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Five years after the debut of the first supershoe, the thick-stacked, carbon-plated racers are no longer new nor controversial, but they continue to amaze with their ability to enliven a run and produce fast times. While a few brands didn’t join the party until this year, many models on the market are two or three generations deep—and the new releases keep coming.
Every shoe in this genre boasts some sort of ultralight, hyper-responsive foam with an embedded, curved carbon-fiber plate, but each delivers a surprisingly unique ride. Designers manipulate myriad elements of the shoe—midsole thickness and composition, heel-toe drop, rocker shape, plate stiffness and location, upper materials—each of which affects how the shoe interacts with your stride. And, since the resulting roll and explosive response of each shoe is tuned to optimize a specific stride pattern, it’s important that you find the supershoe that…
