Arch: Medium | Gait: Neutral | Footstrike: Midfoot: The Reebok Floatride Run Fast 2 is capable of everything from quarter-mile intervals to 15-mile long runs.
- Nutrition - Weight Loss.
- A full-length rubber sole boosts durability without weighing down the shoe.
- Reebok’s changes to the upper made this a little heavier than the debut version.
Price: $140
Type: Road
Weight: 7.6 oz (M), 6.2 oz (W)
Drop: 11mm (M), 10mm (W)
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We loved the first Run Fast because it felt like a racing flat without the punishing ride you get from such a lightweight shoe. You could use it for everything from track intervals to long runs. Good news: The midsole and outsole remain unchanged on this update. The 2 is firm, but not as hard as most featherweight shoes. That’s because the sole is made from a Pebax-based foam—much like what’s found in the Vaporfly Next%. It’s far lighter than standard EVA but delivers excellent cushioning and off-the-charts bounce (energy return).
The bad news, in our opinion, is that the shoe gained more than half an ounce in weight. We frequently see this with sophomore efforts: Brands pad the shoe and make tweaks based on the first round of consumer feedback, ultimately changing the running experience. In this case, the Fast has a thicker, more standard upper. It provides a secure fit, and a lot of runners will appreciate the change, but it just makes this shoe heavier than it needs to be.
Pros
- mm M, 10mm W
- Exceptional cushioning and energy return
Cons
- Gained some weight from the first generation
Light and Soft
For the last five or six years, every shoe manufacturer has been trying to improve on the age-old foam formula. EVA was the standard for decades because that ubiquitous white midsole material was cheap, durable, and lightweight. If you made it soft, however, it had no responsiveness and felt slow. To make it faster, you had to make it lighter and harder. But newer materials delivered a bouncier sensation underfoot, even if they came at the expense of weight. Then Pebax was introduced to the running world. The material had long been used for hard but flexible plastic components like the Wave plate in Mizuno shoes. But when blown into a foam, it’s lightweight, flexible, and springy—so you can compress it with each footstrike and it rebounds with more force.
The stuff is really unstable on its own, however, so Reebok uses a thin layer of it rimmed with firmer EVA around the top edge. That gives the shoe just enough structure to keep you centered on the foam.
A New Upper
Modern running shoes only see big changes to the midsole and rubber every two years, because the molds to form those pieces is expensive. So off-year updates are typically just tweaks to the upper. In the case of the Run Fast, it’s a pretty big change. Just about everything got slightly more substantial and thicker. That’s not all bad, and some people are going to like it. But we loved the original because it had just enough material to hold the sole to your foot—there was nothing extra to slow you down.
On v2, though, the two-layer mesh upper is thicker, with more reinforcements around the eyelets. And the collar padding is a heavier fabric, which, combined with a thicker heel counter, gives you a more traditional fit around the back half of your foot. Heck, even the laces are thicker. They’re not ruin-the-shoe types of changes, but they’re notable and worth mentioning in case you, like me, loved the original model.
On my size 12, the changes add up to an extra 1.4 ounces from the original model, though in the RW Shoe Lab, we found a men’s size 9 sample only increased by 0.7 ounces. That’s not much, but it’s a full 10 percent weight gain.
The Sole is Still Sticky
Regardless of the upper changes, we still love the amount of rubber Reebok has put under this shoe. The outsole gives you complete coverage from heel to toe and sticks to just about any surface. We found the original maybe even too sticky—it would squeak like a basketball shoe on a gym’s hardwood floor any time we inadvertently scuffed it. This update hasn’t made as much noise, but its performance on roads at a quick pace hasn’t changed either. It still delivers sure footing.
What One Tester Said
Trevor C., tester since 2017
Arch: Medium | Gait: Neutral | Footstrike: Midfoot
“I liked this shoe a lot. It’s a lighter weight training shoe that serves versatile workouts very well. I could run longer distances, but it’s also good for tempo work and speed sessions. Having a do-it-all shoe like this is really awesome because it allows you to do more of your training in a single shoe, particularly useful on workout days where you can warm up a few miles and not need to return to the car/home to switch into the faster workout footwear.”
The Pebax-based midsole foam is lightweight and bouncy Runner's World, guiding the brand's shoes and gear coverage. A true shoe dog, he's spent more than a decade testing and reviewing shoes. In 2017, he ran in 285 different pairs of shoes, including a streak of 257 days wearing a different model.
