Running

The fact of the matter is that to get shoes to be faster and faster, there's only so much margin with a limited stack height. One way to make a shoe faster for elite athletes is to tune the carbon plate geometry and stiffness, as well as the foam, to match the gait, weight, and pace of the athlete. Obviously, you can't use custom shoes as a pro runner, but pro runners as a class are all going to be more similar in gait, weight, and pace than the rest of us, so those super shoes are designed to work well for them. You could design a "super shoe" to help a 250 lb runner to run the most economical 13 minute mile pace, but it would look very different from what's sold right now.

The other way we are seeing improvements is shoes that are effectively less durable, either to save weight, or to use foams that optimize for performance over durability.

When you are at an elite level small gains like super shoes makes a big difference as you are much closer to your theoretical limit.

When you have multiple minutes left to gain in a short a distance as a 5k, they are a total waste of money. You'll gain far more time spending money on a coach than super shoes improving fitness, technique, diet.

I find the benefit of max stack shoes for me isnt the speed but it helps me put in more miles without my legs feeling so beat up

This is coming from someone very late to the big stack height game... i wore "minimalist" shoes up until 2022

betteridges's law of headlines.

in short, the answer is (almost always) no.

This kind of stuff is cool, but it makes records murky. Like "what could the current record holder do with the previous record holders tech"