Last month, ultra runner David Roche made headlines when he shattered the longstanding Leadville 100 course record by 16 minutes. Yesterday, he revealed which pair of trail running shoes he wore for the win on the high-altitude course, and why he thinks super shoes are changing the landscape of ultra running.
"Trail shoes are in the midst of a seismic shift that is going to reset the sport. And I think that if you look at all of the records being broken, that fundamental change has already begun," writes Roche on Instagram.
The Boulder runner and coach clarifies that he doesn't have a shoe sponsor and that he's "polyamorous" when it comes to shoes, but for his August victory – which saw him break a record that had been in place since 2005 – he reveals he wore the Adidas Terrex Agravic Speed Ultra.
"I think we will look back on the Adidas Terrex Agravic Speed Ultra as a breakthrough shoe," writes Roche, who says he just relinquished the pair he wore in Leadville to Adidas in Boulder for display.
"I was sad to let them go – I wanted to run in them for some more miles."
As we reported back in April, the model – which is designed to run fast on ultra trail distances – was initially released as a limited edition prototype. Tom Evans won the Western States in them last summer, and the shoes are now available to the public.
Though Roche says the shoe has some issues, including sizing, stability and midfoot-strike preference, he gets 500 miles out of each pair and finds them to be the fastest in all of his off-road tests.
Roche says he thinks that the design, which features a rocker sole and chunky stack of 42 mm in the heel, is a sign of things to come in the world of trail running shoes.
"In road and track running, super shoes have fundamentally altered the sport. Not only do the shoes cause big performance boosts (with variation in response rates based on the individual and shoe), they seem to expedite recovery."
Though Roche himself admits that research into trail running lags behind other styles of running, there is some early evidence published in Scientific Reports that suggests super shoes might reduce stress on the runner, which could in turn improve recovery times.
Roche says super shoes seem to be the footwear of choice among the many elite runners and Olympians in his hometown these days.
"That’s a change from a few years ago, when there was debate about their efficacy as a training tool."
He's far from the only ultra runner to notice and enjoy the benefits of super-stacked shoes for long distances. Many of the winners at this year's biggest ultra marathons crossed the finish line wearing super shoes, from the Hoka Tecton 3s on the feet of Vincent Bouillard at the UTMB and Ludo Pemmeret in the Hardrock 100 to the North Face Summit Vectiv Pros that Katie Schide wore to win both the Western States and UTMB.
A couple of years ago, maximalist shoes were still a divisive topic among trail runners, and there are still those who adhere to a more barefoot approach, but it's hard to deny that for many long-distance trail runners, all that foam has a measurable advantage.
"I think this moment is like 2016 on roads, when some athletes had prototypes of the OG Vaporfly and others were running in shoes that might as well have made of cardboard."
