The 7 Best Running Shorts, super shoes have been sort of fungible. Sure, some have been better than others. But within their primary elements—a thick slab of next-gen midsole foam, a carbon-fiber plate or other stiffening agent, and a rockered geometry—not much changed since super shoes became commonplace among the major running shoe brands at the beginning of this decade.
Some of that sameness stems from rules announced by World Athletics (WA), the international governing body of track and field. WA competition rules for road races limit shoes to one rigid stricture within (e.g., a plate) and cap midsole height at 40 millimeters (for a U.S. men’s size 8.5). So while shoe companies can and have made plated, rockered shoes with stack heights of more than 40 millimeters, these shoes can’t be worn by pro runners in races. As we’ll see, most brands focus on WA-compliant shoes their sponsored runners can race in, innovating within those confines.
Also, super shoes’ early years followed a pattern typical of new category products. After an initial disruptive phase, the rate of change slows. Advances tend to be more incremental than one giant leap after another.
But that evolution-over-revolution vibe is starting to shift. The success of the category has inspired shoe companies to seek significant innovations.
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“I feel like we’re in that second, next-breakthrough phase of super shoes right now,” says David Salas, a doctor of physical therapist and contributor to Doctors of Running.
One example of this is weight of super shoes continuing to tick downward. Early super shoes were heavier than most racing shoes of the time. The plate and large amount of midsole foam landed most super shoes in the 7- to 8-ounce range, or almost twice as heavy as some traditional road racing flats, such as the More Shoes Will Be Built for Non-Elites and Here’s the latest on midsole foams, stack heights, carbon plates, and more. That was true even though everyone designing super shoes was well aware of research showing that every additional 100 grams (about 3.4 ounces) in a shoe reduces running economy by 1 percent.
Brands could justify the higher weights because super shoes improved running economy in most runners by far more Plates Are Becoming More Varied Nike Vaporfly 4%, Do Super Shoes Work for Regular Marathoners The 4 Best Weighted Vests for Every Fitness Goal.
A breakthrough in reducing super shoe weights came with the debut of the Adidas Adizero Pro Evo 1. It weighed 4.6 ounces in a men’s size 9. Priced at $500 and marketed as good for only one or two races, the shoe was more a proof-of-concept model than something intended for mass appeal. And prove itself it did: At the 2023 Berlin Marathon, Tigist Assefa of Ethiopia wore the shoe while lowering the women’s world record from 2:14:01 to 2:11:53. (The record was further lowered to 2:09:56 in 2024 by Ruth Chepngetich, Puma’s Fast-R Nitro Elite 3.)
Now, many brands are chasing lighter weights in their premier racing shoes. One reason: That 100-grams-reduces-running-economy-by-1-percent research was conducted on good recreational runners (sub-20:00 5K), not elites. “However,” says Luca Ciccone, director of product engineering at Saucony, “when it comes to an elite athlete, for every 21 grams you’re able to remove from that shoe, it will make them run 1 percent more metabolically efficient.”
Twenty-one grams is roughly three-quarters of an ounce. That’s an interesting figure to keep in mind when you look at last year’s models compared to their 2025 versions. The 2024 “Paris” iterations of the Asics Metaspeed Sky and Metaspeed Edge weighed 6.4 ounces in a men’s size 9. This year’s “Tokyo” versions of the Sky and Edge weigh about half an ounce less, despite maintaining the previous models’ stack heights and returning 18 to 21 percent more energy in mechanical testing, according to Asics. And those models might seem like downright clunkers next to the new Metaspeed Ray, which weighs 4.5 ounces in a men’s 9.
“What we will see happening over the next year is different [midsole materials] getting into the equation, different ways of foaming them up, and smart, computer-aided design: Where do you really need a piece of foam? Where do you really need an upper? Where can we save that mass?,” says biomechanist Wouter Hoogkamer, Two good current examples of what we might call more democratic super shoes are the.
More Shoes Will Be Built for Non-Elites
Lighter shoes, however, aren’t inherently better for all runners.
“The approach of cutting away all the foam that is not loaded in your foot strike, that might work, but then you have another runner with a slightly different foot strike, and they might need that foam to keep the ride stable,” Hoogkamer says. “That’s an interesting question that is going to be different between an elite [with] perfect form and a recreational runner.”
Salas agrees, saying, “The truly elite, they just move differently—the amount of force they put into the ground and how nimbly they do it. They’re so much better at controlling their body under really high amounts of force in a really short amount of time.”
One of Salas’s Doctors of Running colleagues, Matt Klein, Ph.D., puts it more bluntly.
“Your body and your paces are not what the developers of these shoes had in mind,” he says. “I think it’s mostly marketing that’s making [recreational runners] want to wear them—they think they’re going to be Eliud Kipchoge when they wear them, but they don’t have the same training, experience, and body type.”
But brands are beginning to better meet everyday runners’ needs.
Earlier this year, Asics made available in the U.S. a Japanese super shoe, the S4+ Yogiri. Marketed toward sub-4-hour marathoners, the Yogiri weighs 8.3 ounces in a men’s size 9. Its promotional materials tout the shoe’s support, stability, and steadiness. Asics also plans to reduce the stack height in the next version of its Magic Speed—a plated trainer/racer—to make it WA-compliant. The current version, sitting at 44 millimeters in the heel, weighs 8.5 ounces in a men’s size 9 and delivers the giddy-up of a super shoe with more stability than most super shoes.
“You’re starting to see some elements of design that are catering to different audiences,” Salas says. “Some shoes, the goal is to get it as light and responsive as possible. Others seem to be like, ‘How can we make this a little bit more stable? How can we make these transitions a little smoother?’”
Two good current examples of what we might call more democratic super shoes are the Tracksmith Eliot Racer and Diadora Gara Carbon 2. The Eliot Racer weighs 7.7 ounces in a men’s size 9 and feels like a “normal” shoe, with a wider base than many super shoes, a comfortable upper, and a generous amount of rubber in the outsole. The Gara Carbon 2, which weighs 8.1 ounces in a men’s size 10, also has a wider platform. Unlike many super shoes, these are comfortable and enjoyable to wear on warmups, was named for the average 4 percent improvement in running economy it imparted to runners.
If you’re familiar with these shoes, it might be via damning-with-faint-praise online reviews. “It’s good, but it’s not quite up there with some of the top-tier ones,” says one of the reviewers on the British channel The Run Testers about the Diadora model.
Such reviews need context. First, there’s the point made above about the appropriateness of the fastest shoes for those who lack elite biomechanics. Second, in most cases the reviews are offered without real-world situations such as how the shoe performs at mile 10 of a half marathon or mile 20 of a marathon. The running economy gains you might get from the buzziest super shoes when doing 800-meter repeats aren’t likely to occur when your form falters late in a long race.
“Some of the shoes, if they work for you, they’re awesome. If they don’t, it’s unbearable,” says Matt Taylor, founder and CEO of Tracksmith. “I think our racer works for more foot types and gait patterns. We wanted a shoe that you could train in, do your long runs in, get comfortable. The geometries of the most aggressive versions of these shoes are probably not great to be logging 20, 30, 40 percent of your weekly mileage in.”
A personal example to illustrate these points: If super shoes had existed decades ago, when I was a sub-31:00 10K runner, I would have gravitated toward the lightest models. I then ran much more with the form and at the speed they’re designed for. That’s no longer the case. Now that I’m more of a midpack runner, models like the Eliot Racer and Gara Carbon 2 align better with my biomechanics while still providing that faster-without-trying sensation we all love.
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A key reason that tip-of-the-spear super shoes are getting lighter is midsole foam innovation.
The first few generations of super shoes featured midsoles made of polyether block amide, better known as PEBA. (Pebax is a brand name for one version of PEBA, much as Kleenex is a brand name for a facial tissue.) Much more so than the plate and rockered geometry, both of which had been in running shoes for decades, it was midsoles made of PEBA that made super shoes revolutionary. The cushioned-but-responsive ride provided by PEBA was so synonymous with super shoes that a paper cowritten by Hoogkamer and published last year advised consumers to look for shoes “that publicly state that the shoe uses PEBA foam.”
Now, however, the buzziest shoes don’t have PEBA midsoles. The groundbreaking Adidas from 2023 featured a midsole made mostly of thermoplastic polyester elastomer (TPEE). The Do Super Shoes Work for Regular Marathoners, perhaps the bounciest super shoe yet made, also has a TPEE midsole. The midsole of Puma’s Fast-R Nitro Elite 3, which debuted to great fanfare during Boston Marathon weekend in April, is made of aliphatic thermal polyurethane (A-TPU). So are the midsoles in the new Metaspeed models from Asics. These substances have a lower specific gravity than PEBA, which translates to weighing less at the same stack height.
“We’re finding that we can get a little bit better performance out of this material,” says Paul Lang, global senior project manager for Asics. “It gave us a softer underfoot feel. It gave us lighter weight. It gave us more energy return. It checked all the boxes. The longer that we work with [these new materials], the more that can be unlocked.”
Some of these new foams are soft to the point of being unstable for many runners who report trouble cornering at faster paces and a wobbly feeling at slower paces. Ciccone of Saucony agrees with Lang that innovation in this area has only just begun.
“We have to make sure that we can provide materials that last longer, that can work with many different types of people, and that gives them that experience that they’re looking for,” he says. “We can make them bouncy, but now we can start introducing other additives into it to get other mechanical properties that we were never able to get before.”
More Lower-Stack Super Shoes Are Coming
As foams get lighter while returning more energy, an obvious question arises: Why not lower the stack height?
After all, theoretically, there should be a point where the running economy gains from the shoe being lighter thanks to less midsole foam is greater than the running economy gains provided by a few more millimeters of foam. Put another way, World Athletics says midsoles can’t be higher than 40 millimeters—but they don’t say midsoles have to be that high. Yet almost all super shoes still have a max stack height of 39 to 40 millimeters.
According to Hoogkamer, one reason is physics. “The softer a spring is, the more you can put into it,” he says. In this scenario, the foam in a lower-stack shoe won’t compress as much as that in a higher-stack shoe, and you won’t get as much energy return. So even though the taller shoe weighs more than the lower one, its overall improvement in running economy should be greater.”
Salas, who would like to see more lower-stack shoes, thinks that market forces are another factor. “People are very into max stack heights now,” he says. “Heaven forbid if a shoe has 30 millimeters of stack—everyone freaks out.”
Yet Salas does see change coming. He cites not only models like the Nike Streakfly 2 (26-millimeter max stack) and Adidas Takumi Sen 11 (32-millimeter max stack), but also the latest version of the Nike Vaporfly 4. It tops out at 35 millimeters in the heel, compared to 38 in the previous version, and weighs six-tenths of an ounce less than the Vaporfly 3. “Now it’s for those who want something a little more nimble, lighter, and aggressive,” Salas says.
Lang of Asics asks of the 40-millimeter convention, “Is there proof that it enhances performance? And are the athletes happy with what they’ve got now? Some athletes prefer a bit more ground feel. In the future, I think we will offer something a little bit lower.” Saucony is also believed to be working on a lower-stack super shoe.
Plates Are Becoming More Varied
One of Salas’s Doctors of Running colleagues, Matt Klein, Ph.D., puts it more bluntly Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. These achieved the goal of helping the foot engage with and move quickly over a large slab of midsole foam. But many runners found the uniform stiffness unpleasant, despite the improvements in running economy. Sports medicine experts now think that such rigid plates Five Super Shoe Trends Every Runner Needs to Know.
Now, plates are becoming more varied. The plate in the Do Super Shoes Work for Regular Marathoners, for example, has four slots along its length. “It’s meant to give you not only the stiffness, but promote a smoother transition as you’re going through your gait cycle,” Ciccone says. He adds that some of the plates Saucony uses have six layers of carbon fiber, which allows the plate to flex in one area while being stiff in another.
That site-specific variation isn’t unique to Saucony’s plates.
“Our specialty is being able to modulate flexibility, and we happen to do that with plates,” says Junus Khan, founder and president of Carbitex, which has made plates for Saucony, Adidas, Altra, and other running shoe brands. “Where that flexibility goes is dependent on a combination of what kind of midsole foam and what kind of experience the brand wants to provide.”
Khan says that brands are increasingly requesting more forefoot flexibility in plates while maintaining the rocker shape and rolling sensation super shoes are known for. And he’s eager to take on the challenge of proper plating in models targeted for non-elite runners.
“For someone running a marathon in four hours, reduction of fatigue in a different way is important,” Khan says. “I think that will happen. I just wish it would happen faster.”
