Puma confirmed on Tuesday that it has paid out $171,000 in performance bonuses to amateur runners who raced its Project3 programme at the London Marathon, after 54 of the 176 Project3 starters knocked more than three minutes off their marathon personal bests on Sunday and 84 in total set a new PB. The payout, which Puma is positioning as a counterpoint to Adidas and Nike's elite super-shoe spending, brings the brand's 2026 Project3 spend to nearly a quarter of a million dollars across the Boston and London Marathons combined and the lifetime programme total to "almost $400,000" across more than 600 runners since launch.
The headline rule of Project3 is simple. Any amateur who beats their previous marathon time by three minutes or more, while wearing one of Puma's Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 or Deviate Nitro Elite 4 super-shoes at a designated race, takes home a $3,000 cheque. Additional $3,000 bonuses are paid to the fastest male and female Project3 finisher of each race and to the runner who beats their PB by the largest margin. The 176-runner London cohort came from 16 countries, and Puma's results sheet shows the largest individual PB drop of the day was a touch above 14 minutes, against a programme average of close to seven.
The numbers cut against the dominant narrative of the London Marathon weekend, which was Adidas's: Sabastian Sawe's 1:59:30, Yomif Kejelcha's 1:59:41 and Tigst Assefa's 2:15:41 women's-only world record were all run in the same 97-gram Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, and the resulting share-price boost added more than two billion euros to Adidas's market capitalisation by the Monday close. Puma did not have an athlete in the men's or women's top three. Instead, the brand's gambit on London was to shift the marketing centre of gravity from elite to amateur — paying out a flat $3,000 per qualifying mass-field PB rather than the larger six-figure cheques that Sawe is now being measured by.
For Puma, the calculus is partly about the math of paid acquisition. A $3,000 prize per PB is, as the brand has effectively conceded, cheaper than the equivalent reach a top-three London finish would generate, and the social media pull of a 14-minute marathon PB is closer to the average runner's idea of an aspirational result. The brand's Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 has a published economy figure broadly in line with the other elite super-shoes on the market, and Project3 lets Puma bind that performance claim to verified amateur finish times rather than individual elite contracts. The 176-runner field for London also makes Project3 the largest single-day amateur super-shoe trial of the spring season.
What happens next will depend on how the rest of 2026 plays out. Puma has signalled that Project3 will run again at Berlin in September and at New York in November, and that the $3,000 PB bonus will remain the headline figure across the World Marathon Major calendar. With Adidas's Adios Pro Evo 3 still trading at six to eleven times retail on resale platforms and a wider release not pencilled in until Berlin Marathon weekend, Puma's commitment to keep its NITRO Elite line in stock at retail — and to keep paying its amateur runners for finishing fast in them — could yet make Project3 the most efficient amateur-marketing vehicle of the entire spring marathon arc.