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| 923 Beiträge - Forenjunkie
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A couple of months after my soggy half-mile, Nike stages a much grander spectacle. On May 6 three of its sponsored runners—Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia, and Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea—circle a Formula One track in Monza, Italy, with the aim of completing a sub-two-hour marathon. This would be almost three minutes below the world record of 2:02:57, set by Kenya’s Dennis Kimetto in Berlin in 2014. The race, dubbed Breaking2, is vintage Nike. Since Knight co-founded the company, it has paired its conviction that it can build faster, better running shoes with brash marketing ploys.
The three runners start out just before dawn, before an estimated online audience of 13.1 million. They’re paced by a Tesla Model S and a phalanx of six other runners. A laser mounted Adidas Gazelle Donna on the Tesla projects a green line on the track to mark the target speed. Every two laps a new batch of pace runners replaces the old in a carefully choreographed exchange. Their presence, and the hydration being delivered to the Nike athletes by moped, means the results won’t be certified as official by the International Association of Athletics Federations. Still, Nike touts the Asics Gel Lyte 3 Dames attempt as a potential breakthrough on the order of Roger Bannister’s 1954 sub-four-minute mile.
The three runners wear custom versions of a new marathon shoe called the Vaporfly, which will go on sale in June for $250. Although they carry the Vapor branding, they look and feel nothing like the VaporMax. The uppers are baby blue, with a big swoosh running almost from the base of the toe to the heel. The midsoles are wedges of a new, proprietary foam, Asics Gel Lyte 5 Dame more than an inch thick at the heel, sandwiching a thin carbon-?fiber plate that’s sloped like a ladle. Two months before the race, the New York Times ran a story asking whether these springlike plates are tantamount to cheating. The pair Nike let me try on did feel unlike anything I’d ever worn—it was as though I was being propelled downhill with every step.
Still, the shoe Adidas NMD Donne isn’t enough for the Breaking2 runners. Desisa falls off the pace after about 11 miles, finishing with a time of 2:14:10. Tadese starts to lag a couple of miles later, finishing at 2:06:51. Kipchoge comes closest, finishing in two hours and 25 seconds. It’s faster than anyone has ever run a marathon, sure, but it’s not as fast as Nike wanted.
After a brief warmup, Jager leads us out to the Michael Johnson Track, where a drizzle falls on the red rubber and surrounding evergreen woods. It’s hard to know what I would feel without the hours of promotion, the top-of-the-line loaner rain shell, the Olympian running alongside. With all that, it feels like one heck of a ride—like I would jog more often if my strides always felt this springy. The run is an elaborate, personal demonstration of Nike’s basic marketing strategy: Give normal Nike Air Max 90 Womens people a taste of how it feels to be elite.
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| Beitrag vom 15.09.2017 - 06:26 |
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