Over a year after Tracksmith launched its first Eliot Runner training shoe, the brand has unveiled its first Eliot Racer super shoe. The shoe is planned for a summer release, coinciding with the 2024 Olympic games.
Our RW test team will put the Eliot Racer through the usual rigorous testing once we've received the finished product. But, we did take a first look at the prototype – which is still being fine-tuned before its launch – in the week leading up to the US Olympic Marathon Trials.
When Tracksmith decided to toss its hat into the super shoe ring, it had no delusions about entering an oversaturated market. This was all part of the brand’s strategy. Beginning with the Eliot Runner, which was released in September 2022, the Hare approached footwear by focusing on the core shoes a runner needs.
'You could say the Racer was always a part of the plan,' said Tracksmith’s co-founder and CEO, Matt Taylor, on a video call.
The development of Tracksmith’s training and racing shoes overlapped, which helped the team’s understanding of the geometrical differences between each. For instance, the Eliot Racer’s last is slightly wider in the forefoot because the foot applies more force during turnover at faster paces.
Many people on Tracksmith's product team previously worked for other shoe brands, including New Balance, Puma and Salomon. There’s even a member who worked alongside NASA. With that diversity of experience at the table, the team dived into the challenge of creating a different kind of racing shoe.
At this point, the ingredients of a super shoe are well known: carbon fibre plate, high energy foam and aggressive geometry. There are also those rules every marathoner tries to follow: lay out your gear the night before, start out slow and nothing new on race day. That last rule was the driving force behind the Eliot Racer.
Nowadays, many runners struggle to return to normal daily trainers after running in a super shoe. Instead of reserving super shoes for race day, the urge to train in them has become irresistible. Brands have released super trainers – which are carbon-plated shoes with thick slabs of foam well beyond a 40mm stack height – to feed that craving. There’s also this back-of-mind worry: is training in a shoe for only a couple of runs enough for me to confidently race in it for 26.2 miles?
This is where the Eliot Racer's energy return system comes in. The shoe will come with two sockliners – one for training and one for race day. The 'training sockliner' gives athletes reassurance throughout their training by allowing them to log workouts in their racing shoe. The second sockliner, which is more responsive and has more cushioning, provides athletes with a fresh platform on race morning.
While the Eliot Runner's midsole is composed of PEBA, the Eliot Racer uses TPU foam to sandwich the carbon fibre plate – and you can see it after removing the sockliner. The TPU that is closer to the ground is more durable and slightly harder, whereas the TPU in the sockliner is more responsive and has more give. Shoe specs like upper material, weight, stack height and pricing are yet to be finalised, though.
'In our testing, the properties of these foams definitely have differences based on the volume and the shape of the foams,' says Taylor, who wore the Eliot Racer prototype himself at a mile track race and cross country 10K. 'For the amount of volume in the insole of the Racer, we’ve proven in our lab that TPU actually performs better for us than PEBA.'
The lab also ran energy return tests, comparing the Eliot Racer prototype to other racing shoes, including Nike’s. According to Taylor, Tracksmith’s shoe had the highest energy return across the board.
The shelf life of the sockliner is dependent on the runner. The first sockliner is meant for training cycles of three to four months. But that’s not to say it can’t be used past one training cycle. Similarly, the second sockliner isn’t necessarily a one-and-done feature.
As for what Taylor would say to critics calling the Eliot Racer a gimmick? 'We’re not trying to do something different just to be different,' he says. 'Our team has literally decades of experience in footwear and we have watched this category evolve. We know what works: the geometries, predominantly the stack height; the foam; and the carbon plate. So let’s take that package that everyone knows works and build on it.
'Given the properties of these foams and plates, we thought this was the best way to get maximum energy return. Maybe other brands will look at what we’re doing and continue to evolve their offerings. But we just wanted to make the best shoe we could with what we knew existed in the market.'
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