The Professional Amateur: The Long Run with New Balance

There is something wonderfully irrational about a marathon.

No human being needs to run 26.2 miles anymore. We have cars, trains, bicycles, buses and, in London at least, an Underground system capable of transporting you from one side of the city to the other while barely requiring you to stand up.

And yet, every year, tens of thousands of people gather in Greenwich and willingly attempt to travel 26.2 miles using nothing but their legs.

Soon, I hope to be one of them.

The Professional Amateur series has always been an experiment in curiosity disguised as sport. Padel led me back towards racquets. Pickleball forced me to reconsider what constitutes athletic complexity. Tennis brought me back to something I had once known intimately. Cycling introduced an entirely different relationship between physiology, machinery and endurance.

Now comes perhaps the simplest sport of all.

Running.

One foot in front of the other.

For 26.2 miles.

The destination is the London Marathon. But unlike some of the other challenges in this series, I am beginning this one without a particularly impressive objective. I am not interested, at least for now, in chasing a sub-three-hour marathon or qualifying for something else.

The goal is considerably more primitive.

I want to find out what happens to me.

What happens when a returning runner gradually asks his body to become capable of travelling 26.2 miles? What happens to the heart, lungs, muscles and mind? What happens to sleep, recovery and appetite? What happens when running stops being something you occasionally do and becomes something around which part of your life has to be constructed?

And, perhaps most interestingly, could preparing for a marathon actually teach me something about living longer?

As you all know, I have become increasingly fascinated by longevity.

Not necessarily longevity in its most theatrical form—the cryogenic chambers, experimental molecules and billionaires attempting to negotiate with mortality—but the comparatively boring things that repeatedly appear in the scientific literature.

Sleep.

Strength.

Food.

Relationships.

Cardiorespiratory fitness.

Movement.

The fundamentals aren't particularly sexy. Unfortunately for the wellness industry, the human body appears to have retained an irritating preference for them.

And running might be one of the most accessible ways of accessing several of those benefits simultaneously.

One of the more interesting pieces of research I encountered while looking into this came from a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Researchers pooled data from 14 studies involving 232,149 people, followed for periods ranging from 5.5 to 35 years.

The association was striking.

Compared with people who didn't run, participation in running was associated with a 27% lower risk of all-cause mortality, a 30% lower risk of cardiovascular mortality, and a 23% lower risk of cancer mortality.

There is an important distinction here: this is observational evidence. It cannot prove that running itself caused every bit of that reduction. Runners may differ from non-runners in countless other ways.

But there was another finding I found even more intriguing.

More wasn't necessarily better.

The researchers found no statistically significant dose-response relationship suggesting that endlessly increasing frequency, duration, pace or weekly mileage continually increased the mortality benefit. Even comparatively small amounts of running appeared to matter.

That feels important.

Because longevity has become strangely synonymous with optimisation. We measure HRV, VO2 max, glucose, sleep stages and resting heart rate. We quantify ourselves in the hope that enough data might eventually reveal the cheat code for ageing.

Running proposes something considerably less complicated:

Put your shoes on.

Go outside.

Move.

There is also the persistent belief that running inevitably destroys your knees.

I had heard some version of it for most of my life: you'll regret all that running when you're older.

The evidence is considerably more nuanced.

A systematic review and meta-analysis involving more than 100,000 people found the prevalence of hip or knee osteoarthritis was 3.5% among recreational runners, compared with 10.2% among sedentary controls and 13.3% among competitive runners. The authors were careful not to claim causation—the groups can differ in injury history and other factors—but the findings certainly challenge the idea that recreational running automatically condemns your knees.

Other systematic reviews have similarly failed to establish the simple relationship between recreational running and knee osteoarthritis that conventional wisdom would have us believe.

The distinction between running and training intelligently therefore seems important.

Because a marathon is not necessarily a prescription for longevity. It is an extreme endurance event. The health benefit doesn't require 26.2 miles.

But that is precisely what interests me.

I am using the marathon as the laboratory, not the medicine.

The question is what I can learn from the process.

And if you're going to conduct an experiment, you need equipment.

Which brings me to New Balance.

My relationship with New Balance started long before I knew anything about carbon plates, energy return or running economy.

It started with my dad.

New Balance was his first running shoe.

I don't remember him explaining why he chose them. Perhaps he researched them meticulously. Perhaps somebody recommended them. Perhaps he simply walked into a shop, tried them on and thought they were comfortable.

But children have a peculiar relationship with their parents' possessions. Certain objects acquire significance simply because they belong to them.

Years later, when I started running cross-country at school, my dad bought me my first pair.

New Balance.

I can still appreciate what that represented.

At the time they were simply trainers. I didn't understand stack heights or heel-to-toe drops. I didn't know what pronation meant. I certainly wasn't considering the mechanical properties of midsole foams.

They were the shoes my dad wore.

And now they were mine.

I ran cross-country in them, and somewhere along the way a brand became attached to a memory.

I have worn New Balance ever since.

There is something strange about the objects that survive the different versions of ourselves. You grow up. Your interests change. Your body changes. Your relationship with your parents changes. The child running through muddy school fields disappears and is replaced by an adult who suddenly finds himself wondering whether he could run the London Marathon.

Yet some things remain.

So when I decided that running would become the next chapter of Professional Amateur, there wasn't really a decision to make about what would be on my feet.

It had to be New Balance.

Except this time, the shoe waiting for me is rather different from the one my father bought all those years ago.

Very different.

I am beginning this journey with the New Balance SuperComp Elite v6.

And calling it a running shoe feels slightly inadequate.

The SuperComp Elite sits at the sharp end of New Balance's racing programme. It is designed for the moment when months of training are compressed into a single morning and every gram, every stride and every fraction of efficiency starts to matter.

The v6 weighs approximately 198 grams in the specification published by New Balance and uses an 8mm drop. More interesting, however, is what is hiding underneath your

foot.

At the heart of the shoe is New Balance's Infinion Foam, designed to provide the energy return expected from a modern racing shoe. Inside that midsole sits a full carbon-fibre plate.

But simply saying "carbon plate" doesn't really explain what is happening.

New Balance calls its system Energy Arc.

The concept combines a specifically shaped carbon-fibre plate with strategically positioned voids in the midsole. As the runner loads the shoe, the plate interacts with those voids; New Balance describes the system as allowing energy to be stored and subsequently returned as the plate reforms during the stride.

For the v6, New Balance has further tuned that plate, making it thicker and stiffer towards the forefoot, alongside a lightweight foam composition intended to produce a particularly propulsive sensation.

In simpler terms, imagine compressing a spring beneath your foot thousands of times.

Except the spring has been engineered around human biomechanics.

The purpose isn't to run the marathon for you. No shoe can manufacture cardiovascular fitness or persuade exhausted quadriceps to continue working at mile 23.

What technology can attempt to do is make the act of running slightly more economical.

And over 26.2 miles, slightly becomes interesting.

A marathon consists of tens of thousands of individual steps. Any improvement in how efficiently those steps are produced potentially compounds across the race.

There are other details that reveal just how obsessive modern racing-shoe engineering has become. The upper uses New Balance's FantomFit construction, combining an extremely light mesh with bonded structural support, essentially trying to provide enough lockdown without carrying material that isn't contributing to performance. Underneath, an ultrathin outsole is engineered around race-day traction.

Everything has a purpose.

Remove weight.

Return energy.

Maintain grip.

Hold the foot.

Propel the runner.

Repeat.

It is almost Formula One thinking applied to something humanity has been doing barefoot for millions of years

And I love that contradiction.

But this begs the question, why start with a race shoe?

There is an obvious question.

Why would a returning runner begin his marathon journey with an elite racing shoe?

Surely this is something you earn?

Perhaps.

But Professional Amateur has never been about pretending to be a professional athlete. It has been about investigating what happens when an amateur approaches sport with professional levels of curiosity.

I want to understand the equipment as much as the training.

I want to feel the difference between conventional trainers and contemporary super shoes. I want to understand whether carbon-plated footwear changes my perception of pace. I want to see how my running economy develops as my fitness develops.

Most importantly, I want a reference point.

The SuperComp Elite v6 represents New Balance's vision of what a racing shoe can currently be. It is the end product.

I am very much the unfinished prototype.

There is something rather amusing about that combination.

A £230 piece of running engineering attached to a man who is still trying to remember how to become a runner.

And I should make an important distinction here: I don't intend for the Elite v6 to magically replace sensible marathon training, nor does choosing a race shoe mean every training mile should necessarily be completed in one. The marathon will ultimately require a broader shoe rotation, easy miles, recovery, strength work and—most importantly—gradual progression.

The carbon plate cannot protect me from stupidity.

That part remains my responsibility.

At some point during the London Marathon, assuming I make it to the start line, I suspect all the technology will become irrelevant.

The carbon plate will still be there.

The Infinion Foam will still be compressing beneath me.

Energy Arc will still be doing whatever physics allows it to do.

But somewhere around mile 20, there will probably be a conversation that no piece of engineering can participate in.

The one between the body and the mind.

The body will ask to stop.

The mind will have to provide an answer.

And perhaps that is the real reason I am doing this.

Longevity is usually discussed as an attempt to add years to life. But I increasingly wonder whether that definition misses something.

Living longer is useful only if we remain capable of living.

Cardiovascular fitness matters because it preserves capacity. Strength matters because it preserves independence. Movement matters because the human organism appears to respond remarkably well to being asked to do difficult things.

And occasionally choosing something difficult simply because you don't know whether you can do it feels like another form of training altogether.

My father bought me my first New Balance shoes because I was going running.

All these years later, I am putting on another pair because I want to discover how far running can take me.

There is a pleasing symmetry to that.

From muddy school cross-country fields to the streets of London.

From my father's first running shoe to mine.

From recreational runner to marathoner—or at least an attempt at becoming one.

And from the relatively ordinary New Balance shoes I remember as a child to a 198-gram carbon-plated piece of engineering that would have seemed like science fiction when I first started running.

The SuperComp Elite v6 might help me run faster.

It might help me run more efficiently.

On race day, it might even help me find a little more when my legs are beginning to negotiate their resignation.

But it cannot run the miles for me.

That is what makes this experiment interesting.

Over the coming months, I am going to have to build the cardiovascular engine, strengthen the chassis, learn about fuelling, recovery, cadence, running economy, VO2 max, lactate thresholds and the strange psychology of voluntarily running for several hours.

I will investigate what works.

I will almost certainly discover what doesn't.

And eventually, I hope, I will stand in Greenwich wearing a pair of New Balance shoes, surrounded by thousands of people who have each arrived there carrying their own reasons for running.

Mine began years ago.

With my dad.

And a pair of New Balance.

Professional Amateur: Running has begun.

26.2 miles to find out what happens next.