On April 27, 2026, Kenyan runner Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds — the first time in history a human has broken the two-hour barrier in an officially certified marathon. The shoes on his feet weighed 97 grams. Less than a small apple. Less than a modern smartphone. The lightest racing shoe ever made. And they were engineered, in no small part, by the same technology that's reshaping every corner of manufacturing: 3D printing.

This is not just a story about a shoe. It's a story about where materials science, additive manufacturing, and elite athletic performance have converged — and what it means for anyone who laces up a pair of running shoes.

Part One: The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3

What Makes It Different From Every Shoe Before It

Let's start with the number that stops conversations: 97 grams. That's the weight of a men's size 9 (US 9 / EU 42) Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3. The previous generation, the Evo 2, weighed 138 grams — itself considered an engineering miracle when it launched in 2025. The Evo 3 is 30 percent lighter. In a category where a two-gram reduction between model years is considered meaningful, this is seismic.

To put it in perspective: holding the Evo 3 for the first time, reviewers consistently describe the experience as feeling like the shoe isn't there. Journalists who tested it at the London Marathon launch described laughing out loud when they picked it up. One described it as feeling "almost eerily light, even compared with the hyperlight Pro Evo 2." This is not marketing language. These are people who have handled hundreds of performance running shoes.

The ENERGYRIM: Adidas Abandons the Carbon Plate

The most radical engineering decision in the Evo 3 is also the one that most directly connects to the broader conversation about 3D printing and carbon fiber in running shoes. Adidas has replaced the traditional full-length carbon fiber plate — and even their own EnergyRods system — with something called the ENERGYRIM.

Here's what that means. Since Nike's Vaporfly broke onto the scene in 2017, the defining characteristic of "super shoes" has been the carbon fiber plate embedded in the midsole. The plate acts as a spring-like lever, storing energy at toe-off and returning it with each stride. It was the innovation that collapsed marathon times globally and touched off an arms race among every major shoe brand on earth.

Adidas had their own take on this: instead of a single flat plate, they used EnergyRods — carbon fiber rods that mirrored the metatarsal bones of the foot, placed in specific positions to replicate the natural lever function without adding the weight or rigidity of a full plate. The system worked. The Pro Evo 1 and Evo 2 collectively dominated 2025 marathon racing, winning six of twelve World Marathon Major titles.

But carbon plates and rods, however refined, have weight. And Adidas' moonshot brief for the Evo 3 was unambiguous: sub-100 grams, marathon-legal stack height, no compromise on cushioning or energy return. That meant rethinking the structural element from scratch.

The ENERGYRIM is a carbon-fiber-infused structural frame that runs around the outer perimeter of the midsole, rather than through the center where your foot contacts the foam. The result is that the center forefoot — where the foam actually flexes and provides cushioning — is a pure, uninterrupted bed of foam. No plate between your foot and that energy-returning material. The rim holds the shape and provides the stiffness and propulsion traditionally delivered by the plate, while leaving the center open for maximum cushioning and bounce.

The genius of this is biomechanical as well as engineering. Adidas specifically notes that front medial pronation — the inward collapse at the inside front of the foot during toe-off, visible even in elite runners — is reduced by keeping the ENERGYRIM along the outer edges. Less lateral collapse equals more efficient energy transfer equals faster running.

The Foam: 50% Lighter Than Its Predecessor

The structural revolution of the ENERGYRIM would mean nothing without an equally revolutionary foam beneath it. The Lightstrike Pro Evo compound in the Evo 3 is, according to independent lab testing, the softest super shoe foam ever measured — scoring 21.0 AC on the Asker C durometer, edging out even the Saucony Endorphin Elite 2 (previously considered the softest super shoe midsole on the market at 22.1 AC).

It's also 50 percent lighter than the previous Lightstrike Pro Evo used in the Evo 2. Adidas achieves this through a non-compression-molded foam construction — a process that relies on controlled expansion rather than injection and compression to achieve a specific foam structure. The result, under a digital microscope, shows "by far the least dense foam ever seen in the lab," according to RunRepeat's analysis — an open-cell matrix that has almost no air left to compress, which means almost no weight, and extraordinary energy return.

Independent testing confirmed the Evo 3's cushioning numbers: 153 SA in the heel and 142 SA in the forefoot — top-tier energy return scores that, in any previous shoe, would have come with significantly more weight. The combination of the ENERGYRIM structure and the Lightstrike Pro Evo foam delivers a 1.6 percent improvement in running economy compared to the Evo 2. At elite pace, that's the difference between a world record and a very good time.

The Track Record: Dominance in 2025, History in 2026

The Evo line didn't arrive as a novelty. It arrived backed by performance data accumulated across seasons of elite racing. Here's the lineage that makes the Evo 3's debut in London so significant:

• 
  

  
  
  2023
  Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 launches. At 138 grams, it's already the lightest serious marathon shoe available. Limited release, $500. Immediately sold out. Sparks an industry arms race.
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  2025
  Adizero Adios Pro Evo 2 launches — same 138 grams as the Evo 1, but with significantly more responsive foam. Goes on to win 6 of 12 World Marathon Major titles in 2025. Wins men's and women's world marathon championships. Worn by Sabastian Sawe, who wins London Marathon by over a minute.
• 
  

  
  
  2026
  Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 debuts at London Marathon. At 97 grams, it is the first shoe to break the sub-100g barrier. Sabastian Sawe runs 1:59:30 — the first official sub-2-hour marathon in history. Tigist Assefa breaks her own women's-only world record: 2:15:41. The shoe releases publicly on April 27, 2026.

Who Is It Actually For?

At $500 for a limited-release shoe with a narrow toe box, a foam so soft it compresses noticeably over repeated use, and a stability profile that rewards fast, technically sound runners, the Evo 3 is not for everyone. That's not a criticism — it's an honest description of a purpose-built race-day instrument.

Part Two: 3D Printing and the Modern Running Shoe

How We Got Here: The Carbon Plate Revolution

To understand why the ENERGYRIM is significant, you need to understand what it replaced — and how the carbon fiber plate became the defining technology of modern marathon running in the first place.

Before 2017, running shoe midsoles were made almost exclusively from EVA or PEBA foams, molded into shapes that designers hoped would balance cushioning, stability, and energy return. The tools for shaping those foams were traditional: injection molding, compression molding, hand assembly. The foam compounds were relatively fixed. You could tune density and geometry, but you were working within hard constraints.

Then Nike embedded a carbon fiber plate in the Vaporfly 4% — a thin, curved plate running through the midsole that acted as a lever at the metatarsophalangeal joint, where the foot bends during toe-off. The plate stores elastic energy during the loading phase of each stride and returns it explosively at push-off. The effect was measurable and dramatic: independent studies found runners using carbon plate shoes improved their running economy by approximately 4 percent (hence the name). Across 26.2 miles, that's a lot of time.

The running world changed almost overnight. Every major brand scrambled to develop their own plate technology. Adidas developed EnergyRods. Brooks partnered with HP for 3D-printed lattice midsoles. New Balance built the FuelCell SuperComp Elite. Asics developed their MetaPlate. Within five years, carbon fiber structural elements were the baseline expectation for any serious marathon racing shoe.

Where 3D Printing Entered the Picture

Carbon plates themselves aren't typically 3D printed — they're made from layered carbon fiber prepregs, compressed and cured in molds. But 3D printing entered marathon shoe engineering from a different direction: the midsole foam itself.

Traditional foam midsoles have a fundamental limitation. They're manufactured through compression or injection molding, which means every region of the foam has the same density. You can use different foams in different zones (like a dual-density midsole), but within each zone, the foam behaves uniformly. What if you could design foam that was denser in some millimeters and more porous in others — tuned precisely to the biomechanical forces experienced at each point of the foot during a specific stride pattern?

3D printing makes that possible.

The Adidas 4D Story: 17 Years of Athlete Data, Printed

Adidas's most visible 3D printing program is Futurecraft 4D, developed in partnership with Carbon — a Silicon Valley company whose Digital Light Synthesis (DLS) technology can print complex lattice structures from liquid photopolymers at commercially viable speeds and quality levels.

The Futurecraft 4D midsole is not shaped like traditional foam. It's a lattice — a three-dimensional mesh of interconnected struts whose density, angle, and pattern vary across the midsole's surface. At the heel, where the foot needs shock absorption, the lattice is denser and softer. At the forefoot, where runners need stiffness and energy return for propulsion, the lattice is tighter and more rigid. In the arch, where stability matters, the structure bridges the two.

This variability — impossible with injection-molded foam — is informed by Adidas's 17-year archive of biomechanical athlete data. The lattice geometry isn't arbitrary. It's computed from thousands of pressure maps, stride analyses, and force plate measurements, translated into digital lattice parameters through AI-driven topology optimization, then printed with micrometer-level precision by Carbon's DLS process.

The commercial result is a shoe midsole that would have been science fiction fifteen years ago: a single printed part that is simultaneously a shock absorber, a spring, a stability structure, and a propulsion device — with each function precisely located where the foot needs it.

Brooks and HP: Personalizing Running Economy

Brooks's partnership with HP takes the 3D printing promise a step further: personalization at the individual runner level. Using HP's Multi Jet Fusion technology — which fuses thermoplastic polyurethane powder layer by layer at high speed and precision — Brooks developed the Exhilarate-BlueLine with midsoles tailored to specific runners' biomechanical data.

HP's independent validation found that MJF-printed TPU midsoles deliver higher energy return than 90 percent of midsoles currently on the market. But what makes the program genuinely novel is how those midsoles are personalized: Brooks runners who participate in the test program sync their wearables, which collect data on stride length, cadence, weight, and other biomechanical factors. That data informs the lattice geometry of their specific midsole print.

The result is a midsole that isn't just high-performance for runners in general — it's tuned for how you specifically run. No two midsoles are identical. It's the opposite of mass production, enabled by a manufacturing process that has no tooling cost and no penalty for variation between parts.

What Carbon Fiber Actually Does In a Running Shoe

Both the ENERGYRIM in the Evo 3 and the carbon fiber plates in traditional super shoes rely on the same fundamental material properties of carbon fiber. Understanding why carbon fiber works in this application helps explain why it's now essentially universal in elite-level marathon footwear.

Carbon fiber is an extraordinarily stiff material for its weight. Its specific stiffness — stiffness divided by density — is roughly five times that of steel. When you embed a carbon fiber element in a running shoe midsole, it does two things. First, it limits the degree to which the metatarsophalangeal joint bends during toe-off, reducing the energy expenditure of the muscles and tendons that would otherwise control that motion. Second, and more importantly, it stores elastic energy during the loading phase of the stride and returns it at push-off, acting like a compressed spring releasing at the optimal moment.

The key biomechanical variable is longitudinal bending stiffness (LBS). Research published in peer-reviewed biomechanics literature has shown that a forefoot carbon plate insert increases metatarsophalangeal joint plantarflexion velocity — the speed at which the foot's forefoot pushes off — and improves the net positive mechanical work done at the knee joint compared to shoes without carbon. The net effect is faster running with less perceived effort: the definition of improved running economy.

The Arms Race Continues: What Comes After the Carbon Plate

The ENERGYRIM suggests we may be entering a post-plate era — not because carbon fiber is going away, but because the optimal way to incorporate it into a running shoe may not be the flat plate that started the revolution. The rim geometry Adidas chose places carbon fiber precisely where it contributes most to propulsion (the outer forefoot and heel) while removing it from where it would add weight without corresponding benefit.

Other brands are experimenting with 3D-printed carbon fiber components — using continuous fiber deposition technologies that allow carbon fiber strands to be printed into complex geometries that are impossible to achieve with laminated prepreg sheets. Imagine a carbon structure that mirrors the specific force distribution of your particular stride, printed in one piece, integrated into the midsole. This isn't speculative technology — it exists in aerospace and automotive manufacturing. Its application to footwear is a matter of cost reduction and scale.

Meanwhile, the foam itself is getting closer to being 3D printable. Adidas's non-compression-molded Lightstrike Pro Evo process shares conceptual DNA with 3D printing — it's about controlling the internal structure of the foam through the manufacturing process, rather than relying on post-processing of a solid block. As DLS and MJF technologies become faster and cheaper, it becomes increasingly plausible that a future super shoe midsole will be entirely printed — lattice geometry, stiffness map, and all — in a single manufacturing step.

Part Three: What This Means for the Rest of Us

The Technology Trickles Down

The history of performance running technology has always followed the same arc: elite innovation at extreme cost, followed by gradual democratization as manufacturing processes mature and competition drives prices down. Carbon plates were $250 shoes just four years ago. Today you can find capable carbon racers for under $150. 3D-printed lattice midsoles that cost hundreds of dollars per pair to produce in 2018 are now commercially available in consumer shoes.

The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3's ENERGYRIM and ultra-light foam will follow the same path. The engineering principles discovered in developing a 97-gram marathon shoe will filter into the Adizero Adios Pro 5, then into training shoes, then into everyday running footwear. This is how it has always worked. The Evo 3 is a proof of concept for where running shoe engineering is headed, not just a shoe for the fraction of runners who can afford $500 and want to race at sub-3-hour marathon pace.

The Personalization Promise of 3D Printing

Perhaps the most transformative long-term implication of 3D printing in running footwear is personalization. Traditional manufacturing produces shoes in whole-size increments, with fixed widths and fixed-density foams that are designed around a statistical average foot. The average foot, as any serious runner who has spent time fitting shoes knows, often belongs to nobody.

3D printing has no tooling cost and no minimum run length. In principle, every runner could have a midsole printed to the specific geometry of their foot — their arch height, their forefoot width, their pronation pattern, their weight and preferred pace. The Brooks/HP partnership is an early commercial prototype of this idea. As scanning technology (including smartphone-based foot scanning apps) matures and printing costs fall, made-to-measure running shoes become economically plausible for mainstream consumers.

When that happens, the question won't be "what's the best shoe for a runner with high arches and a neutral stride?" It will be: "what are the optimal lattice parameters for your specific foot geometry and biomechanical data?" The answer will be computed, not guessed — and then printed.

3D Printing in Your Running Gear Today

The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 represents the bleeding edge — $500, limited pairs, and a design brief that explicitly accepts durability tradeoffs in exchange for race-day performance. Most runners won't own one. But the same material technology that makes the ENERGYRIM and Lightstrike Pro Evo possible — precision-engineered carbon fiber composites and additive manufacturing — is accessible today, in other forms, at a fraction of the cost.

At Dreaming3D, we work with carbon fiber PLA — a composite filament that blends chopped carbon fiber into a PLA base, producing printed parts that share the high strength-to-weight ratio that makes carbon fiber so valuable in elite footwear. It's the same material philosophy scaled to accessible precision manufacturing: lightweight, stiff where stiffness matters, and durable beyond what traditional materials deliver at the same weight.

Our carbon fiber golf tees are a tangible example of this material in action — 3D-printed from carbon fiber PLA, lighter and more durable than wooden tees, with the consistency that comes from a process measured in layer increments rather than hand-cut batches. The connection between a 97-gram marathon shoe and a golf tee might seem like a stretch, but the underlying material science is the same: using carbon fiber's extraordinary specific stiffness to build something that performs better than the conventional alternative, at a weight that makes you question whether it's really there.

The Bottom Line

What happened on the streets of London on April 27, 2026, was a human achievement — Sabastian Sawe's 1:59:30 will be remembered alongside Roger Bannister's four-minute mile as a moment when a believed-to-be-impossible barrier fell. But it was also a manufacturing achievement. The shoe that carried him across that finish line represents the current frontier of applied materials science, additive manufacturing principles, and carbon fiber engineering in athletic footwear.

The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 is 97 grams because Adidas redesigned the structural carbon element, reformulated the foam compound, rebuilt the upper from scratch, and stripped the outsole to the absolute minimum — each decision measured in nanograms and validated through hundreds of kilometers of elite athlete testing. It works because the ENERGYRIM delivers the energy return benefits of a carbon plate at a fraction of the weight, and because the Lightstrike Pro Evo foam underneath it is simultaneously the lightest and most responsive super shoe foam ever produced.

3D printing didn't build this shoe directly. But the additive manufacturing revolution — in Adidas's own Futurecraft 4D line, in Brooks's HP partnership, in On's Lightspray robots — is the research environment in which this kind of engineering thinking has been normalized. The idea that a midsole's structural properties can be precisely programmed, zone by zone, layer by layer, is a 3D printing idea. Adidas applied it through a different manufacturing process, but the conceptual lineage is clear.

The two-hour marathon barrier is gone. The sub-100-gram shoe exists. What seemed impossible, as Adidas's own slogan goes, is nothing. The next generation of performance footwear — personalized, printed, precisely engineered to the individual — is being built right now.