Look, I didn’t want to write about super shoes. I wanted to be the kind of runner who talks about training volume or altitude camps or whatever happened to Molly Seidel. But here we are. Because if you’ve spent more than three minutes around a cross country team, a group long run, or literally any running blog in 2025, you know what I’m talking about – So let me say this:
By now, if you haven’t run a marathon in under three hours, the real question is: what kind of trash can were you strapping to your feet? Because let’s face it—today’s super shoes aren’t shoes at all. They’re hyper-engineered, carbon-plated, foam-injected rocket boosters disguised to bring average Joe’s like myself to a BQ. Every brand is locked in a Cold War-style arms race to create the next unfair advantage that still technically counts as legal as long as they are under 40mm.
Remember when you had to “train” for a marathon? Quaint. Now, all you need is $275 for race shoes, a couple $4 Maurtin gels, and the moral flexibility to ignore that your PR is as fake as a three dollar bill.
Nike started it, obviously. The original Vaporfly was less a shoe and more an existential threat to competition. It was as if Eliud Kipchoge whispered to a team of aerospace engineers, “Make me God,” and they delivered. Ever since, every brand has been playing catch-up like school children trying to recreate the Atomic bomb with paper towel tubes.
Enter the first challenger ADIDAS, They showed up with the Adizero Adios Pro, and evolved to the Adizero Adios Pro EVO 2. Which sounds less like a running shoe and more like something you’d launch from a stealth submarine. Weighing less than a banana peel and held together by the force of gravity, it disintegrates after one race—perfect for the “one-night-stand” approach to performance, and costs roughly the same.
Lets not forget about the OG Nike, ASICS. Not to be outdone, recently rolled out the Metaspeed Ray, because when regular Sky/ Edge isn’t fast enough, you need “Ray.” It’s designed to weigh less than your GU wrapper, coming at a more digestible price of $300 ( $200 less than Adidas’s submarine sinker) This is the 4th version and if the 3rd time was a charm with the Paris edition, they might just take the thone back from their American step-child, Phill Knight, at least until Nike releases the Alphafly 4.
The best of the rest, Saucony has the Endorphin Elite, which sounds like something you need a prescription for, and will still leave you feeling short of the runners high you friends get with their Nike or Asics counterparts. Hoka arrived late, and not in a fashionable way. releasing the Cielo X1, a choncky shoe for your feet that doubles as a flotation device in case of a mid-race flood. The jury reached a verdict and told them to stick to the trails.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Puma—yes, even Puma—is in the game now. Their Fast-R Nitro Elite 4 looks like something NASA rejected for being “a bit much.” It features a visible gap in the midsole and a midsole that extends past the toebox. This shoe advertised being fast and delivered. At Boston and London it trampolined athletes to new PR’s, and bounced their running stock higher than Taylor Roe’s potential.
With each new drop, we’re promised new levels of efficiency, as though the laws of physics are up for negotiation. Giving enough energy return top file for a federal tax credit.
And the result of this technological renaissance? Your average weekend warrior now feels like Sifan Hassan—even if they’re racing in a local marathon where the lead car is a rusty bicycle. You’re running 6-minute miles? Congratulations, so is Todd from accounting, and his longest training run was a neighborhood 5k.So where does this end? Will world athletics continue to ban them? Will mechanical doping prove to be a greater advantage than EPO? Who know and honestly who f**king gives? These shoes make running fun and wallets cry. Despite my unsolicited banter, name calling and berating hobby joggers. I honestly love these shoes and the PR’s they give me —if feeling like Tamirat Tola for 26.2 miles is wrong, maybe we don’t want to be right.