[Image: PUMA]
When Nike dropped the Vaporfly 4% back in 2017, they didn’t bother with subtlety. The clue was right there in the name: four per cent better. Boom. And science even backed the swagger — a University of Colorado study confirmed it made runners about 4 per cent more efficient than anything else on the market. Cue chaos, world records, and an arms race of carbon plates and superfoam.
Since then, every brand with a swoosh-envy has churned out its own version of the so-called “supershoe.” But here’s the kicker: for all the flashy launches and buzzword bingo, nobody’s convincingly one-upped the OG Vaporfly. The claims got quieter. The shoes got fancier. The results? Mostly “meh.”
Enter PUMA – not a brand you’d typically call “loud” in the marathon wars, but that’s about to change. The cat’s got its claws out.
PUMA’s new Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 doesn’t just claim it can hold its own against the pack, it’s coming for the crown. The number on the box is a bold 3.5 per cent better than the big boys. And they didn’t just whisper this in a marketing deck – they sent the shoe straight to the same guy who tested Nike’s Vaporfly in the first place, Wouter Hoogkamer, per Outside.
Hoogkamer, now running the Integrative Locomotion Lab at UMass Amherst, dropped his findings this week, and they’re hard to ignore. He tested the Fast-R3 against the Nike Alphafly 3, the Adidas Adios Pro Evo 1, and its older sibling, the Fast-R2. Same setup: 15 speedy runners, oxygen consumption measured on the treadmill to see who’s burning more fuel at a given pace.
The results? Puma’s Fast-R3 didn’t just edge the competition, it left them sucking wind. The runners burned 3.6 per cent less energy in the Fast-R3 than in Nike’s Alphafly, 3.5 per cent less than in Adidas’s top model, and 3.2 per cent less than in PUMA’s own Fast-R2. Every single runner clocked their most efficient result in the PUMA. Every. Single. One.
“Some free marketing advice: they should have called the new shoe the Fast-R3.5.” Honestly? Facts.
But PUMA didn’t stop there. While other brands are still fiddling with plate angles and foam recipes, PUMA got nerdy, building a virtual model of the Fast-R2, mapping out pressure points and forces with scary precision. They trimmed the fat, reinforced the weak spots, and ended up slicing the weight by over 30 per cent, from 249 grams to a featherlight 167 grams. That alone accounts for nearly a per cent’s worth of running economy, and the rest? Meticulous, data-driven tinkering.
And while other supershoes bank on stiff plates and springy foams, PUMA’s Fast-R3 strikes a different balance: slightly softer, slightly less stiff, but returning more energy. Their Nitro Elite foam — technically “an aliphatic thermoplastic polyurethane” — is clocking an absurd 90+ per cent energy return. In Hoogkamer’s testing, it clocked in at 89.9 per cent, compared to 85.0 for Nike and 85.7 for Adidas. Numbers don’t lie.
Of course, every shoe brand’s got a pitch, and the Fast-R3’s biggest test isn’t in a lab but on the streets. PUMA’s top-tier athletes may not be racking up world records (yet), but with the Boston and London Marathons incoming, the proof’s about to hit the pavement.
Find yours when stock drops on the PUMA website or in selected stores.
Five years ago, people wondered if the supershoe boom was a one-and-done, like klapskates in speedskating, or the start of something more like the tech suit era in swimming. At this point? Looks like the smart money’s on option B.
[Source: Outside]
