If you have watched any of the recent professional long course triathlon races, you may have noticed a new run shoe trend.  A lot of the top athletes are now running in the Asics Metaspeed shoes. I bought myself a pair of the Asics Metaspeed Edge shoes, and today I ran in them for the first time.

The Metaspeed shoes are high end, carbon plate shoes from Asics, and designed to compete with the famous Nike Vaporfly products.  These types of run shoe can improve running economy and this enables athletes to run faster.  I am not going to debate whether using these shoes are ‘cheating’; they can be used in races and that is all that matters for now.

So what are they like to run in?

Firstly, they are incredibly light weight and you notice this, as soon as you put them on.  Just walking around the house, they felt ‘different’. It was almost as if they propelled me forward.

On my run, the shoes felt nicely cushioned, but early on in the run they didn’t feel that different. That was until I went up a slight incline. Going uphill, these shoes felt amazing. Maybe I was imagining it, but it felt a lot easier to run up an incline.

Running downhill, I found that I could feel pounding in my quads, until I increased my cadence and ran faster.  Once I did that, the shoes felt great again.

The only ‘issue’ I had, while running in the shoes, was a slight lack of support. That is not a shoe issue, it is me.  These shoes are a neutral shoe and I typically run in stability shoes.  I have a pair of inserts that provide additional stability, so I am going to try those in the shoe on my short run tomorrow.

I love Asics shoes and the Gel Kayano has been my favorite shoe for a long time. If the new insert works well, I have a feeling that that I am going to absolutely love these shoes too. The Asics Metaspeed Edge might just be the shoe for my next race.