Carbon soles are the dogs bollocks for ultra endurance. Anything less expect your feet to die a lingering death.
Some of their earlier work was very well thought out and executed, but there were some boners too. I made a mistake posting this after a cursory glance at what they had setup for testing during the video. It seemed like it could work, that what they were looking for would be found that way.
Yeah, not so easy for that answer… Now the question is what answer did they actually find?
Unless that’s what they were supposed to find. There is a big university near here that had a professor working there several years aog who was bringing in lots of money (so they looked the other way a lot) and he was basically making research results to order. His lab’ would take a clients desired result and tailor testing around proving that result. Anything that could possibly disprove that thesis was tossed form the protocol. I read a lawsuit where he was offered as an expert witness, and the opposition lawyers were having a field day ripping his lab to shreds. They went to other cases his lab was admitted as a expert and tore his research to fine pieces. The opposing council even got an ex-employee to testify that he/they would meet with clients (for days occasionally) to go over the exact methods they would use and what bits of data they would record to prove their clients point. They called it ‘sound science’, and I began to see that phrase pop up a lot in the press. ‘Sound science’ was bought and paid for fake news. But I’m sure they university got lots of cash from his ‘work’. I think he was eventually fired, his ‘lab’ disbanded, but it was a huge black mark on university research.
Clearly “Big Cheap Shoe” is behind this testing.
That was covered in the second video posted. There are ways to infer the amount of power going into the system. That second video is from an actual engineer who immediately was the errors in the GCN video.
Will GCN do an update, or delete that video.
And I remembered when I was a runner, you don’t mess with people’s running shoe brand. You can easily declare open war doing that with some people. Yikes, it was like a religion, a personal assault. I had two brands that I ‘loved’, but people ripped them, especially one of them, ruthlessly. But it’s important to keep data accurate and reports on issues with power and usability as accurate as possible.
I just found the fizik carbon Vento shoes and they are my go to for sure, and I didn’t have to buy either white or black.
No but if they go to s lab and measure something I expect at least a basic understanding of what they are measuring… That video was just really bad.
Personally I think shoes are super personal but overall I prefer stiffer soles. For me Shimano shoes seen to work great and I can find the 7 series for heavy discounts.
Isnt it easier to measure shoe deflection. The more a shoe deflects the more power is lost. So a stiffer shoe is always better from a power transfer perspective. It gets hard when you try to quantify that in terms of watt savings but even then its still doable with a couple hundred dollars of equipment from sparkfun and a good pedal power meter.
Don’t forget that Oli likes to remind everyone he’s a scientist (and he’s Dr Oliver on social media), which I guess is intended to add credibility to these tests they do.
Not necessarily, think of the sole as a spring instead. During deflection it stores energy which is recovered when it springs back. Lost energy manifest itself as an increased temperature.
HAH!!! When we moved to our current location, I mentioned as we were driving around with a real estate agent that ‘Oh, we have an international airport too?’. She said ‘Just because they call it that doesn’t make it so’. Then I found out there is a room at the general aviation terminal where a customs agent sits. It’s a ‘port of entry’, meaning the 1% often fly in there rather than a ‘real international airport’ so they can breeze through the customs process. There are no foreign destination flights, it’s just a person sitting there waiting for self interested people to be rushed through the ‘entry process’. 
So Ollie/Oli/Olly can call himself a scientist, but that dog don’t hunt. A real scientist would have thought this whole thing through and realized they weren’t even in the ball park of proving what they thought they were. And shame on the company they used for not being more forceful pointing out the lunacy of this. Sure they got paid (likely) but it’s still an embarrassment that they didn’t do ‘due diligence’ to make sure that their work actually had a contact with reality. It’s bad on both of them, but the later more so as they were the focus of the perceived ‘expertise’ to prove the point. (Flogging a dead horse?)
Nobel disease.
Smart people can make dumb decisions on things outside their expertise.
I do it all the time thinking I can do house DIY because I have a PhD 
I had to explain, several times, how to replace a knob set on an inside door to someone who worked down the hall from me. People told him I did a lot of remodel jobs on various properties, and I did at the time, so I didn’t realize how much help he actually needed. I get it, there are things I should probably know on some level, but filing taxes drives me to catatonia and I fall over. I tried to do our taxes once, and it said we owed over $20,000 in taxes. We both freaked out… A good accountant actually got us a refund! 
chatgpt says it better than me:
Yes! If you can measure output force and spring displacement accurately, you can construct a force-displacement hysteresis loop, which directly shows energy loss per cycle.
How to Construct a Hysteresis Loop:
- Apply Cyclic Displacement:
- Move the spring back and forth through a full cycle.
- Use a controlled displacement waveform (sinusoidal or triangular works best).
- Record displacement and output force simultaneously.
- Plot Force vs. Displacement:
- X-axis: Displacement (xx)
- Y-axis: Output Force (FoutFout)
- Analyze the Hysteresis Loop:
- If the system is purely elastic (no losses), the curve is a straight line.
- If there are viscoelastic losses, the loop encloses an area.
- The enclosed area represents energy lost per cycle due to internal damping.
Don’t we just love a complicated solution, to what’s essentially a non issue, on this forum?!
You vetted the method of chat gpt? Don’t blindly trust it’s solution or sporoaches…
Now think about what you actually need to build to measure that properly… You need fake leg and foot where you can set the power because you need to measure the power before it goes into the shoe the the spring and if you want to check how it behaves over a pedalszroke you would need to make that rotating… It’s probably easier to just do a gas exchange analys of the Rider…
… or temperature of the shoe.
You mean the one on whether you are faster climbing with your suspension open vs. closed? Yeah, that was clever, a misdirect to point to something more fundamental.
Especially on MTB shoes, you may want a bit more flex at times. My previous MTB shoes were Bont Riot+ MTB, a road shoe with SPD cleat interface and some rubber glued to them. On the bike, they were excellent, almost as stiff as my S-Works 7. However, they were not great to walk in to put it mildly.
Previously, I have owned Velokicks MTB shoes and these were amazingly comfortable. Now I am using a pair of Lake MX169, which are about as far away from the Bonts as possible. Since I use them on my commute and when I go shopping, they are a better fit. I will eventually get another pair that is stiffer, though.
I say we can just end the thread and buy these eye wateringly expensive new S-Works Ares 2. Omg the marketing claims. 
A shoe that improves your lactate threshold! AND makes you faster because you FEEL faster. It’s literally a shoe that Roglic says makes your bike “jump”! All that for ONLY £479!
The only buzzword missing from that article was “AI”….and just pathetic “journalism” from road.cc.
There is plenty of new tech to help explain the price premium, which we’ll dig into further down the page
No, there really isn’t. They literally mentioned no “new tech” further down the page. They just spewed out Specialized’s PR points.
But when has Specialized ever restrained themselves from blowing their own horn? Their promised benefits from ‘a shoe’ would make Rube Goldberg blush. I also have their incredible invention that the summarily abandoned: The Future Shock Stem. I have what was called a Gen 0.5, and the dealer couldn’t get any information from Specialized and what they did get was either for the original version, or the next version, so they were stunned and apparently pissed off someone there as they were, likely coincidentally, dropped as a dealer. They left with mixed feelings I’m sure. They were talking about all the ‘issues’ they had with Specialized, mainly support issues.
And who is going to stomp on such outrageous claims now? I wonder what the mechanism that would increase a leg’s power output? Can someone still walk on that shoe? 
And yet someone trotted out the asperger victim ChatGPT to come up with a way to test shoes. AI is the biggest ghost product in software in decades! Time after time ‘AI’ has been proven to be of highly questionable value for use in anything. It may get better, but at what cost. Reports of AI attacking various parts of government/society, AI giving out ideas to take out vital parts of society, etc… And oh boy, they want to use AI to run the US government. 
AI is THE shiny sticker corporations are using to call attention to their inept designed/engineered turd. It’s GREAT!! It has AI!!