Straight from the Brooks HQ, Lee gives us the rundown on the latest race day supershoe from Brooks: the Hyperion Elite 5.
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All right, this is Brandon with Fleet Feet and we are at the Brooks headquarters in Seattle, Washington and I’m here with Lee, product line manager of racing. We’re gonna break down the Hyperion Elite. Lee, Brandon, thanks for having me. Psyched to be here. Yeah, this is the Hyperion Elite 5. This is the fastest shoe that we have ever built for marathon road racing, and we are so proud of it uh and so proud of uh everything it’s going to accomplish. This shoe is the amalgamation um of a lot of years of experience outfitting people like Dez Linden, CJ Albertson, Jess Mlan, like our fastest marathon racers. And this shoe came to be directly from their feedback from the Hyperion Elite 4 and the Hyperion Elite 4 PB. The ideation and like how this kind of got started was just wanting to create something that was lighter than air. Not necessarily just from a weight perspective, like these shoes need to be under 7 ounces to be competitive nowadays. When we would talk to the athletes, they would always talk about how their headsp space during a race instead of being really tuned in and aware of what people were doing, um there was there was nothingness. Like CJ has this great quote when he was running Boston where he’s like, “Every thought that I have is wasted energy, which is wasted speed from a metallic platform.” You know what I mean? And so, how can we build something that isn’t just light to the touch and light underfoot, but something that just like disappears and feels like an extension of your body? And I think that we accomplished that. Like this thing is there’s so much excellence built into this. Whether it’s from the foam or the geometries, whether it’s the carbon fiber plate, every inch of this thing, every kind of millimeter of why the sidewall displaces in this angle, why the plate kind of has a cutout here, everything is built to make the human as metabolically advantageous as possible. And we’ve thought through every stitch of this thing to accomplish that. And we’re psyched on it. You talk a little bit about like every stitch of this shoe and I can already just see from the top it almost looks like I don’t know it’s like I don’t know if it’s knit or weaved or stitched together but it’s got this like really the upper has this like really light and airy almost like a track spike uh vibe to it which I think is really cool. It almost looks like it’s like 3D printed like in a way. It’s so funny you say track spike. One of the early kind of ideation sessions was Dez. Dez has this great focus where she was like instead of taking a marathon shoe and making it faster. How do we take a track bike which is inherently faster than a marathon shoe, right? Like if you take a Hyperling MD, that thing is meant to run two circles just just two two circles. Got it. Um and how do you take that ideology like that speed and translate it to the cross? I see. And so a lot of this upper actually did come from our track spikes and we’re using like a TPU coated knit. So, all the yarns on this thing, uh, while it seems like when you see on the wall, it seems like it would drape and be, you know, really really light and tensile, but it’s it’s quite strong. Like, it locks the foot down the midfoot, but it’s still so open, so breathable, so light there. We’re psyched in the upper. Upper is different than anything we’ve ever done. And it still has some really nice give and flex to it as well. So, it seems like accommodating. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then you’ve got some padding around the heel collar to just kind of provide that extra structure. this. So this um on this last platform, like the way we build this shoe, we actually use a spike heel counter. So the heel of the shoe is actually very similar to a spike, but we make it once again like taking a marathon shoe and or I’m sorry, taking a track spike and making it applicable to the road. We took basically a track heel and gave you this like really soft touch, really premium heel counter that just helps lock the foot down. So yeah, like when you’re looking at this upper, there’s so many track things that we’ve just translated up to 26.2 miles. Well, well, as a as a track fan myself, I’m really really excited. And I kind of just love nerding out about the uppers of the shoe. And like I do feel like while everyone is focused on the midsole, the upper is something that sometimes can be forgotten or not really like thought of. And at Fleet Feet, like fit is such a big part of our story and our message. And so making sure that you have that right dialed in fit. It’s really exciting to know that that’s really something that that wasn’t overlooked here. Yeah. But let’s talk a little bit about the midsole. And um visually the first thing that immediately comes to mind are these are these bubbles? Are they like little pods? Like are they like beads? Like what’s going on here with these with these circles? All it’s all they’re all the above. I think it’s literally if you ask us in person, they’ll have like a different name for it. So these this is another thing that came directly from the athletes. The way these like super shoes are built, it’s usually you take the best foam, you put two slabs of it on top of each other and you have a plate in the middle, shoe goes this way, everyone’s happy. But when you put two slabs of foam on each other, these foams are so advanced, the only place that the foam can kind of displace and then kind of like deform and reform to give you that pop and that energy return. When you just have two slabs, you’re only you’re only giving the foam the perimeter to be able to like expand and contract and give you that propulsion. So the idea behind the cutting all this away and having these different shapes was literally Dez was like this this blocked foam idea. What if we just use different shapes and have them compress against each other? Do we get a metabolic advantage that’s different than all of these kind of sea of sness? So instead of having two slabs um and two squares on top of each other, we kind of have these offset orbs if you will. And the idea is that the foam should be able to displace in a much more smooth kind of convex manner and should give you a much more smooth kind of natural propulsion to that big toe. The the biggest call out here and I think it’s a testament to our engineering is we’ve cut out a lot of this midsole. This is 8% more gold, more DNA gold than Hyperion 4 PB. So, the shoe is lighter and you have these like massive displacement pods here in the midsole, but we know the foam is kind of the engine of these shoes. The foam is what makes the shoe feel propulsive and fast. And we’re giving the runner more of that good stuff. Uh, even though it looks like wester kind of a cool little tidbit. And DNA gold runs throughout the entirety of the shoe. That is the the one foam that’s in this one. Whereas the the Hyperion Max 3 had had two foams. So, this one’s going to be more aggressive. maybe a little bit faster on foot as well. Yeah, the Hyperion Elite should be our the fastest shoe that you can buy from from Brooks Racing. Uh it is meant for race day. It is crafted 100% with our Brooks Pro Athletes. So, all the feedback uh and it is 100% DNA Gold, which is our lightest, softest, and fastest foam that we make. And for race day, is this like are we talking 5K, 10K territory? Are we talking half marathon or full marathon? What would someone want to utilize this shoe for? So, this was designed with the full marathon in mind. 26.2 is like the majority of where our testing went. But nowadays, these shoes are so light and they’re so quick. Like, this is absolutely a 5K, 10K shoe, you know what I mean? Absolutely a half marathon shoe. I think um it’s not World Athletics legal for the track. So, like anybody that’s like going to your local track meet in here in Seattle, we have the all comers meet where you can go and run a hot mile or you know, hot 5K. um those you’re going to get in some tricky scenarios, but yeah, anything 5K to a marathon excels at. This is incredible. I mean, not only does it visually look beautiful, um but something that I really like was that you put a different Brooks logo on it than what we typically see in a lot of other Brook shoes like um I’m not sure what the other logo is called, the more traditional Brooks logo that goes Yeah. the path logo. Um, but this one you went with the the the Brooks one going all the way across the shoe. I really like that subtle design there. And then in between the midsole here, there’s what I’m seeing called not just speed vault, speed vault plus. Yes. So that’s I’m assuming going to be different than the speed vault that we see in Hyperion Max 3. Yes. Okay. Great question. Good eyeballs. Yeah. So speed vault, if a shoe has speed vault, it’s getting a rigid structure of some kind. Maybe that rigid structure is nylon. Maybe it’s carbon fiber. Speed vault kind of stands for road plates. Okay. Speedvault plus is our highest end plate. It is produced by a company out of Berkeley, California called Aerys. And what the reason it’s kind of the plus is not just because it’s carbon fiber, but because very similar. It’s the exact same plate as the Hyperite 4PB. It is carved out at very specific moments in the shoe to kind of augment flex and then augment weight. So, we’re able to keep the plate very, very light while still being very, very torsionally resistant. So, that torsion and that stiffness is what kind of exacerbates that forward propulsion. We’re able to cut away a ton of carbon fiber out of this plate while still keeping it really torsionally strong. And then each plate is kind of size customized. So, the idea is, so Dez is a is an M5, right? A women’s 6.5. I’m a size 12 in men’s. Okay. Dez does not need the same stiffness plate that I do. You know what I mean? Because our feet and our bodies are so much different. So instead of taking one plate and then just kind of cookie cuttering it down where Dez will be in a plate that’s as stiff as mine, each size is going to get a stiffness that’s specific to them, which is really cool. So that kind of customization and then that attention to detail with weight and propulsion. That’s the the plus kind of add to the speed ball. So, you’re curating to the individual’s needs based on the size of their foot. Yeah. Instead of one one shape fits all. Wow. That’s incredible. Cool, right? That is really cool. That’s like I never knew that people were out here doing that. I’m here. So, like um I I love geeking out about the tech and and and learning something new every day and this is something that I’ve learned that was new. So, that’s really cool. You Fleaf guys are usually like up on your stuff. So, if I can give you something new, I’m like I know you got one on us that time. I’m not entirely sure when is this launching. So, this is the same time as the Hyperion Max 3. The Hyperion Elite 5 is 7125. So, another summer release just in time for like fall marathons like Chicago in October and Championships. If someone was on the fence about this shoe and they were considering this race day shoe or or maybe a different one or another shoe from Brooks, like what what would you say to really get them across that finish line to have them at least try this one on? I think that’s such a good question because we all know there are so many racing shoes in the market right now. You have your pick of the litter uh to what what to race in. The way this shoe is different is we don’t look at a single performance technology to kind of boost us across the line. We are thinking about every technology in synchronicity with the entire shoe. So, we’re thinking about not just do we have the best foam, do we have the best plate, do we have the best upper, but we’re thinking about how those all interact with each other to create the fastest possible experience. So, every sidewall of this shoe, every kind of angle in the foam is thought about in congruity with the plate. How is this foam going to affect this plate? And then how are those two things going to affect how the upper moves? Where does the upper drape? Where does it drag? Where does it compress? Like you said earlier, where does it stretch? You can’t look at these things in isolation. You can’t just take, you know, it’s all top of the line. You can’t just take one thing and assume it’s going to work with all the other technologies. All of this was built with the runner in mind to go as fast as possible. And I think that that’s just something that we do differently here. All right. Well, if you’re looking for that curation, that specialized the specialization to detail, and if you’re looking for your next PB, I’d say uh this is a shoe that might might just get you there. So, Lee, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time and and walking us through the shoe. Thank you. I had a great time. Take care. All right. Good luck.
