Eliud Kipchoge to Race London Marathon Shoes that Give New Meaning to Custom

By Adam Kopet

Lindsay Berra of Yahoo Sports reports Eliud Kipchoge will wear a special pair of shoes in Sunday's Virgin Money London Marathon.

The shoes in question will be a custom 3D-printed pair of the Nike Flyprint. The upper has been specifically designed to match Kipchoge's feet and his preferences in his racing shoes.

To create the shoes, Nike first had to create a new 3D printer that could make an upper soft enough to be used for performance running shoes. The new shoes will weigh only 5.9 ounces each, 0.4 ounces less than the shoes Kipchoge ran 2:00:25 in during the Breaking2 Project last year.

One additional feature of this new shoe is that it cannot absorb water. Kipchoge complained of his shoes getting heavy as they became waterlogged during last year's Berlin Marathon, which was hampered by steady rain throughout the race.. He won that race in 2:03:32.

Jordan Hasay, Galen Rupp, Mo Farah and Geoffrey Kamworor have also experimented with custom 3D-printed Nike Flyprint shoes. Each pair takes about half a day to make, making it easier to quickly adapt a design to an athlete's specifications for the next round of trials.