Determining the effect and magnitude of advanced footwear technology on female distance running performance

Abstract There is limited work, to date, in which the potential performance-enhancing effects of Advanced Footwear Technology (AFT) in the female elite athlete has been considered. This study aimed to retrospectively explore publicly available race data for a marathon, half-marathon, and 10-km elite events to analyse the effect of AFT, along with athlete and event characteristics, to determine the effect on female running performance. Race performance times for the top 20 female athletes within the world were extracted from 1990 to 2020 (n = 1722), along with athlete and event characteristics from 2010 to 2020 (n = 660). Data for race shoes were available for 655 of the 660 performances. The changes in grouped mean performance times over the years that AFT had been adopted were compared with the grouped mean of the corresponding number of years immediately prior show marathon, half-marathon, and 10-km performance times were 1.7, 1.72, and 1.75% (p < 0.001, pη2 > 0.220) faster during the AFT period. Repeated performance analysis comparing the improvement in race times between the control group and athletes who adopted AFT showed athletes who adopted AFT improved significantly more over the marathon (2.64%, p < 0.001) and half-marathon (1.67%, p < 0.002). Advanced Footwear Technology correlated (r > 0.50) with improvements in the marathon and half-marathon, but not the 10-km. Based on multiple regression modelling, it can be suggested that wearing AFT improves marathon race time by 78 s (0.93%), and half-marathon race time by 28 s (0.71%). Based on these results, we observe a small but meaningful performance-enhancing effect of AFT within elite female athletes.