I took up running for specific reasons: to keep fit and to challenge my limits. I bought a pair of shoes and hit the road. In about three years, I have made considerable progress in my timing, kept a check on my weight and participated in a few half marathons. As I see it, running is about discipline — getting up early in the morning, watching your calories and keeping yourself injury-free. It is not about the kind of shoes you wear.

But if you have followed the trends recently, it would seem that running is all about shoes. Nike started it off in December when it announced a project called Breaking2. It planned to break the two-hour barrier in a full marathon in the spring of 2017. The present record stands at 2:02:57. On March 7, Nike did a test run with three leading runners wearing its Zoom Vaporfly Elite shoes. Not to be left behind, Adidas launched the Adidas Adizero Sub2, which made its first appearance at the Tokyo marathon in end-February.

When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile record in 1954, he tested two pairs of shoes and chose to run in one of them. According to him, the four requirements to break the record were: a good track, absence of wind, warm weather and even-paced running. The current project is more a marketing gimmick pushed by two sports companies looking to increase the sales of their running shoes. It has nothing to do with running.

The Zoom shoes, experts say, act like springs and are ‘illegal’. While the IAAF, the governing body of track and field, says that shoes should not give undue advantage to the runner, the definition of what construes ‘undue advantage’ is debatable. If athletes wearing Nike’s shoes do break the two-hour barrier, it would be an exciting moment — for technology, not for human endurance.

Deputy Editor

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