Adidas's record-breaking weekend at the London Marathon was won as much in the laboratory in Herzogenaurach as it was on Tower Bridge. Sebastian Sawe's 1:59:30 winning performance and Yomif Kejelcha's 1:59:41 in second were the first two sub-two-hour marathons run in legal, record-eligible conditions, and both Adidas-sponsored athletes wore the same shoe: the new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, launched three days before the race and going into general retail this week. Tigst Assefa's women's-only world record of 2:15:41 was set in the same model. Three world records, two sub-two-hour barriers, one shoe.
The headline number on the Pro Evo 3 is its weight. At 97 grams in a UK 8.5 sample, it is the lightest mass-production running shoe ever taken to retail, roughly 30 per cent lighter than the Pro Evo 2 it replaces and around half the weight of a typical men's racing shoe a decade ago. Most of the saving comes from a reformulated Lightstrike Pro Evo midsole foam, which Adidas claims is nearly 50 per cent lighter per cubic centimetre than the version used in the 2024 Pro Evo 2. The remainder is recovered from a kitesurf-sail-derived engineered mesh upper and a stripped-back outsole that uses Continental rubber only at the forefoot.
The shoe also marks a structural rethink of the now-standard carbon-fibre plate. Adidas has replaced the embedded plate of the Pro Evo 2 with what it calls EnergyRim, a U-shaped carbon stiffener that sits at the perimeter of the midsole rather than running through it. Internal Adidas data, which the brand published alongside the launch, claims the geometry boosts forefoot energy return by 11 per cent over the Pro Evo 2 and improves running economy by 1.6 per cent at marathon pace. Stack height sits at 39mm at the heel and 36mm at the forefoot, comfortably inside the World Athletics 40mm road-shoe limit, with a 3mm drop. Pricing has been confirmed at 500 US dollars and 450 pounds, with a single white-on-white colourway at launch.
Reviewer reaction has been split between admiration for the engineering and questions about durability. Road Trail Run, RunRepeat and The Running Channel all received pre-launch samples and broadly agreed that the shoe runs as light as it looks; several reviewers reported the Pro Evo 3 felt closer to a racing flat from a decade ago than to a modern super shoe in the hand. The trade-off is mileage. Adidas has so far declined to publish a recommended life for the shoe, but the published guidance for the Pro Evo 2 was a single race plus warm-ups, and several reviewers expect the Pro Evo 3 to be even more limited because of the lighter foam. At 500 dollars and at one race per pair, the Pro Evo 3 is the most expensive running shoe in the world per kilometre run.
The strategic context matters too. Adidas has spent two years closing the gap on Nike at the elite end of marathon running, taking three of the four 2025 World Marathon Major men's titles and building a Kenyan roster around Sawe, Kejelcha and Kelvin Kiptum's former training partners. Sunday's London produced the highest-profile retail moment for a running shoe since Nike's Vaporfly launch in 2017, and Adidas has been deliberate about timing: the Pro Evo 3 was already on sale in Adidas's London flagship by Sunday evening, and the global rollout closes this week. Whether the shoe outlasts Nike's response — the Alphafly 4 is expected at Boston 2027 — is the question now driving the next 12 months of super-shoe development.