Ryan Heisler

The godfather of nearly every current road racing shoe on the market – the Nike Vaporfly. Image: Nike It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 10 full years since the original generation Nike Vaporfly (then known as the Vaporfly 4% Elite) started trickling into the hands of Nike’s elite runners. It would be nearly another full year before the first releases would be open for public sale.

Any follow-up to a product that I dubbed my sleeper shoe of the year last year is going to have some mighty big…errr…shoes to fill. (I promise, I’m not going to fill this thing with nothing but bad puns and Dad jokes.) That’s the exact dilemma that Salomon and the Aero Glide 4 are presented with; how do you alter a shoe that was so good in the first place? And especially where the Aero Glide 3 represented such a huge departure from the one that came before it?

The famous in-water start of the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon With over 170 races globally, there’s an awful lot of variety in IRONMAN host locations. If we expand this to include other worldwide triathlon race producers, we get close to 250 unique venues. That’s an awful lot of stakeholders, courses to route, and of course, money involved. It is, as we wrote in our article following IRONMAN Jacksonville, a logistical nightmare attempting to produce one of these events.