Nearly seven months after Eliud Kipchoge came just 35 seconds short of capturing the marathon world record, the Kenyan plans to run the London Marathon on Sunday with a pair of 3D-printed performance shoes that are six percent lighter than the ones he wore to win Berlin in September.
Kipchoge will wear the new Nike Zoom Vaporfly Elite Flyprint shoes, which Nike created specifically for him using computational design driven by his feedback from the Berlin Marathon, where he came excruciatingly close to Dennis Kimetto’s world record wearing the first-generation VaporFly Elite shoe.
The changes dreamt up by Kipchoge and executed by Nike make the shoe 11 grams lighter than the original pair he wore in Berlin. They’ve been designed to absorb less water than their predecessor, which Kipchoge identified as a problem in Berlin, and to be airier so that both water and wind can pass seamlessly through the fibers without weighing on the athlete’s performance. The shoes are also lighter and more breathable than the Zoom Vaporfly Elite shoes Kipchoge wore last May when he came 25 seconds short of being the first person in history to run a sub-two-hour marathon. He clocked a 2:00:25 marathon in those shoes, though it hasn’t been recognized as an official world record.
Nike is putting a lot of focus on the manufacturing process used for these Flyprint shoes, which it says makes prototyping 16-times quicker than any previous method, enabling the company to more quickly adapt to the demands of elite athletes and innovate its consumer product line.
3D printing helped the company to implement a “rapid-fire prototyping phase,” where Kipchoge would provide his inputs about changes to the shoe’s upper and Nike would turnaround a new prototype based on his suggestions a few days later.
“He drew a picture and pointed to arrows where he wanted change and said, ‘with these changes I’m ready and prepared to wear the shoe for the London Marathon,’” said Brett Holts, the VP of Nike Running Footwear.
The Flyprint manufacturing process allows designers to translate athlete data into “new textile geometries” by using computational design tools and algorithms that lead to “digitally-enabled textile development.” The company builds these shoes based on solid deposit modeling (SDM), a process whereby TPU filament is melted and layered, used also for the Hyperfuse, Flywire and Flyknit brands.
With computational design, Nike essentially creates 3D textiles, which it says are more dynamic and capable of being fine-tuned than traditional 2D fabrics. Take an example of needing to adjust the same shoe based on the different feet sizes and shapes of two different elite athletes. The multilayered and fused nature of Flyprint means Nike can more easily adjust the upper to hug the foot in hyper-localized areas, something that one might think of as precision tuning.
“We’re using computational design to hack into it and allowing a designer to create every filament and textile to create a new kind of shoe,” said Roger Chen, Senior Director of Nike’s NXT Digital Innovation – Advanced Design. “We’re hacking traditional manufacturing approaches.”
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
In the case of the shoe Kipchoge will wear on Sunday, Chen said his design team “went through several hundred iterations” with him over the past four to five months until the final design was finalized.
“With more rapid iterations we can use the same amount of time but end up on a much better product because you’re able to iterate so many times,” said Holts. “On a shorter timeframe, we’re able to put out a better product and people are ultimately going to be more satisfied.”
The Nike Zoom Vaporfly Elite Flyprint shoes have already been worn during races twice by other Nike athletes: first by American runner Galen Rupp, who wore them to win the Rome Ostia Half Marathon on March 11 with the second-fastest time in American history, and by Kenyan Geoffrey Kamworor, who wore them to win his third consecutive IAAF World Half Marathon Championship title in Spain at the end of March. London’s marathon on Sunday marks the first time they’ve been used for a full marathon, and the first time that Kipchoge, following months of redesign, will wear them for performance in a race.
SportTechie Takeaway
Sneaker companies are in a race to prove they can use 3D printing, also referred to as additive manufacturing, to build more customized shoes on a faster time horizon. 3D printing enables companies to innovate faster by drastically streamlining the process and reducing the weeks- or even months-long wait times to process new prototypes through traditional manufacturing methods.
Adidas plans to 3D-print 100,000 shoes this year as it explores innovative materials and production methods. Adidas-owned Reebok has unveiled a limited-edition 3D-printed running shoe that replaces shoelaces with a 3D-printed “liquid lace system.” Under Armour has partnered with EOS, a supplier of industrial 3D printing equipment and consulting services, to scale its 3D-printed footwear. New Balance struck a deal with 3D-printing giant Formlab to similarly scale its 3D-production capacity. Nike has been exploring swifter prototyping with 3D printing for years, having 3D-printed components for shoes used by Olympian Allyson Felix during the 2016 Summer Olympics.
In the future, it won’t be enough to just build a shoe more quickly using 3D-printing techniques. As these Flyprint shoes show, the next phase of additive manufacturing for footwear will be using advanced techniques such as computational design to build customized high-performance shoes for elite athletes.
Suggested Further Reading
Telecom Group Offers IoT Service To Help Break Two-Hour Marathon