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.