Inside the design of Sabastian Sawe’s world-record-setting, 97-gram Adidas ‘supershoe’

When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon on April 26, an Adidas attendant was waiting on the sidelines to collect his shoes. The attendant wrote Sawe’s record-breaking time, 1:59.30, on the side of the shoes, waited for him to take some photos with them, and then whisked them off to Adidas’s archives in Herzogenaurach, Germany.

In that moment, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 became the fastest shoe in the world.

Sawe was the first person to ever run a sub-two-hour marathon in an official race, followed closely by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who finished with a time of 1:59.41. Fellow Ethiopian Tigist Assefa set a women’s world record of 2:15.41. All three of these runners, who are official Adidas partners, wore the Evo 3.

The Evo 3 is the lightest, fastest race shoe Adidas has ever made. Its design is changing the game for every other athletic company on the market.

In the days since the race, awareness of the Evo 3, which Adidas first unveiled on April 23, has skyrocketed. Marc Makowski, Adidas’s SVP of innovation, says an initial limited launch of 200 pairs sold out in less than two minutes (they’re already reselling online for up to $4,000). Adidas expects to drop several more limited runs of the shoe in the coming months, followed by a more broadly available commercial iteration of the design around the Berlin Marathon in September.

But, for Adidas, the Evo 3 represents much more than its potential commercial success: It’s proof, on the world stage, that the brand is on the cutting edge of marathon running innovation. That’s a status that other brands have been doggedly competing to achieve, including Nike with its Alphafly 3 (worn by the previous all-time marathon record holder, Kelvin Kiptum), On with its LightSpray technology, and Asics with its Metaspeed Edge. 

“Marathon racing is, in our industry, a bit like F1 in the automotive industry,” Makowski says. “It’s become that battleground where, as a brand, if you want to showcase your performance credibility, that’s where you do it.”

It’s an intense race to design the most high-tech “supershoe” on the market—and, for now, Adidas is in the lead.

A shoe that weighs less than a bar of soap

Adidas has been developing ultra-light running shoes for more than three years as part of its Adizero Adios Pro effort. The goal, Makowski says, is to work with elite athletes to find out “what it really takes to produce the fastest running shoe.”

The team’s first key insight: It would need to embrace a literal “less is more” approach. Like in F1 racing, even the smallest design details can have a tide-turning impact on performance in elite marathon running—especially when it comes to weight. Adidas’s pro athletes told the team that they were looking for the lightest possible shoe that could still offer stability, cushioning, and traction.

Alasdhair Willis, chief creative officer at Adidas, says that a minimalist approach is nothing new for the company’s design team: “When I came to the brand, I was working on a project called Project Silence, which was about the idea that, when you cut away the noise, the silence gets louder. It’s this sense of reducing, removing the superfluous to get us down to the essence of what’s required.”

Makowski explains that prior to Evo, Adidas’s professional running shoes averaged around 230 grams. After in-house testing, the design team found that taking around 100 grams off of that total could achieve a 1% reduction in running economy (a key measurement of a runners’ physiological performance).

One percent might sound like a small blip, but Makowski’s team found that it could potentially shave 60 seconds off of a total marathon time.

The first Evo launched in September 2023 and weighed in at 138 grams. The Evo 2 arrived in April 2025 and had the same average weight. Both of these models produced major results: Adidas says the two shoes helped their athletes break three world records and win over 30 key road races, including six World Marathon Major wins, seven national records, five course records, and one Olympic record time.

Then, last September, Sabastian Sawe stepped out in the Evo 2 to run the Berlin Marathon. He hit a record-breaking time of 2:02:16, despite intensely hot weather—leading many fans to speculate that with a more comfortable temperature, he could’ve clinched the first sub-two-hour time then and there. 

“That moment then further accelerated a lot of the work, because we felt like we had it, and it somehow got taken away from us by the weather conditions,” Makowski says. “So we thought, Okay, what else can we do from a product perspective to take our destiny even more into our hands?’”

The answer was a moonshot design concept that would stretch Adidas’s innovation chops to their limits: A supershoe weighing less than 100 grams. 

Foam, carbon, and kitesurfing

The team reworked the entire design of the Evo, from stitching to laces, to bring the total weight down in almost imperceptible increments.

The most critical element of the design was its foam base, which cushions the athletes’ foot and provides maximum energy return. Essentially, it needed to function like a spring propelling the foot up and forward. 

For the base of the Evo 2, Makowski’s team created a 39 millimeter stack of proprietary foam, called Lightstrike. For the Evo 3, they went back to the drawing board to devise an updated Lightstrike formula that could stand at the exact same height, just with less total density.

While Makowski says the specific recipe is under wraps, the process generally entailed identifying which lighter chemicals in the mix could be bumped up to a higher total of the composition, while also mixing a greater ratio of air into the foam. 

“Ultimately, what we’ve done is created a foam that is 50% lighter than its predecessor with 11% more energy return,” Makowski says.

With such a thick piece of foam cushioning the foot, the Evo 3 needed to be stabilized with a structural component sandwiched inside the Lightstrike layer. To solve this problem on the Evo 2, the team had already designed a five-fingered rod system—imagine this like a structural plate in the shape of a spread hand—to keep the sole stable.

With the Evo 3, though, that component proved too heavy. Makowski’s team stripped it back from five rods to just one horseshoe-shaped carbon-fiber-infused piece (named the Energyrim) that circles around the bulk of the foam.

When it came time to design the upper material of the Evo 3, the design team quickly realized that none of the conventional materials on hand would allow them to reach their weight goal. They started looking at other industries that might be using ultra-light materials. They landed on an unexpected source of inspiration: kitesurfing. 

“We looked at thin, lightweight foils that actually have a high level of rigidity and stability, and then we embedded polyester yarns that have a 50% higher strength than a regular polyester yarn,” Makowski says. “We created an upper that is ultra-light, but gives you way more stability than what you would get from any other existing lightweight material.”

In a series of final touches, the team stripped away any unnecessary stitching on the upper component, added a strategically placed sole for traction, and created stretchy laces to reduce their total length and weight. After countless prototypes and rounds of testing in the Herzogenaurach lab and with athletes at Adidas’s facilities in Kenya and Ethiopia, the Evo 3 was complete. It weighs 97 grams: about the same as a pack of cards, a bar of soap, or four small batteries. 

“There were moments when we handed athletes the shoe in a box, they picked it up, and they’re like, ‘You gave me an empty box,’” Makowski recalls. “The box weighs more than the actual shoe.”

The race to design the next supershoe

The Evo 3 is already proving to be a bright spot for Adidas’s business. The day after the London Marathon, the company saw a small boost in share prices as investors reacted to coverage of the shoe. Shares rose even further on April 29, when the brand revealed strong first quarter financial results—including a total 14% revenue increase year over year, driven in part by a 10% jump in running gear sales. 

Going forward, Makowski says, the brand plans to apply some of the new technologies and methods that it developed for the Evo 3 to other shoes in the Adidas catalog. Willis says that the shoe’s success is bound to have a “material effect on the business from a commercial standpoint.” More importantly, though, he hopes that it begins to position Adidas as more of an “innovation brand” that is constantly cooking up its next groundbreaking design.

“You can’t be a truly successful sports brand if you’re not successful in running,” Willis says. “We have been really heavily committed to winning the performance race category for the last three or four years. It is clearly quite literally a race in terms of how quickly innovation can be brought to the market—and to the athlete.”