Carbon Plate Shoes I Have Known: Altra Vanish Carbon

We are once again gathered here to continue our exploration of carbon plate running shoes.

If you're like me and struggling to remember what happened even yesterday, here's what we've covered so far:

• Some background on why the heck carbon plate running shoes & where did they come from
• A little editorial about my experience running in the New Balance RC Elite carbon plate shoe
• Another covering my experience with the Saucony Endorphin Pro carbon plate shoe

Today, we are looking at the first carbon racing shoe from Altra: the Vanish Carbon, which you can get here ($240).

You might ask, "Angela. You already had two pairs of carbon racing shoes. WHY OH WHY another?"

Carbon Plate Shoes I Have Known: Saucony Endorphin Pro

Hidey ho, friends, today we are continuing our discussion of carbon plate running shoes.

If you've been missing out, allow me to catch you up:

• Some background on why the heck carbon plate running shoes & where did they come from
• A little editorial about my experience running in the New Balance RC Elite carbon plate shoe

Today, another little editorial on the Saucony Endorphin Pro, Saucony's first foray into the carbon plate world. You can still get this version of the shoe at a few places at a significant discount though the available sizes are limited. The version 2 (extremely similar to version 1) is widely available and the version 3 (HELLA different) is coming soon. (A few shoe blogs and running stores have released their preliminary reviews.)

Why did I buy these shoes when I already had a pair of New Balance RC Elites? Three reasons, friends:

Carbon Plate Shoes I Have Known: New Balance RC Elites

Hello, if you missed Part 1 about carbon plate running shoes (ie "super shoes"), you might want to check it out before reading on. Or don't! It's your world!

If you've chosen chaos, allow me to catch you up slightly:

• Carbon-plate shoes have been around since the 90s, they just weren't good enough for the heinous price tag to make the shoes economically feasible as a product.
• They caused a massive dust-up in the mid-2010s when Nike pros started running in VaporFlys & normies started sometimes paying like $800 a pair on the secondary market
• Yes, they really do work, science says so.
• The magic is a combination of a super-stiff, super-light carbon plate usually sandwiched between next-gen foam with crazy high energy return. The plate works like a teeter-totter and the foam is what provides the spring-like action.
• In addition to letting you run faster with less effort, they may also mitigate the damage on your calves from training, possibly allowing you to train more and harder.

As I said in the previous post, I got my first pair of carbon plate racing shoes as a Christmas present at the end of 2020--the New Balance FuelCell RC Elites. At the time I was planning to train hard in spring 2021 and run 5K, 10K, and half marathon time trials and it's always fun to have a new toy to motivate you.

Carbon Plate Super Shoes: What's Up W/ That?!?!

If you are reading this I am sure you know all about the Nike Vaporfly and the general uproar it caused in the late 2010s. But in case you are curious about why someone would ever put a carbon plate in a running shoe in the first place and how the whole deal works, here is a quick primer.

The first carbon plate running shoes were made by Reebok in the early 90s, followed closely by Adidas (1, 2). Even at that point people had figured out that a carbon plate could offer an advantage, but it was an idea whose time had not yet come. The carbon fiber was so outrageously expensive that there was no way to produce a shoe that could compete with the rest of the market (remember in those days more than $100 for a pair of running shoes was kind of outrageous), and the shoe tech and knowledge needed to really optimize the effect of a carbon plate and make it something people would actually pay top dollar for didn't yet exist.

Reebok InstaPump Fury with a Carbon Fiber bridge (from FreeRunSpeed.com)

Training Log: (Super) Dead Super Shoes + Crisis Averted!

Before we get into this week's training log, a moment of silence please for this amazing (in some respects) pair of New Balance RC Elites that I super enjoyed running in for a little over a year. As you can see I really pushed the envelope in this these things but I think April 3's SacTown 10 was destined to be their last hurrah, and we're calling it at a whopping 216.27 miles according to my nerdy little spreadsheet. I am pretty sure when you can actually see and touch the actual carbon plate that you should not be running in a pair of shoes anymore regardless of how much they cost.

These shoes were a pandemic-era Christmas gift from my mom but I am pretty sure they cost $225 which puts us at about $1.04 per mile. I have never calculated this ratio for a running shoe before but once you get up into the > $200 super shoe category, it really just becomes irresistible.

I've had opportunities this last year to run in a few different carbon plate distance shoes (not the Nike ones, I absolutely refuse on principle) and I have a lot to say about them, so look for a future blog post going into more detail. But for now, just know that I loved these shoes *so much* in terms of feel and performance but was also super bummed at how non-durable they turned out to be (lesson learned).

ANYHOO, let us move on to this week's training log.

The deal with those fancy new Nike shoes.

ICYMI the ever-inquisitive Alex Hutchinson has left Competitor (RIP Competitor, which is *kind of* still Competitor but not really) and now writing for Outside Online. Most recently he tackled the issue of those fancy new Nike shoes, the Vaporfly, which purportedly improve efficiency by 4%. Now, for a while that was just Nike making claims, though the lack of actual scientific evidence did not stop many people from rushing out to drop hundreds (!) of dollars on them. But last week the results of an actual, rigorous randomized control trial run by a legit, reputable lab (the University of Colorado’s Locomotion Laboratory) were published in a for-real peer reviewed science journal (Sports Medicine), and it's official; the Vaporfly really does (or at least can) honestly and truly improve runners' efficiency by over 4%.

Yes, the study was funded by Nike because that's how research works, but given the reputation of the lab and the researchers involved and how the paper was published, you can be reasonably sure that the results are legit and not just more Nike propaganda. So, yeah, if someone is wearing them and seems to have an astonishingly good race, there is a nonzero change that the shoe really did have something to do with it. (As you probably already know, Eliud Kipchoge was wearing them when he clocked that just-barely-not a 2 hour marathon in Italy earlier this year, and Shalane Flanagan was wearing them when she destroyed the NYC marathon last month; see also Galen Rupp in Chicago and Camille Herron destroying the 100 mile record by over an hour.) To quote Hutchinson, "There’s something going on with these shoes."