Runners typically save their very best for race day: Their freshest legs, their best headspace, and their spediest shoes, hopefully coalesce to achieve a fast time. But, the vast majority of a runner’s pavement pounding comes during training, and those practice runs require different sneakers. For those long hours, runners need a good training shoe: Unlike a racing shoe which is meant to propel a runner forward, a training shoe should feel softer, expertly absorbing the repeated pounding on the pavement to lessen impact on the joints. At the same time, it should have some spring to its step to make those long runs palatable. . Enter Nike’s new Pegasus Turbo.
Last year, the sports and footwear company debuted its fastest running shoe yet—the Vaporfly Elite, which was designed specifically to help elite marathoner Eliud Kipchoge and others run a marathon in a time faster than two hours—a human endurance barrier that echoes, to some degree, the plight of the four minute mile. The shoe features a newly designed midsole (the chunk of foam sandwiched in the middle of the shoe between the insole and the outer layer) dubbed ZoomX as well as a curved carbon-fiber plate. Both features are meant to spring and propel a runner forward and increase the shoe’s energy return. A higher energy return means a runner has to do slightly less work with each stride. The shoe’s consumer versions include the less expensive Zoom Fly and the decked out Zoom Vaporfly 4 percent.
This past fall, the shoes—along with a ton of hard work and training—helped Kipchoge almost reach that potential with a time of 2:00:25. And non-elite runners are all using the consumer versions to chase down