You might consider using the Tempo NEXT% for all your fast training and your racing, but on the latter front it falls short of a lighter, all-out racing shoe like the Vaporfly or Alphafly, or indeed the Saucony Endorphin Pro or Brooks Hyperion Elite 2.
However, it does restrict its market to runners who are prepared to have a three-shoe rotation for racing, fast training and easy running. The Tempo NEXT% is designed to be a fast training shoe, so not excelling at easy runs isn’t necessarily a problem. It has the happy knack of making holding a steady or fast pace feel easier, and the more speed you put into it the bouncier the shoe feels. However, on tempo and long runs, the Tempo NEXT% redeemed itself. There are more comfortable options for purely easy efforts, including Nike’s Pegasus 37 or the Pegasus Turbo 2. I also found that my legs felt tighter than usual, especially in the hamstrings, after easy runs. The large stack on the shoe started to feel clumpy and I could also hear a fair old slap on landing. However, when I took it out for the kind of easy runs that make up the bulk of most training plans, it didn’t feel great. Every time I upped the pace it seemed to feel better and more responsive, and over the course of a session mixing 2km and 400m reps I fell in love with the shoe. Given the size and relatively heavy weight of the shoe – it’s 277g in my size 9 UK – I wasn’t sure how it would perform with fast efforts during interval sessions on the track, but it blew me away. I’ve used the Tempo NEXT% for several types of runs over the course of a training week, including a track session, a tempo run and a 16km long run, and its strengths and weaknesses have surprised me somewhat.
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