Nike Air Zoom Alphafly Next% 'Eliud Kipchoge 1:59:40'
Colorway: White/Pink Blast/Pure Platinum/Black · Style code: DD8877-100 · Release date: October 31, 2020 · Price: $175 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Nike Air Zoom Alphafly Next% 'Kenya' (DD8877-101) · Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT% 'Ekiden Zoom Pack' (DO2407-728) · Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT% 2 'Ekiden Zoom Pack' (FQ8110-331) · Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT% 2 'Ekiden Zoom Pack' (DZ4784-304) · Nike Zoom Alphafly Next Nature 'Rawdacious' (DB0129-001)
The number on the shoe is a time: one hour, fifty-nine minutes, forty seconds. Eliud Kipchoge ran it over the marathon distance in Vienna's Prater park on 12 October 2019, becoming the first person on record to cover it inside two hours.
It was never going to count as a record. World Athletics does not ratify a performance run with rotating pacemakers, fluids handed over from a bicycle and no open field to race against, and the organizers of the INEOS 1:59 Challenge knew that from the start; the point was to establish that the distance could be run that fast under any conditions at all. Kipchoge's ratified world record, 2:01:39, had been set in Berlin thirteen months earlier, and was itself the largest single improvement on a marathon record since 1967.
What he wore in Vienna was a prototype, a version of Nike's racing shoe the company claimed improved running economy by four percent. It reached the public afterward as the Alphafly NEXT%. This pair, out at the end of October 2020 at $285, is the commemorative make-up: the time itself printed on the shoe.