Puma seems to be a bit longer to me than the Alphafly 3. Width is very similar.
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Finally ran in these. Did 5x1 mile on 90s rest.
The shoe is grippy around the corners. No issues there.
The fit is true to size. I almost felt they were a little small but only just because my Nikes fell a little roomier, but while running they were perfect.
Every interval felt easy fast. Faster than I’d normally run. I flipped my watch over to cadence and I was about 3-4% higher cadence than I normally am without trying to force it.
The shoe feels light and snappy. A soft snap. Not the AF3 squish and not the Asics firmness.
After my first run, no doubt my favorite race shoe.
Legs felt great. No issues feeling like my calves were working too hard for me. Visually, the heel worried me like it was going to be unstable, but no issues or feeling like that at all. Wow. This shoe is legit.
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I really enjoy mine. Decided to go with the On Cloudboom strike yesterday at IM California. Happy with my call as a good portion of the run is on hard pack gravel with some loose dirt. The On feels much more stable. It’s a softer shoe which I think helped me get across the line.
Def think the puma will be the shoe I choose for my next 70.3
Just adding another follow-up after IM AZ today. I PR’d my marathon compared to last year by 14 minutes. Last year I was injured that prevented running for about 5 weeks before the race though!
I ran 10min faster than IM Nice this year, we which I ran in new Alphafly 3s. There I biked almost 2 hours slower than AZ (plan in Nice was always to take the bike “easy” and go hard in AZ).
Anyway, my first thought getting off a hard bike (for me) at 4hr50… was damn these shoes are murder on my legs. I was moving at a good pace, but holy hell, for the first 20 minutes they beat me to hell. I was missing the soft squish of the Nikes.
But my pace was good. I was trying to hold between 4:30-4:50/kms the entire run and I did just that with an average 4:47km for the run.
I’ll also say the shoes look pristine on the bottom still at first inspection.
So, if you have resilient legs and want to run a PR off the bike, check these out. You will definitely feel it though.
One more post on the Puma R3 for anyone looking at these. PR’d my IM marathon at AZ in them and haven’t used them until the Mesa Marathon today.
Net 1000ft downhill, with a decent 2 mile climb thrown in. Pretty solid PR course. I don’t really do stand alone marathons, but I have been doing a lot of zone 2 on the bike since December and wanted to throw some intensity into my weekly runs and then got the bug to go for a marathon PR about 4 weeks out…. Not ideal, but fitness was good already.
Used the Pumas and felt amazing and easy all the way through the half at on pace for a 2:57ish finish. But damn, the mixture of the strong return in these shoes and my relatively low mileage beat the hell out of my legs. I’m a huge fan of this shoe for a lightning fast half. If you are running fast in these at marathon distance, please have high mileage and/or do regular work in an alternate training pair.
7k from finish a knot developed in my calf and I was in survival mode. Finished in just over 3hrs. Not at all disappointed, and my fitness and heart was feeling great. Almost wish I did the race in my alphafly 3s to see if my legs would have felt much better.
So for me personally and the way I train, the R3 is going to be my half marathon shoe and I’m going back to the Alphafly 3 (or maybe Asics, I like those too) for my Ironman marathons.
In case this helps anyone - I highly recommend this marathon shoe if you can get a lot of regular miles in them. In which case you need two pairs. Or I suppose if you’re a 2:40 or under guy…
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Spending a lot of training time in the R3 would be expensive. Do they feel similar to the R1 in that regard? Those were a bit less protective than R2, and can be found cheaply now.
I haven’t used either of those so I can’t comment.
I agree on the expense. There might be some calf lifting with a lot of high reps that could help increase the tolerance to the pounding late into the marathon.
Just did a test comparing my “old” Nike Allhafly 3 against my new Puma Fast-R NITRO Elite 3.
First of all: do subjectively not feel a great difference. The Nike weighs 235g per shoe, the Puma 190.
Testprotocol:
Treadmill, 13 km/h, 2 minutes Puma, 2 minutes rest, 2 minutes Nike, 2 minutes rest etc. After each run I wrote down my Heart Rate.
Result:
P 129 N 135
P 136 N 139
P 137 N 136
P 136 N 136
P 136 N 136
P 135 N 135
So after some turbulence in the beginning due to warm-up effects the Heart Rate grooved in at about 136 for both shoes. It seems that they’re the same to me.
What is HF??
Sorry it’s my non-native English, I mean Heart Rate.
The protocol is way too short and to do a real comparison you should do,it with a gasanalyses so you cannot only monitor heart rate but also oxygen uptake etc.
But 2 min is too short to really measure it as heart rate comes up slowly.
We do this test a couple of times a year and do blocks of 10 minutes. But also do it with gasanalyses as we own that equipment.
Jeroen
Yes of course you can monitor other data than just Heart Rate, somewhere up in this thread one also used lactate.
However, if the Heart Rate difference of two shoes is about the same after 2-minute runs it will probably not be a lot different after 3- or 20-minute runs. Heart Rate should be indicative for effort and speed so I’m happy to draw conclusions from my simple test. Furthermore, the problem of doing blocks of 10 minutes is that you can’t do a lot of them: maybe only two comparisons which might not be significant to draw conclusions (I did 6 comparisons in my test).
On the other hand, I only wanted to share my results without claiming to be right, I’m far from being an expert.
Most of the reviews of the Puma’s say they are not well-suited to heel strikers. I’m definitely in that category but when damn near everyone on my racing team bought a pair—and a few raved about them after a marathon—I couldn’t resist the peer pressure. (Not sure what that says about me, a 52-year old man).
In any case, I really did not like them at all. There’s basically no heel on them, and every step felt awkward and harsh. I went back to the Metaspeed’s, which have served me well at every distance. It’s clearly a fast shoe, but not the right shoe for everyone.
I just got a pair of these. I am a “bigger” runner at 6 feet 2 170 lbs, and pretty fast too for a 41 year triathlete, with a threshold of about 5:40 per mile. I am also a major heal striker. This results in a lot of pounding on my legs when I do faster workouts. I did a workout in these. They are very fast shoes no doubt, but I am still debating if I would race a 70.3 half marathon in them. The major issue is the feeling of instability and the resulting stress it places on your calves. I am still sore 3 days later. The Hoka rockets give me a little more stability so I may just stick with those.
I did a lab test of the Puma vs Adidas Pro 4 and the Metaspeed Ray. The puma showed about 2% faster than those other shoes, but 2% is such a huge difference I would expect to observe the improvement in practice outside the lab, and I simply don’t observe that. My race times are the same as usual, my threshold sessions where I test lactate are the same as any of my other shoes. They’d still be my shoe of choice for half and shorter races, but they are a bit firm for a full marathon for me. It’s also worth noting that many of the Puma pro runners, the women especially, have continued to run in Puma’s more traditional style super shoe.
I’ve done multiple lab tests and will have another one in 2 weeks with the Puma vs my current fastest testing shoe and another new one.
Heart rate tests are useless for this. There is too much variability for the resolution it provides. Just ignore it completely. You need a gas analysis to tease out differences of 1-3%.
In my experience lab testing does correlate well with race pace. I found a shoe that was 2% faster than my previous PR shoe and I ran a 4 minute PR in my following race. They’ve since become my tempo day shoes and sure enough I run about 5sec/km faster at the same effort.
Edit: Just saw the HR protocol was only 2 minutes. That’s even worse. All the relevant physiological measures take about 2 minutes to equilibrate. There’s a reason all the shoe brands and labs do 5 minute rounds. First 2-3 minutes are ignored and the last 2-3 minutes are used for analysis.
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This