Own the Track in the Best Sprinting Shoes

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No matter your pace during a race or workout, it’s fun to feel fast. Whether you’re doing short intervals on the track or racing up to 10 kilometers on the roads, you can find some extra motivation in a snappy sprinting shoe that unleashes your top gear.

This used to mean lacing up the lightest pair you could find, since the fastest options typically offered just a stiff sole with tread or spikes to grip the track. But serious innovation in recent years has radically changed what speed shoes look like—even road-racing models with thicker midsoles and tall stack heights are well-suited for your speedwork sessions.

The Best Sprinting Shoes

• Best Overall: Under Armour Sprint Pro 3 Sprinting Shoe

• Best Beginner Spike: Nike Rival Sprint Sprinting Shoe

• Best Foot Security: New Balance Sigma Harmony Sprinting Shoe

• Fastest Road Racing Shoe: Nike Vaporfly 3 Sprinting Shoe

• Best for the Mile and 5k: Nike Streakfly Sprinting Shoe

What to Consider

Should I Get Spikes or Racing Flats?

For serious racing and training on the track, you’re best served by a pair of track spikes—extremely lightweight, stiff-soled shoes that envelop your feet and have spikes (a.k.a., pins) underneath the forefoot. Track spikes have minimal structure in the heel, while spikes for middle and long distance have fewer pins at the forefoot and thicker midsoles for comfort. There’s no faster footwear for track running—but you can’t wear them anywhere else but the track.

Racing flats, which are lightweight shoes meant to maximize your effort, are more versatile than track spikes—you can wear them to run and race both on the track and on the road. Unless you’re a pro, even lightweight running shoes will work just fine on the oval, though they’re not quite as fast around the turns as track spikes. Your legs (especially your calves) also don’t get beat up as badly in road shoes compared to spikes.

How We Selected

Between our staff and a 250-strong wear-test team, we’ve laced up almost all of the spikes and road racers we recommend below. We hit our local tracks to see how they performed in both wet and dry conditions during demanding speed sessions including ladder workouts, wind sprints, and 400-meter repeats. On the pavement, we evaluated the racing flats on this list for their fit, cushioning, and comfort during longer tempo runs and in real race situations.

For those we couldn’t get on our feet or in the lab, we researched best-selling sprinting shoes and selected our picks based on cushioning, spike layout, and any standout technologies we recognized from other shoes we’ve tested.

TRACK SPIKES

When you’re trying for a standout performance in a race that lasts less than a minute, you want a spike that never falters. Every errant strike or low-traction toe-off can sneakily tack on milliseconds that could put you just a whisker behind where you need to be. According to our testing, the superior responsiveness and traction in these spikes from Under Armour won’t leave you second-guessing your times.

With eight solid pins, an aggressively forward-leaning geometry, and an upper that molds to your foot, you’ll be locked into your perfect stride for every precious second of your competitive sprints. The one compromise this sprinting shoe makes is in its comfort-enhancing features, which effectively don’t exist. This is one seriously stiff shoe, and it won’t feel good if you put it on right before you’re in the blocks. However, if you’re looking to knock every possible decimal point off your most blistering race paces, comfort isn’t necessarily most important.

Newcomers to the track might want a sprinting platform that’s more forgiving and budget-friendly. After all, track spike geometry is a fairly dramatic departure from any other running shoe silhouette, especially modern road shoes with a chunky heel.

This entry from Nike doesn’t have a full plate like many of its higher-end siblings, resulting in a sole that’ll flex more naturally under your foot. Even better, it’s still durable enough to last a full season, and its weight is still manageable at high cadences. Just know that this shoe runs a bit small, so notching up a half-size will likely feel more comfortable.

At a glance, these spikes look like they’ll clip into a set of road bike pedals—you can thank the Boa dial lacing system for the unorthodox look. Unlike traditional shoelaces, a Boa system ratchets the upper together in tiny, tiny increments, which means you can quickly and consistently fit your shoes as tight as you need, one-handed, without worrying about squeezing too hard and starting all over.

That lockdown pays dividends when combined with the shoe’s eight interchangeable pins that offer superb traction on varying terrain.

ROAD SHOES

When you make the world’s fastest shoe, you don’t mess it up. And, good news: Nike didn’t. In fact, the changes to this third version of the Vaporfly, while expansive, do little to change the shoe’s overall silhouette and feel—the biggest change longtime Vaporfly fans will notice is a boost in stability, especially on corners.

You still get exceptionally lightweight, soft, and springy ZoomX foam underfoot and a rigid, carbon-fiber plate to help you bound down the road at high speeds with less effort. This shoe’s optimized to help elite marathoners who run at a sub-5 minute mile pace consistently, but it translates well to shorter distances for those of us with a little less octane.

Buy Men’s Buy Women’s

While the Vaporfly is versatile on the roads all the way up to a marathon, some runners want even less shoe for short road races like the 5k and 10k. Enter the Streakfly. It’s Nike’s lightest racing shoe, harkening back to the time when we all believed a shoe had to be lighter to get faster. But unlike the old, thin racing flats, the Streakfly uses ZoomX, the brand’s springy foam compound.

There’s no carbon-fiber plate here; instead, the shoe uses a short Pebax plate under the midfoot only, designed to stabilize your foot as you roll through your stride. Based on our testing, where one runner used this shoe on tempo runs and even a 20-miler, we find it best suited for speedy runners with an already efficient stride who land on their midfoot or forefoot. If you’re a heel-striker, you’ll feel the foam bottom out—there’s a noticeable thunk as the foam compresses as far as it’ll go and your foot runs out of room to travel.

Building atop the common skeleton of most other carbon-plated racing shoes, New Balance’s sprinting shoe stands out as an option that doesn’t skimp on the midsole foam.

That extra thickness not only improves cushioning, but it gives New Balance more space under the hood to beef up the engine. This update manages to maintain plenty of its predecessor’s stiffness, but it now has enough squish that your feet and ankles won’t feel raw after a few intense intervals.

That extra stack does make the shoe feel a little more precarious in turns, as you can feel the heel squirming, but that shouldn’t matter in an all-out, straightforward effort.

Buy Men’s Buy Women’s

The Magic Speed was designed with some trickle-down features from shoes like the MetaRacer, and it has more budget-friendly components from shoes like the NovaBlast, making it a viable race day option with a price tag that falls well below what you’d normally expect from a carbon-plated shoe.

It’s more traditionally styled—it has a lower stack height than most other super shoes—and it’s made to feel less like a lofty lump o’ foam and more like an amped up version of an old-fashioned, minimalist racing flat.

Buy Men’s Buy Women’s

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