahua pharmacy (or from an enterprising Chihuahua) to better his chances of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.
Finally, the cost of the latest and greatest racing shoes—both legal and conditionally legal—has become sufficiently high so that certain quasi-impecunious runners who have always set aside money for the best racing flats are now facing a choice that, say, CEOs of state-propaganda outlets are not and never will face. This is the reality of competitive sports, but running used to be a sport that didn’t see competitive levels gradually stratifying themselves accordance with socioeconomic status (or for that matter, outright slobs being handed expensive racing flats on the basis of structural “-isms” to stomp around in for five minutes a day). So that part sucks, too.
My feeling, though, is that most of the runners who presently say they won’t race in shoes that exceed the 40-millimeter stack height will soon be seeing the 50-millimeter stack-height models on more and more of their competitors’ feet, and will cave and get the taller ones for themselves once they perceive that the local rabble has achieved a critical citizen-runner mass of cheating-while-not cheating. Anyone sufficiently competitive is not going to adhere to stoic and admirable, but easily rationalized-away, principles forever. As one of my longtime friends told me shortly after the Nike Alphafly road-racing model became available—someone who’s done over 1,000 races in all manner of beat-up footwear and is definitely old-school: “It’s either get the shoes or get left behind!”
(Social-share photo: Flickr.)