I’ve been an ardent fan of the Adidas Adios for over a decade. I bought my first pair in 2012, four years after Halie Gebreselassie broke the 2:04 barrier in the marathon in the original Adios. I can still picture him flying to a world record on a moody day in Berlin while wearing a fluorescent yellow prototype.
His whiplash finishing time of 2:03:59 shattered everyone’s conception of fast, and, every time I laced them up, I held confidence that I, too, could be speedy. Since then, I’ve worn several versions of the top-shelf racing shoe throughout its lifecycle, thousands of miles clocked on road workouts and light trails.
I love this shoe.
Which is why the recently released Adios 8 arrived at a particularly interesting time, a time of leaps and bounds in high performance footwear, where supershoes and carbon plates have stolen the show, and often for good reason. I wondered: What role does a shoe like the Adidas Adios 8 fill today? What role does a non-carbon-plated, high-performance flat like the Adios play in a shoe ecosystem full of Alphaflys and Endorphin Elites and Rocket Xs?
I took the latest version of…
