Thomas Watson

In April 1966, a 23-year-old woman named Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb crouched in the forsythia bushes near the Boston Marathon start line in Hopkinton. When the gun fired and the pack thundered past, she slipped out and joined the race. By the time she crossed the finish line on Boylston Street, she had run ahead of two-thirds of the men – and become the first woman ever to run the Boston Marathon. That part of the story is reasonably well known. What is less well known is everything else.

The Nike Alphafly 3 and Saucony Endorphin Elite 2 are two of the fastest marathon racing shoes money can buy — and at $285 and $275 respectively, they cost about the same as a race entry. Both are full-stack, carbon-plated super-shoes built for one job: getting you to the finish line faster. On paper they’re almost twins, separated by a single gram. On the road, they feel like opposites. Here’s how they actually compare after race-pace testing.

The ASICS Gel-Nimbus 27 and Hoka Bondi 9 are the two shoes runners point to when they say they want “maximum cushioning.” Both are flagship max-cushion daily trainers, both land within a fraction of an ounce of each other on the scale, and both stack up close to the legal limit of foam. But they get to that plush ride in very different ways — and after putting miles on both, the difference comes down to two things: how much the foam pushes back, and how the shoe rolls you through the stride.