It seems for a number of years whilst other manufacturers have had athletes wear the latest incarnation of a racing shoe, the go to amongst Nike sponsored long distance runners has remained the Zoom Streak 3. Low and behold for both the men’s and women’s race 3 of the top 10 finishers, 6 of 20 athletes, were in the Zoom Streak 3! So no fluke. Turns out the year before Sneaker Report conducted the same study. And had to dish out some of the last pairs of 3’s they’d managed to find in time for the race? Unlikely. Or maybe, if it was the Zoom Streak that Nike were having their athletes wear, they’d had a production problem with the 5’s. There were a few Zoom Streak 4’s and 5’s on display but mostly it was the older Zoom Streak 3 shoe that Nike athletes were wearing that day… 13th and 14th place Biranhu Kemal and Micah Kogo… that’s 4 of the top 20 in the men’s race! The same for the women, 7th place Firehiwot Dado and 10th place Buzunesh Deba wearing the ZS3. Stephen Kiprotich, 5th, also wore the shoe. So why was he running in the 3? It turned out he wasn’t the only one. 3? A few months earlier I had purchased the Zoom Streak 5 as a possible alternative to the Flyknit Racer. I came to find that the shoe Desisa had worn to 2nd place was the Nike Zoom Streak 3. It documents the first 100 shoes that crossed the line that day. Soon after I stumbled on the following article from Sneaker Report. But this footage was evidence to the contrary… time for some investigative shoe journalism. As a convert from adidas to Nike, following (in my opinion) the disastrous switch from soling the Adios with ‘Boost’ instead of ‘Adiprene’, I’d been wearing the Nike Flyknit Racer on the assumption that was Nike’s go to marathon shoe. I knew Kipsang was wearing adidas adios boost 2 – in the build up adidas had made a fairly big deal of it as they had Dennis Kimetto break the world record in the same shoe 5 weeks earlier – but what the hell was Lelisa wearing?! Even in a close up on the podium I was still clutching at straws.

And all I was thinking was ‘what are on his feet?’. I’d heard they’d had a bit of a duel racing into the finish line, an exciting culmination to what had been a difficult race in blustery conditions. Being the nerd I am, I was ignoring Tim Hutchings babbel about low arm carry and ‘taking it to each other’. I’d returned to London from New York having run the 2014 marathon and was watching highlights of Kipsang and Desisa.

Nike zoom shoes 2015