Technological advances in running shoes are as old as the industry itself. Decades before it became a behemoth across every major sport, Nike was born out of selling shoes to distance runners thirsting for faster times. It employed cutting-edge methods, which in 1971 meant co-founder Bill Bowerman creating a sole by pouring urethane into a waffle maker.To buy more nike free run shoes with cheap price, you can visit shoesshox.com official website.

Over the next 50 years or so, shoe companies chased the next leap forward, helping to enhance human capability with small advances — many of them quickly copied by competitors — and scant controversy. Progress was both constant and celebrated.

In January 2016, Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge tested a new shoe that would come to be known as the Nike Zoom Vaporfly Elite. A straight line of progress was about to become jagged and complicated.

The Vaporfly series — and the Alphafly series it begot — broke barriers. It sparked controversy. It prompted a response last week from track and field’s governing body, months after Kipchoge wore a prototype pair of the Air Zoom Alphafly Next% as he became the first person to run a marathon in less than two hours. Nike calls Kipchoge “the essence of progress.” His shoes, South African sports scientist Ross Tucker wrote, “disrupted the meaning of running.”
When it comes to technology in sports equipment, where is the line drawn between hailed and harmful? Other sports have tried to answer the question for years. Swimming banned certain material from suits after records fell at alarming rates in 2008 and 2009. Golf is grappling with the effects of lightly regulated advances in balls and clubs. Cycling is constantly at war with itself over what two wheels should be able to accomplish.

Distance running was slow to realize it faced the same issue. The sport’s powers failed to view the running shoe as a piece of equipment. They regulated shoes as if they were clothing instead of a racecar or a tennis racket or a pair of Alpine skis. When they finally acted, it was as if they were putting toothpaste back in the tube.“If you wanted to put everybody on the same starting line, you can require people to run with their bare feet,” said Damiano Zanotto, the head of the wearable robotic systems lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. “Which doesn’t make any sense. There is not negative or bad technology. There is a need for regulation and clear regulation.”