On Sunday, April 26, Sabastian Sawe ran his way into the history books, becoming the first man to break the 2-hour barrier in an official race. His time of 1:59:30 at the London Marathon shattered Kelvin Kiptum’s world record of 2:00:35 by 65 seconds and was quicker than Eliud Kipchoge’s 1:59:40 from the INEOS 1:59 Challenge exhibition race in 2019.
So what was on the feet of the fastest runner of all time? Sawe raced in the $500 Adidas Adios Pro Evo 3—the brand’s latest high-end super shoe.
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In a press release on April 23, Adidas claimed that the shoe is “the lightest and fastest racing shoe Adidas has ever created” and that it weighs an average of just 97 grams, or 3.42 ounces. In other words, the shoe is designed to be as light as possible for the fastest athletes in the world. According to the Adidas website, the Pro Evo 3 will be available on Monday, April 27 at 10 a.m. in limited supply.
(If you can’t get your hands on it, the more approachable Adizero Adios Pro 4 is a popular pick for marathoners.)
“We went through more than a dozen iterations, working closely with our athletes and testing everywhere from our labs in Herzogenaurach to high-altitude camps in Kenya and Ethiopia,” Patrick Nava, GM of Running at Adidas, said in a press release about the Pro Evo 3. “At that level, every detail really matters—we were measuring things down to the nearest nanogram. It was a long process, but it’s led to something we believe genuinely changes what a race-day shoe can feel like.”
The first edition of the Pro Evo made headlines in 2023 for its $500 price tag and limited supply; just 521 pairs were initially released. Tigst Assefa broke the world record in the shoe at the 2023 Berlin Marathon, running 2:11:53.
Like Sawe, Assefa also wore the Pro Evo 3 in London on Sunday, where she ran a women’s-only world record of 2:15:41 to win for the second year in a row. And Yomif Kejelcha also laced it up in his marathon debut—a staggering 1:59:41 to finish second to Sawe.
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Theo Kahler is the senior news editor at Runner’s World. He’s a former all-conference collegiate runner at Winthrop University, and he received his master’s degree in liberal arts studies from Wake Forest University, where he was a member of one of the top distance-running teams in the NCAA. Kahler has reported on the ground at major events such as the Paris Olympics, U.S. Olympic Trials, New York City Marathon, and Boston Marathon. He’s run 14:20 in the 5K, 1:05:37 in the half marathon, and finished 40th at the 2025 New York City Marathon. He enjoys spotting tracks from the sky on airplanes. (Look for colorful ovals around football fields.)
