Friends wanted to hold them, bend them, and look for the carbon-fiber plate. This year, though, at the start of the race, people in my corral were buzzing about the shoes that I and about a dozen other people had on.
Most people take a subway to a ferry to a bus in order to stand in the cold for 45 minutes at the start and then head straight up a steep bridge. With the New York City Marathon, the course is designed to be as psychologically and metabolically confusing as possible. All sorts of factors can slow you down or speed you up, from an upset stomach to a twisted ankle to slightly over- or under-doing it in the final week of training. And testing shoes on the feet of regular runners in an open race is hard. The real question for Nike, which has invested an awful lot of money in these shoes, is whether they really work for regular runners-or at least regular runners willing to spend $250 for the Vaporfly 4%, or $150 for a slightly less advanced version, the Zoom Fly, that doesn't have the carbon-fiber plate. Or perhaps you had a pair of shoes that made you run faster than you'd run before. Or perhaps pain from an old injury didn't show up as expected. But it also really helps to have something surprisingly good happen during the race. Most people who succeed in doing so probably passed the marshmallow test as children. Running a negative split requires planning and discipline. In the 2016 US men's Olympic marathon trials, only three of the 108 entrants ran the second half faster: the men who came in first, second, and third. Strava data shows that roughly one in 30 runners from the 2015 New York City Marathon ran negative splits. The problem besets newcomers and it besets elites. Almost every experienced runner starts the race with a desire to run the second half faster, but only a very few actually do.
The ideal way to run a marathon, in fact, is likely through what's called a negative split: running the second half slightly faster than the first, which turns out to be rather hard.
If you feel like you're jogging in the beginning and blazing at the end, then you're probably running evenly throughout the whole race. And then, for the last six miles or so, as your body painfully shuts down-as your quads ache, your carbohydrate stores vanish, and your toenails rip-you need to go faster than your body wants. For the first 20 miles or so, you need to go slower than your body wants. To run a fast marathon, you need to be good at two things: not spending energy and spending energy.
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