If you’ve studied the lead pack at any major marathon, you’ll have noticed one obvious trend: Nike-sponsored elite runners not named Eliud Kipchoge (and, now, Kelvin Kiptum) all tend to lace up the latest Nike Vaporfly when racing 26.2 miles. On the American side, Conner Mantz is an AF loyalist (he prefers the Alphafly 1). Farther back, it’s a mix.
But, this ratio of Vaporfly among the fastest runners is curious, given the fact that the Alphafly was specifically designed to be a superior nike tech trainer amazon prime number to call.
So, it’s with that intel that Nike set out to overhaul the Alphafly in an effort to get more of its paid athletes to opt for that shoe. Did it succeed? Well, time will tell. The Nike Alphafly Next% 3 was officially announced at the end of November and didn’t go on sale until January but, at recent marathons, we have seen a few more pairs—prototypes were relatively hard to come by, even for pros.
Nike Alphafly Next% 3 Specs
Price: $285
Weight, as tested: 8.7 oz (M12, as tested)
Weight, claimed: 7.8 oz (M10); 6.2 oz (W8)
Stack Height: World Athletics approved limit (must not exceed 40mm)
Drop: 8 mm
Cushioning: ZoomX foam and dual Zoom Air units
Carbon-Fiber Plate: Full-length Flyplate
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I got a test sample of the Alphafly 3 in November. Sadly, it arrived too late for me to lace up in my turkey trot race on Thanksgiving. That’s probably just as well, because I didn’t need to flex that hard at a community jog. But it would have given me the best opportunity to push my pair hard in advance of writing an initial review.
Instead, I had to settle for yanking them out of the box and running four miles, with a good clip at marathon pace, just 24 hours after a 14-mile long run before the shoes were announced. (I don’t recommend doing so, but such is the price I pay to help you get an understanding of the newest footwear.) Since then, I’ve laced them up for a tempo workout of four miles at 6:30 pace, a 5K a little bit quicker than that, and even for 10-second sprints at 4:10 pace.
Key Improvements to the Alphafly 3
As with any shoe update, we always want to know what has improved—and what was messed up. For insight into that, I chatted with Bret Schoolmeester, Senior Product Director overseeing Nike Running Footwear via a Zoom call.
The task for his team, he said, was, “How could we make a really good shoe even better? And how could we increase adoption from all of our athletes in the Alphafly?
“The Vaporfly is now more of a versatile racing and training tool that everybody’s using for everything from 10K to the marathon,” he continued. “Alphafly is really intended to be a specific marathon-racing tool. So we wanted to say, ‘alright, what’s keeping some athletes from choosing the Alphafly for race day?’”
The answer to those questions, Nike believed, could be found by focusing on a few key qualities:
- Create a smoother transition
- Redesign the arch to eliminate irritation and improve stability
- Reduce weight
- Maintain energy return
The most obvious change addresses point 1 above. The shoe visually looks like an all-new model with the sole fully connected by foam. Previous versions of the shoe had an awkward break right behind the Zoom Air units, highlighting the carbon-fiber plate under the midfoot. Now, ZoomX foam runs the length of the shoe, including the few millimeters between the rubber outsole and Air units, an update we saw in v2 to increase energy return and make the shoe run quieter.
Beyond the looks, you’ll obviously feel the change to the fit through the arch. Schoolmeester says they tweaked the last to ensure they were reducing irritation and to make it a runnable shoe. You can actually see the change when looking inside the two shoes side-by-side. On Alphafly 2, the insole rises sharply under the arch, pushed upward because of the very narrow waist underfoot. The Alphafly 3 clearly appears broader across the sockliner, which you can feel immediately when you put on the shoe.
Stability was boosted in two ways: First, Nike widened the midfoot of the shoe when it filled in the gap with foam. Even more so, however, Nike widened the carbon-fiber plate on the medial side of the midfoot. That makes sense on paper: A wider platform underfoot, pushing down on foam that makes more contact with the road, will result in a more stable foundation. That benefits not only us amateurs but also the elite runners when they’re racing at their limits.
“These shoes are, obviously, super-high-performance vehicles,” Schoolmeester said, “but you’re gonna spend two, three, four hours in ’em, depending on who you are. So they need to be really stable and secure without sacrificing any of the other great performance benefits. I like to say, I’ve never seen somebody more beautiful and efficient in their stride than Eliud Kipchoge. But, even he starts to break down at mile 20, 21, 22.”
It’s interesting to note that Nike was able to add the extra foam and widen the platform, yet still reduce weight. My size 12 weighs just 8.7 oz, down from 9.9 oz of v2. For comparison, my original Alphafly weighed 9.3 oz, the felt nike blazer limited edition women bean boots weighs 9.6 oz, nike air max dominate weartesters shoes for sale+ weighs 8.5 oz, Nike Vaporfly 3 ronaldo mercurial nike 2015 2016 black women Saucony Endorphin Elite weighs 8.6 oz. So, while the Alphafly looks chunky, it’s right on par with the top marathon racing shoes.
To shave weight, Nike stripped from just about every area it could. “It’s grams,” Schoolmeester said, “so it’s hard to get it all out of one spot. You’re just kind of shaving here and there, to make sure we can get it all pulled back.”
One big spot they saved weight was the outsole, where Nike used a new “Fast Shot” technology, which Schoolmeester said gives the shoe more traction, too. They also dropped grams by tweaking how they process the ZoomX foam.
Schoolmeester was tight-lipped about what exactly Nike doing with the foam process, saying “I can’t go into massive detail [because] it’s a little proprietary,” but here’s what we gathered. Nike appears to be working with different geometries of the preform—the plastic base material that gets expanded into a shoe-shaped midsole. But, to optimize it, Schoolmeester hinted that they’re trying to not compress the foam. This seems to be something similar to what we saw on the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1, the $500 shoe which has a midsole that’s actually carved into shape rather than compressed.
The Alphafly 3, by comparison, still seems to have been molded into shape, but Schoolmeester says “depending on how much [preform] you have and how much it gets compressed throughout the heel and the forefoot, we found there can be some real performance benefits there—both in terms of weight saving and energy return.”
The tradeoff, as we know, is durability. There’s been speculation that the aforementioned Adidas marathon racer has a shelf life of just one marathon race—Adidas told me “It is not accurate to say the shoe only lasts one race,” but was pretty fuzzy about the shoe’s expected lifespan. As for the Alphafly 3, Schoolmeester says Nike had testers put up to 250 miles on the shoe “and still be really happy with it.”
My First Impressions
Hallelujah! The fit is greatly improved. Alphafly 2 was excruciating for me. The upper didn’t have enough volume and pressed down tightly over my instep. I was in agony every time I wore them for just two or three miles. There was no chance I could make it through a marathon in that version. Plus, AF2 was nearly impossible to get on my feet—I felt like I was going to dislocate my shoulder trying to wrench them on. Consulting our database of wear-tester feedback, the shoe volume issue wasn’t a problem for our testers, but almost everybody remarked on how hard it was to get into the shoe. Alphafly 3, thankfully, is far easier to put on—and it doesn’t give me the same overall pressure. During a 17-mile long run in the Alphafly 3, I finished without any of that foot pain I’d experienced in the previous versions.
Also, as noted above, the arch will appeal to many more runners now. The waist on the AF3 is considerably wider and I don’t feel the bite into my arch like I did on AF2, despite my arch being relatively high and my foot fairly average in width.
For me, the biggest early impression I get is that the heel and forefoot seem to know what each other is doing now. In the AF2, I got a disjointed sensation as I applied weight to the heel before advancing to midstance. The best way I can think of describing it is to picture one of the costumed centipedes from the Bay to Breakers race, where 15 runners are tethered together. You know the runners at the front and the back ends are having a hell of a hard time keeping that thing all together. That’s what the AF2 always felt like to me (and still does, as I ran in them again Monday).
Now, with foam filling in the midfoot section under the carbon-fiber plate, the shoe feels like it’s all going in the same direction at the same time, both ends working in harmony. Does that actually affect performance? I’m not yet sure. But it’s one less thing for me to think about when I’m trying to run fast.
One thing I absolutely was thinking about as I worked my pace down to 6:00-flat was how the Air units feel like a fulcrum beneath the ball of my foot. Right as I get my heel off the pavement, I feel the “pivot” pushing me onto the forward-most part of the carbon-fiber plate for toe-off. It’s a tipping sensation I particularly enjoy, because I like a race shoe to feel like it’s pushing me forward—one reason I also typically enjoy a taller heel-to-toe drop.
But there’s one thing that you’re just never going to get out of your mind: It’s undeniably an Alphafly, based solely on what you hear. The damn shoe still sounds like a horse clip-clopping down the road. There are still cavernous, hollowed-out spaces around the Air units and down the midline of the shoe that create that loud stomping noise. If you’re not an Alphafly wearer, you still likely know the annoyance if you’ve run any marathon in the past few years.
Worse, however, is that on the second four-mile run my test pair developed a steady, mouse-like squeak with every toe-off. It seems the disconnected foam just in front of the Air units may be making contact with the carbon plate, causing it to “yip.” I asked Nike the cause and was told, “In some instances, Alphafly 3 shoes may make a squeaking noise as a result of the Air Zoom units engaging with the plate and foam around it. This does not affect the performance of the shoe!” My solution was to use a tiny smear of bike wax in that gap, which temporarily silenced the squeak. Other testers we have in the shoe now have reported that their shoes have started squeaking, too. Hopefully that goes away quickly, because it’s mighty annoying.
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While the shoe has just gone on sale in the “prototype” colorway you see above, it quickly sold out. Nike says that “more colorways will follow,” but has not provided a date.
As for the cost, well, I have some bad news: When I spoke with Schoolmeester, he said the shoe was holding steady at the $275 price it debuted nearly four years ago. But, upon announcement, the shoe listed at $285 US. Outside the States, it’s going to cost $320 in Greater China; €310 in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa); and $275 for APLA (Asia Pacific and Latin America).
That follows suit with what we saw from the Vaporfly 3—its price sneakily rose $10 since it was first released in March 2023. Like seemingly everything else, you have to pay a few extra bucks for these shoes, too.
Editor’s Note: This article originally published on November 29, 2023 when the Alphafly 3 was first announced, with limited test impressions. We have updated the article to include more insight based on further workouts and long runs in testing.
nike lunar swingtip white dress women outfits 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.
