What Running Shoes Do Ironman Triathletes Wear?
The winners and the field in general preferred one brand.
On Saturday in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, Germany’s Jan Frodeno and Daniela Ryf captured the men’s and women’s titles at the 2015 Ironman World Championship, and they were each wearing ASICS running shoes. Frodeno, who ran in ASICS Super J33-2 stability-oriented racing flats, ran a 2:52:22 marathon split (the fifth fastest run of the day) and finished in 8:14:40. Ryf, who wore the ASICS DS-Trainer 20 stability trainer/racer model, ran a 3:06:37 marathon (the third-fastest split among the women) and finished in 8:57:57.
Sometimes what the winners wear has no statistical correlation to what the rest of the field wears, but for the second year in a row both winners wore the same brand (last year German Sebastian Kienle and Australia Mirinda Carfrae wore New Balance shoes). What’s perhaps more interesting though is the fact that ASICS once again was the top brand in the field, according to this year’s shoe count conducted by Dave Jewell of ShoeRanger.com for Lava Magazine. ASICS was worn by 17.5 percent of the finishers in the count, ahead of Saucony (14.3 percent), Hoka (11.6 percent), Brooks (9.2 percent) and Newton (9.2 percent) among the other top-five brands.
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Adidas (7.2 percent), Mizuno (6.2 percent), New Balance (5.2 percent), On Running (5.0 percent), Nike (4.5 percent), Zoot (3.9 percent) and Skechers (2.6 percent) rounded out the top 12 brands this year.
But it’s also interesting to note that the top men’s running split was turned in by David McNamee of the UK, who ran 2:49:52 wearing a pair of Skechers GoMeb Speed 3 shoes on his way to placing 11th in his Kona debut in 8:32:27. The fastest woman runner was Liz Blatchford of Australia, who ran a 3:06:25 marathon split in a pair of Pearl Izumi Road N2 en route to finishing third overall in 9:14:52.
ASICS and Saucony have been the top two brands in the field each of the past four years. Last year, the top five brands were ASICS (17.7 percent), Saucony (14.5 percent), Newton (10.7 percent), Brooks (10.3 percent) and Hoka (6 percent).
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