Rob is a perfectly proportioned, living, breathing Coors Light commercial of a man. He talks about running a marathon without really training for it and, recently, his “first” 50K. Of course he would be who Nike would send to take me–someone who hasn’t exercised in six months, maybe a year–for a tour of their latest shoe, not some normal human being, but 180 impossible pounds of Just Do It.
“Let’s run a couple of miles,” he says with the casual rapport of a lesser-known Marvel superhero.
We’re at a gym in Chicago’s north side, stepping onto side-by-side treadmills to try out Nike’s latest paradigm in shoes: Nike Epic React Flyknit. I haven’t run regularly in nearly a decade. I am terrified. But dang, my feet sure do look good.
Of course, a large sole is a necessity for foam to achieve this rebound, but it’s also an advertisement of soft springiness–just looking at the Epic React, you feel like it must give you some extra power as a runner. “We wanted it to be visually distinct, and to be intuitive when you pick up the product,” says Brett Holts, VP of Nike Running Footwear. “You see there’s something about this that looks softer, more cushioned than a slab of foam. There’s a visually intuitive part to [to this approach].” Meanwhile, the upper is a tighter weave of Nike’s Flyknit technology than its sometimes sock-like weaves, which secures your foot tightly onto the pad.
“It’s a lot like baking. You have your bread, flour, egg, and salt. And yeast,” says Hossein Baghdadi, director of Nike NXT Footwear, and lead on React. “I can use different yeast strains, different flours. Different salt. But also combine them in different ratios. And depending on how I bake that bread, I can end up with a nice crust, or I can burn it, or I can overcook it.”
“There was one moment when I tried on a pair of shoes, and was like, ‘holy bleep.’ This was different, this was good,” recounts Baghdadi. “Then it was a question, do other people feel that?” Samples were sent to Nike’s headquarters in Oregon, and Baghdadi confirmed that other people felt the same way, too. The React was light, soft, and springy. Everyone from Nike’s own employees to its partner athletes loved it.
“The pattern is a direct output of that algorithm,” says Holts. “If you were to compare, take the React foam itself versus the React foam with the computational pattern, it’s actually much softer with the computational pattern upon impact, but it’s also more resilient upon impact, meaning it gives more response at the same time.”
Computational design also allowed quicker iteration. In the case of the Epic React this was key, as Nike decided that each half shoe size in the line required a unique sole shape to maximize its own promised energy returns. Such a size-by-size approach to building soles isn’t unheard of, but it’s far more common for a single core sole shape to be designed and simply scaled to all of the shoes in a model’s line, with testing only in the middle and at each of the extremes.
All of those decisions produced the Epic React, tested over 17,000 miles of running, and available in two colorways to the public on February 22, for $150 (though, no doubt, the core React technology will make it to more shoes soon). While you can call it a response to Adidas’s successful Boost line, which has helped Adidas regain its spot just behind Nike as the second biggest athletic shoe manufacturer in the world, it would be unfair to call it a copy. Adidas’s Boost line features brashly unfinished, Styrofoam-looking soles. Even if they can help you dunk a basketball, they’re too cool to admit it. Meanwhile, Nike’s Epic React is carefully finished with speed lines that, like a sports car’s, make them look fast just parked by your front door.
So how did the Epic React work out for me, a guy whose body is in peak physical condition to rock his newborn at 3 a.m. or open the occasional wine bottle on the weekends? As if sensing my own trepidation at the offer of a “short, 5-6 mile run” with a Nike expert, Nike not only sent the Epic React shoes for me to try, but accompanied them with a small wardrobe’s worth of performance Nike gear, ranging from a sweat-sopping jacket to an $50 pair of knee-high compression socks.
So I cover myself head to toe in the bright polyester blends that are vaguely reminiscent of European clubwear circa 1998, gaining confidence the way many reluctant athletes do: by wrapping every inch of my skin in aspirational branding.
I am the swoosh incarnate.
My first run with the Epic React is like jogging on marshmallow fluff. It’s almost eerie how smoothly proportioned the foam feels, from heel to toe, even as I purposefully shift my stride from running on the balls of my feet back to my heels in an attempt to find weak spots. A relaxed mile and a half later, Rob assures me that he is sweating, too–really!–even though only one of us is breathing through his mouth. We adjourn. With suddenly cramped legs, I opt to sit in a chair, rather than work at my standing desk, to write this article. I assume Rob is sending emails while squirrel suiting to his next ultramarathon.
Of course, fashion and performance claims aside, footwear preferences are extremely personal. It’s why Nike’s strategy going forward is to support maximalism and minimalism across its wide line of shoe technologies. It can be everything to everyone. That said, Nike has clearly ditched the “nature amplified” tagline Mark Parker repeated again and again when I visited the campus in 2013, as the company attempted to take over the barefoot market and sell us shoes that felt like wearing socks.
By redoubling its efforts into thick foams, Nike is confirming that the minimalist era is over. We’re in an arm’s race of energy return technology. And as a consumer, it only takes a half an hour in Nike’s or Adidas’s extra-cushioned shoes to remind you that walking on clouds really is more comfortable than running on concrete.
“For the majority of runners, or people, the number one filter is comfort. And that’s why you see the industry go through these swings. There was the whole minimalism thing–and that was a trend we were part of that because there was a potential benefit there–but it swings back to what’s really comfortable,” says Holts. “There will always be a preference, whether what’s trending minimal or maximal. And we’ll always have a cushioned, soft yet responsive solution, because we think that’s where the majority of [people] tend to gravitate.”