I visited the Tarahumara and ran the race in his book 4 times. I know Chris personally and he's certainly a storyteller and not a scientist to put it simply. I was similarly bothered by these kind of claims and he wasn't the first to make them. I did some research papers in college on this years ago.
Surprisingly, these claims are more true than false, though in no way completely true. There are some fascinating cultural mechanisms that enable each one. But they were also largely dependent on their society being extremely small and living in remote hillsides and only coming together for certain social events. Not very applicable to modern society.
That's fascinating regardless of the topic! How exciting.
> Surprisingly, these claims are more true than false, though in no way completely true. There are some fascinating cultural mechanisms that enable each one. But they were also largely dependent on their society being extremely small and living in remote hillsides and only coming together for certain social events. Not very applicable to modern society.
Indeed - the Mayans might be worse at culturally-mandated obsidian daggering of people, but at least they don't have microplastics!
Quite possible there's a psychological benefit from super shoes, they certainly feel fast. Though there are enough plausible mechanisms it's unlikely to be the major factor.
Yes, most of the studies show there is a very large individual variation. The original 4% figure and similar studies were an average of something like 1-7% across runners.
Also interestingly, the shoe in this record uses much less carbon than past shoes, both saving weight and allowing even more super foam where much of the energy return comes from. Though there so much variance in shoe design and materials there are only theories on how much comes from the plate vs foam vs stack height vs weight vs other factors.
Yes, that's correct. There's a mistaken belief that it's the major source of performance improvements. It plays a role, but the bigger gains come from the stack height (limb lengthening effect) and the energy return of the foam. But that leads to very unstable shoes. The carbon gives rigidity to balance this out.
I reference Jakob's Law at least once a week, which says users use not your site most of the time. So if it works like most other sites then users will intuitively understand it. And if you do something different users will struggle to learn it.
A lot of watches now have Bluetooth music playback, both smart watches and sport watches.
I can also still manage to fit an iPhone 12 Mini comfortably in many running shorts in the small rear key pockets or back zipper pockets. Some running waistbands also work well. But it's hit and miss vs old mp3 players that weighed next to nothing.
Fully 3D online game engine with multiplayer. Most of the game is made in the interactive click and drag mode, but has modes for extra logic and ultimately a full JS scripting engine if needed. Kind of like Roblox but far simpler on the dev side.
When Web Sockets were still not finalized, I was writing a C# program using them but there wasn't a functional library available. There was however a nice open-source Java implementation. I copied it into Visual Studio, changed all the file extensions, and spent half an hour hitting build then fixing syntax and import red squigglies. It eventually built successfully and happily sent data to a NodeJS front end for years.
Cool. I did something similar with an old C program from the 80s by Peter Langston called Riffology, which was the algorithm used to generate the procedural music in Ballblazer.
I pasted the C files into Eclipse, deleted some `register` keywords, made a bunch of tweaks, and it ran fine as Java.
My favorite front end interview did this exact thing. The interview started with an issue taken straight from the Preact GitHub codebase. The interviewer provided the issue text and the commit right before it was fixed to pull down onto my machine. I had an hour to figure out how to build and reproduce the issue, Take in the high level structure of the code base, figure out how to drill down in a debugger to find where the issue itself was occurring, then propose a fix for it. Took the whole hour but was both extremely satisfying for me, and I imagine very insightful for the interviewer.
Surprisingly, these claims are more true than false, though in no way completely true. There are some fascinating cultural mechanisms that enable each one. But they were also largely dependent on their society being extremely small and living in remote hillsides and only coming together for certain social events. Not very applicable to modern society.
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