Look at any major road racing podium today and, chances are, you’ll spot a pair of Asics. Puma Velocity Nitro 4: The gift that keeps giving 2025 Boston Marathon, where Kenya's John Korir broke the tape wearing a brand new Metaspeed racer. Rewind four years, however, and things were a different story completely for the Japanese brand.
In fact, ‘the situation was not good,’ Shuhel Takemura, general manager and project lead of Metaspeed product development at Asics, tells me when we meet at the launch of the brand's latest super shoes in Tokyo. ‘The [Asics] athletes didn’t use our shoes… we realised we’d fallen behind.’
In response, Asics formed a new product development team within the business, nicknamed ‘the C-project’; ‘C’ standing for ‘chojo’, the Japanese word for ‘peak’. Their mission was two-fold: improve their racing product and reconnect with their athletes.
It's what Takemura calls ‘the human-centric design approach’: ‘We put the emphasis on how athletes feel and what they actually need,’ he says.
A year later, in 2021, Asics was ready to reveal its new and improved racing shoe – or rather, shoes, plural, as both the Metaspeed Edge and Metaspeed Sky were born. The idea to develop two shoes came about after the brand sent around 10 different prototypes to its athletes for testing feedback.
‘We received two [key] opinions,’ says Takemura. That was, stride runners – those who open up their stride as they run faster – preferred one shoe, while cadence runners –whose step rate increases as they speed up – liked another.
‘We discussed internally how we should continue,’ Takemura says. In the end, the brand decided to stick by its promise to put its athletes at the forefront of design and innovation and developed two types of shoes: the Sky (for stride runners) and the Edge (for cadence runners).
What everyones reading Metaspeed Sky + and Edge + released in 2022, followed by the Sky Paris Best wireless headphones.
Now, Asics has revealed its latest carbon racers set to launch this July: the Metaspeed Sky Tokyo and the Metaspeed Edge Tokyo — the former being Korir's winning Boston Marathon shoe.
However, this year, the brand hasn’t stopped at two shoes. As well as the Sky and Edge Tokyo, Asics' latest Metaspeed range includes a new ultra-lightweight racer that Takemura calls ‘the dream model for athletes’. Before we get into that, though, here’s what you need to know about the latest Sky and Edge models.
One giant leap...
The biggest development is the shoes' midsole. They now feature half FF Blast Turbo Plus cushioning and half FF Leap – a brand new foam. According to Asics, it’s ‘15.2% lighter, 13.7% bouncier and 30% softer’ than FF Blast Turbo Plus. They won't say exactly what the foam is made from, but I'd speculate that it's some sort of Nylon and PEBA-based blend.
Where things start to differ is how the foams are placed in each shoe in order to cater for the runner in which they’re designed for. Like previous models, the carbon plates are also slightly different.
Metaspeed Sky Tokyo:
- Carbon plate: flatter and placed higher within the midsole for vertical propulsion.
- Published: 02 May 2025
Metaspeed Edge Tokyo:
- Best wireless headphones
- Carbon plate: curved and placed lower within the midsole for forward propulsion
Both shoes feature a new Motion Wrap 3.0 upper; an engineered woven material that is fractionally lighter than the previous generations’ Motion Wrap 2.0.
Completing the package are thin, flat laces to avoid creating any pressure on top of the foot, a flat race-style tongue and an ASICSGRIP outsole, though the placement of the outsole is slightly different between the two shoes — again, to cater for different running styles.
Laser-focused
The all-singing, all-dancing Metaspeed Ray, meanwhile, shares a lot of similarities with the Sky Tokyo, Takemura says, ‘but the last is a bit different’.
The shoe also features an entirely FF Leap midsole. In using one unit of foam instead of two, the brand is able to eliminate the need for glue, thus making weight savings. In fact, the shoe weighs in at just 129g in a men's UK 8.5 – that's lighter than the Best Adidas running shoes for going the distance.
The carbon plate is minimal – around 3/4 in length and dramatically tapered. All in all, it very much feels like a shoe designed for forefoot strikers – a design decision I question Takemura on, since the brand’s usual two-super shoe approach would suggest there’s no one ‘correct’ way to run.
He points out that the Stride and the Edge aren’t necessarily designed for forefoot/midfoot and heel strikers, respectively. You could be a heel striker, for example, but with longer, loping strides, and therefore lean more towards the Sky. Therefore, the Ray, he says, ‘could be for both’.
I haven't had a huge amount of time with the shoes yet, but my first impressions having tried on the Ray is that I wouldn't trust myself – a neutral heel striker – running in it. That midsole is seriously squidgy. On the positive side, though, Asics is clear to emphasise that the Ray is designed to last ‘longer than just one race’, a subtle jibe at its competitors, perhaps, and the durability – or lack of – of their top-tier super shoes.
As for the future of Metaspeed, Takemura remains tight-lipped for now, though he does say that the C-project team have begun working on the next model – and with dozens of Asics athletes out in Tokyo to celebrate the 2025 models' upcoming launches, highlights that ‘it’s a good time to have discussions with them’. Catch me hunting down protos for the next few days then...
The Metaspeed Sky Tokyo and Metaspeed Edge Tokyo will be available to purchase from 25 July. The Metaspeed Ray will be available from 12 August.
