These shoes are identical in every way except for color.
But runners who wear this one might be more likely to get hurt
because it's a man's shoe being sold to women.
This can be a big problem
because a woman's foot isn't just a smaller version of a man's.
Most athletic footwear is still research,
design and tested based on male anatomy.
Women's feet are more pie shaped than men's feet.
In other words,
the heel is a bit narrower and the forefoot is a bit wider.
So the shape is kind of like a slice of pie.
Women also tend to have a higher instep and their ankles are lower.
Women have wider hips and a more flexible Achilles tendon.
All of this means the biomechanics of running
can be dramatically different between the sexes.
the design process for most women's runners ignores this completely.
Instead of designing a shoe from the ground up,
they just scale down a man's shoe.
It's known as shrink it and pink it.
Chris Napier, the director of the Run Lab at Simon Fraser University
says there's a pretty easy fix.
It's just a matter of, uh,
taking, uh,
a female last, uh,
so the mold that creates the shoe, um,
and sort of basing off female,
female anatomy and then, um,
building a line of shoes off of that.
If you've ever run with ill fitting shoes,
you know how uncomfortable it can be.
You might even be more likely To get hurt.
While there's no hard data linking injuries to women's running shoes,
we know female runners are more likely to get certain injuries
compared to men, especially injuries related to the calf,
lower leg and bone stress.
Napier and his team recently published a small study
where they held focus groups with women
who ranged from 20 to 70 years old
with varying levels of running experience.
The main findings were, uh,
that these shoes just didn't fit their foot.
I think there was an aha moment when uh,
the women in the room realized that this wasn't just a personal issue
that they had felt. The women ranked comfort,
injury prevention and performance
as the most important factors when choosing a running shoe.
I think when the paper came out,
um, there were a lot of women just sort of nodding their heads going,
yeah.
While some big brands have released runners designed for women's feet
just in the past couple years,
it's still very rare. So others have stepped up to fill the gap.
This shoe was research designed,
developed based on female anatomy.
Lindsay Houseman is the founder of Heta's,
a company based right here in Vancouver.
Their goal was to create a science backed running shoe for women.
But there was a problem. Between 2014 and 2021,
only 6% of research studies focused exclusively on women.
Many major studies don't look at women at all.
The original Nike Vapor Fly shoe,
which was sort Of the original super shoe,
all the testing on that initially was just done on men.
So head is teamed up with the Run Lab to fill these research gaps
and make their findings publicly available.
We have 10 infrared cameras right around the treadmill.
They pick up the reflective markers that you can see on Kaylee there.
This fancy setup can model a runner's biomechanics.
So we can actually also do measurements of oxygen consumption,
that's running in different footwear or under different conditions
and determine, you know,
how those shoes might affect performance.
Or we can look at how it changes mechanics.
Runners and researchers alike hope that
once innovations like this find their footing,
all women will be able to find shoes that help them succeed
instead of being their Achilles heel.