Editor’s Note: At our annual RW Shoe Summit meetings in New York City during the week leading up to the NYC Marathon, Adidas addressed durability concerns about the exposed section of forefoot foam. A small percentage of runners were seeing premature wear, so Adidas is going to extend the outsole material to better protect that section for all runners. When Sabastian Sawe became the first official runner to break 2 hours in a marathon in an actual race, he was shod with Adidas’s latest $500 race rocket, the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3.
That shoe is incredibly fast, incredibly lightweight, and incredibly hard to get your hands on. Today, Adidas released the next best thing: The Adizero Adios Pro 5. It’s the evolution of the brand’s best racing shoe, with learnings from the pricier Pro Evo 3.
This time around, it’s lighter and uses a new carbon rim setup instead of rods. We got to test the shoe ahead of the announcement and have put it through some fast-paced workouts to see how it performs. Such is the nature of the beast that shoe companies must keep finding ways to change things up every 18 months or so.
But, the Adios Pro 4 was an outstanding racer, so it didn’t really need a radical overhaul—just a nip here and tuck there. And it seems that’s mostly what Adidas did. It’s worth noting that we saw much the same situation with the recently announced Nike Alphafly 4.
For that shoe, online commenters grumbled that it’s really just the Alphafly 3.1. But it had small tweaks that really improved on the formula. The biggest improvement: weight.
The Adios Pro has been on a diet the last few generations. My size 12 weighs just 7.3 oz, which is an ounce lighter than v4—and that shoe was a full ounce lighter than the previous model. The trimming puts the Adios Pro 5 right where it needs to be, on par with shoes like the Puma Fast-R 3, Asics MetaSpeed Sky/Edge, and Nike Vaporfly 4.
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