The idea was to keep a medium pace for the first four kilometres of the 8-km run. That would have been around 8.25 minutes per km for me. But, this Thursday evening, the body had a different plan. Ever so often it would slip into the late 7.00s and I had to consciously lower the pace. For someone who clocked a 60-minute 5k run in May—an anomaly we'll blame on the heat and a heavy lunch—memories of trying, with great futility, to increase the pace, were still vivid. While that slow run was clocked on the ASICS Gel Nimbus 21, this one was on the ASICS Metaracer, said to be the sporting firm's most advanced distance racing shoe. Besides of course its shiny exterior, the Metaracer is much lighter than the Gel Nimbus. Getting into the shoe, I worried that I was trying to wear a supermodel's clothes.

The point of course, is not the size, but if one size fits all. Earlier this month, Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge announced that he would use the Nike Vaporfly Next % to defend his London Marathon title on October 4. It's these shoes that he had worn in October 2019 when he broke the two-hour mark for a marathon distance for the Ineos 1:59 Challenge. While there was talk that the Vaporfly range gave undue advantage to other runners, owing to its sole technology, World Athletics—the global athletics governing body—decided against a ban on the shoes, saying any new shoe technology developed after April 30, 2020, would have to be available on the open market for four months before an athlete could use it in competition. It also introduced an immediate indefinite ban on any shoes that have a sole thicker than 40 millimetres.