It was exactly like him to pour a bunch of latex rubber into a waffle iron to see if his idea was feasible. It is how his mind worked. My understanding is he r

It was exactly like him to pour a bunch of latex rubber into a waffle iron to see if his idea was feasible. It is how his mind worked. My understanding is he ruined three waffle irons before he had a workable piece, including the first one which never opened. I'm not sure if that's accurate but it would definitely be consistent with how he "bird-dogged" a problem. He had been experimenting with rubberized materials before the waffle iron, using it at first to resurface the track at Marist High School in Eugene after making numerous test pads and coated them with different formulations to see which ones worked best over concrete. At the time, running tracks were usually packed clay, cinders, or other "fines". Great for training by the way (fewer impact injuries) but terrible for breaking 4 minute miles or going under 10.00s in the 100m. He shifted his attention to shoes after spending time in New Zealand with Lydiard. Lydiard was a cobbler of women's shoes and showed Bill how they were made. Bill's philosophy of making shoes lighter and lighter was no joke. He was "Bill Bowerman serious" and firmly believed athletes needed every form of optimization in order to perform their best, including going so far as to measure the weight difference between wet and dry socks over the distance of a marathon, multiplied by the number of times the leg had to lift the foot, in an attempt to understand how athlete energy is allocated during a race.