Sub 1 oz. running shoes?

These won’t hold up well enough to be usable

camp and stream crossing slipper?

Once those mesh soles get packed with mud, the 1 oz will become…a couple lbs?

Some people only need their running shoes to last for 9.58 seconds.

“A pound off your feet is worth 7 pounds off your back.”

Imagine Usain Bolt with all the same muscles but several pounds less equivalent mass.  It’s too late in the day to do the math, but several hundredths of a second easy.  Maybe as much as a tenth of second.

The research I’ve looked at shows that physiological cost of footwear is not measurable below a certain figure.

I’ve forgotten what that figure is but it is around the standard lightweight road running shoe weight.

@David: that maths is an equivalent in physiological cost between weight of shoe and weight on back. Not weight of shoe vs weight of shoe.  A 200g shoe should incur half the physiological cost of a 400g shoe and that extra physiological cost (200g on the feet) is like carrying an extra kilo or so on your back.

I am not sure if the science is certain that these relationships are completely linear.

if it weren’t from adidas or Nike or a huge brand I wouldn’t believe it.

here come the days of $300 custom camp shoes lol

im interested, why not!!?

Over any small interval, everything is linear.  And while small differences in weight aren’t detectable from all the other variables in one measurement to another, they’re still contributing.

I’m pretty sensitive to pack weight and always have been.  In the 1980’s when other people on the trip would have 45- and 60-pound packs, I was thinking, “if my pack weighed that much, I wouldn’t go backpacking.”

I’d feel as tired doing 15 miles per day carrying 30 pounds as doing 25 miles per day carrying 20 pounds.  So 10 less pounds = 10 more miles.  Hence, losing one pound lets me hike another mile that day (or lets me feel 1 mile less tired over the same distance).

But back to racing: is there also a psychological benefit? – I certainly notice when I put on my lightest trail shoes, I feel lighter on my feet.  Baseball players swing a weighted bat before going to the plate.  Swimming shave all their body hair before a big meet and *feel* slicker in addition to actually having less hydrodynamic drag.

And there’s the physiological effect on the other racers if they don’t have the best gear.  The Nimbus 2000 / 2001 were the fastest racing brooms through 1992 until the Firebolt was developed by Randolph Spudmore in 1993 after which it came to dominate in International Quidditch events.

Where are you seeing sub 1 oz?  The articles I read have the prototype’s weight at 7.7 oz.