October 2019 Elliot kipchoge did what no human had ever done before broke the sub 2 hour marathon record finishing with his time of 1 hour 59 minutes and 40 seconds now the shoes he was wearing during this race would go on to get banned from running events just a few months later I mean mixing the event of someone breaking a sub to our marathon and doing it with now banned shoes created a perfect storm for what seems from the outside as a perfect Nike publicity stunt clearly creating an image around this pair of shoes that
it is just so good and it will help you run so much faster that it needs to be banned so that people can compete on a Level Playing Field even though the specific pair of shoes that Elliot kimchoke wore during that sub 2 hour marathon Race ended up being banned and no longer permitted by the world Athletics Nike quickly released an almost identical looking retail version it had a shorter stack of foam and only one carbon plate running through the midsole making it eligible to be legal in competition now fast forward a few years and
we have a somewhat similar story this time it's a lot more serious an Ethiopian Runner durara Harissa actually won the race finishing with a time of two hours and nine minutes just 45 minutes later he was disqualified and stripped of his first place title and why because of his shoes his pair right over here or actually the first version of it this is the latest version and it is packed with technology even more than that first version it's also made by this Edward Scissorhand looking machine which is some kind of dystopian futuristic process of creating
this pair of shoes now all I could say is after getting this pair of shoes in hand and trying it out it truly is ridiculous it's called the Adidas Adi Zero Prime X 2.0 strong pretty impressed I strung that sentence together it is officially released on September the 15th however for Adidas members which is pretty much you just put your email in there you can get these things early however now I believe they're sold out they retail for a whopping 250 pounds here in the UK or 300 if you're around the US now typically of
this shoe is illegal you wore this pair during a competitive running race you would be disqualified or potentially even banned and that's because of a few things first off and most obviously is because of this giant stack of foam that you find underneath a pair of shoes it is the tallest stack I've ever seen coming in at 50 millimeters the world athletic rules that you can only wear a pair of shoes with a 40 millimeter stack as the highest put that in comparison the retail version of the band Nike shoe comes in at 40 millimeter
stack height so this is 10 whole millimeters taller now another one of the world athletic rules that this pair of shoes breaks is the fact that they State you can only have one carbon plate running through the center however this pair has at least two so at this point you may be wondering why did Adidas make these it was something that I was genuinely considering as well I mean if they were jam-packed full of all of this Tech made for serious Runners but serious Runners can't race in them something's not adding up here well I
think a big reason which is something that you can clearly see through Adidas's marketing of this pair of shoes they're really really leaning into the fact that this is an illegal shoe I mean if you head over to their website their slogan for these is literally so much technology in a shoe it's not allowed in Elite races every single FAQ that they have shown on their website is about these being illegal and why they made it yeah don't get me wrong I'm not saying that these are just fluff for marketing I do think there is
something really really interesting about Adidas basically jam-packing all of their most futuristic and Innovative technology into one pair of shoes honestly these are insanely impressive on foot I mean not just this insanely soft and Squishy midsole which is made of Adidas's Light Strike Pro cushioning not also this new upper technology that Adidas has put together called strong it's ridiculously over engineered now this pair of shoes falls into a category what serious Runners called a super shoot it's again comparable to like the Nike Alpha fly in the very very top tier of basically when a company
creates a running pair of shoes with just all of their technology slammed in as a shoe it's not really made for casual wear and every single piece and idea of the issue is put together all to help the performance of the wearer now I'm not a serious Runner by any means I go to the gym I occasionally run I'm mainly focused on Sports and just general fitness what I'm mostly interested about with this pair of shoes and any super shoe for that matter is the technology that usually trickles down from this pair of shoes to
the more affordable and more lifestyle models a great comparison would be the Nike Alpha flight but since that Elite Super Shoe released he has been trickling down this technology into some of their other models like the Nike Invincible run one of the most comfortable shoes I've ever tried also the alpha fly having those Zoom Air unit Pods at the front has led them to try and put those pods into more of their lifestyle models which has produced some very interesting looks but nevertheless it's pretty cool to see and I hope that Adidas decides to do
the same thing because arguably this technology that's in this pair of shoes is even cooler I mean for starters This Light Strike Pro foam that's in the midsole of these things is ridiculously soft it's also really really light so I could just imagine this in a lifestyle model being an incredibly comfortable pair of shoes but honestly I think one of the coolest Technologies in this pair of shoes is the upper it's called the Adidas strong it's actually a technology that Adidas has been working on for quite a while now they first announced this with the
future craft 4D shoe it was just a concept shoe that they hadn't actually produced yet but they were mainly focusing on this strong material which if you look at it up close it looks insane like some kind of Spider-Man woven web and you could just look at it and think that it's some kind of weird stringy material but in fact this strong material is the world's first data-driven textile creation process basically they can input athlete data into the Edward Scissorhand looking machine which places each thread into a single composite with specific performance zones based on
that data they're basically thicker and thinner sections all to try and boost the performance of the person or the Accolade who is wearing this pair of shoes now in hand it actually feels pretty weird because it does feel like kind of one piece of material but at the same time you can feel the texture on the upper and just visibly see and it is literally just made out of a bunch of little threads woven in between each other mixed with the fact that you do have this little stretchy piece to actually slide your foot in
there it ends up being a very comfortable experience now if you're someone who maybe tried out the first version well this one does actually improve on that first version Pretty massively the main difference between this second version and the first one is the fact that these are just way more stable than in that first version the big problem that a lot of people had with the first version was that it was so narrow that it would cause stability problems and people would roll their ankle or just generally speaking feel unstable wearing it now this pair
definitely improves on that it's a lot wider it feels a lot more stable on foot in doing that it also added a little bit more weight to it this is about roughly 50 grams heavier than the first version so what's it like wearing this pair of shoes well I wore these around kind of casually I'd say the biggest problem stopping you from wearing this pair of shoes casually is the plates that run inside the midsole it makes it a lot more I guess just sturdier so when you're walking around you kind of feel like you're
being propelled forwards with every single step now when you're running that's amazing that's exactly what you want but when you're just walking around you you don't want that and running in this pair of shoes is obviously a drink definitely an elite level running shoe and they feel incredibly comfortable on foot I could see this pair being an incredibly good lifestyle model if it didn't have the plates or just a less Elite level of a running shoe something like the Nike Invincible run where it's still a running shoe but it's also something that you can wear
casually it's got an incredibly soft midsole a nice upper I'd love for Adidas to do something like that with the technology that's in here because honestly this is such an impressive pair of shoes from every standpoint I would love to see something that's uh just something you could wear around but until then this is a very expensive Elite running shoe not made for elite runners
