Carbon Plate Shoes I Have Known: New Balance RC Elites

Hello, if you missed Part 1 about carbon plate running shoes (ie "super shoes"), you might want to check it out before reading on. Or don't! It's your world!

If you've chosen chaos, allow me to catch you up slightly:

• Carbon-plate shoes have been around since the 90s, they just weren't good enough for the heinous price tag to make the shoes economically feasible as a product.
• They caused a massive dust-up in the mid-2010s when Nike pros started running in VaporFlys & normies started sometimes paying like $800 a pair on the secondary market
• Yes, they really do work, science says so.
• The magic is a combination of a super-stiff, super-light carbon plate usually sandwiched between next-gen foam with crazy high energy return. The plate works like a teeter-totter and the foam is what provides the spring-like action.
• In addition to letting you run faster with less effort, they may also mitigate the damage on your calves from training, possibly allowing you to train more and harder.

As I said in the previous post, I got my first pair of carbon plate racing shoes as a Christmas present at the end of 2020--the New Balance FuelCell RC Elites. At the time I was planning to train hard in spring 2021 and run 5K, 10K, and half marathon time trials and it's always fun to have a new toy to motivate you.

The first thing I noticed about these shoes when I took them out of the box was how incredibly, almost eerily light they were. I remember reading a quote from Shalane Flanagan about how she had serious doubts about the VaperFly when she first saw it because it looked so bulky and thic. But they (the running shoe industry in general) are not lying when they talk about how both the plate and the fancy new foam (New Balance's particular foam is called FuelCell) are engineered to be preternaturally light.

For the record, that's a solid half-ounce lighter than Saucony Kinvaras in the same size and only a touch heavier than nearly every racing flat I've ever owned.

I still remember how strange the RC Elites felt when I first put them on--squishy and bouncy and unstable, like I could easily lean too much the wrong way and fall over. I first took them out for 12 easy miles just to get a feel for them, and indeed, it felt like running on little trampolines. I think at that time I was typically doing easy runs at 10:00-10:15 pace and I ran those 12 easy miles at 9:09 pace without trying any harder, so, you do the math there.

For all that they took a bit of getting used to in terms of the feel, I still loved these shoes right away. They fit my feet well as New Balance often does, they were super comfortable, and once I got around to actually trying to run fast in them, it was utterly addictive, like flying. They were also very grippy on the concrete thanks to a bunch of hard little blown-rubber spike-like nubs on the bottom of the shoes. 

The only trouble for me was that, as sometimes happens in certain pairs of shoes, I'd often have the sensation of my feet shoving to the front end of the shoe, leaving a tiny gap between the heel cup and my heel while my toes would kind of get squished into the toe box.

I dealt with this the same way I often do by using a heel lock lacing pattern, which did help to a certain extent, but it still made me wonder if, despite the fact that I've always worn a 7.5 in New Balance shoes, maybe I should have sized up to an 8. Then again racing shoes always fit a bit tighter than trainers, so I thought maybe that's just how they're supposed to fit.

So, I did NOT end up running all those time trials I'd planned for the spring, but I did run in the shoes a few times because they just felt so odd on my feet and I wanted to get more used to the feel. Once I started kind-of-sort-of training again, I wore them for a few workouts, and then for a 5K time trial which I had to abort after two miles when I pulled my hamstring. I raced a couple of awful 10Ks in them that summer, and then didn't run in them again until Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon last February. 

Did they make me faster through all that? I mean, some part of the answer is undoubtedly yes; it's just that I was so unfit and so inconsistent with training because of injuries that nothing I ran that year was going to be that impressive regardless of what shoes I was wearing.

*However*, six weeks after running a 1:56 half at Kaiser Permanente, I somehow ran a 1:40 half in Oakland in those shoes, and that was impressive. As in, I had about three weeks of workouts under the belt and thought if I had the best day possible, maybe I was in 1:45 shape. Two weeks later I ran the 10 miler at the same pace, again in the same shoes.

So did they make me faster for those races? Again, science would say almost certainly yes. And we can't ignore the fact that that 1:40 in Oakland was my fastest half marathon in nine years and it felt almost easy. (Though, given that I improved my half marathon time by 16 minutes in six weeks in the same shoes, I think I still get to take a little personal credit for the 1:40.)

Don't get me wrong, I loved the feel of these shoes. Running in them felt nigh on like magic. But there were two major drawbacks.

The first, as I alluded to earlier, was the toe box issue and my foot constantly sliding to the front of the shoe and jamming my toes into the toe box. I had this issue slightly with the NB Fresh Foam Zantes but nowhere near to the same extent and not with any other NB shoe I've worn. During training with the heel lock lacing, it was okay, but I finished the KP half with very sore bruised first and second toenails! At the end of the Oakland Half my toenails were black and so smashed up that they were actually bleeding after the race, which has never happened to me before (and yep, I ultimately lost them. But hey, it's been like four years so I guess I was due.)

Okay, here is the other thing about these shoes. Post-Kaiser Permanente, they had only about 160 miles on them (all on concrete, I swear, nothing weird) and looked like this:

    

Here we are post-Oakland and just before SacTown 10 (~198 miles):

...and finally the day I tossed them in the shoe recycle, carbon plates totally exposed, with a grand total of 216 miles:

You know what, though? In spite of looking like they were attacked by rats, the shoes still felt great. Running in them still felt like floating along on little trampolines and all I wanted to keep wearing them, mashed up toes and all. And even though they were a gift, some part of me was still going "Errrr this is a $225 pair of shoes which puts me at about $1.04 per mile". 

After a little googling, I learned something which I had not known, and that's that carbon-plate "super shoes" have one job and one job only and that's to make you run hella fast when it counts (and maybe save your legs a bit in hard workouts). It's not to be durable. It's not to be budget-friendly. At no point were either of those things design criteria. There is just enough blown rubber on the bottom to grip the concrete for a couple hundred miles and after that it's alllll foam.

For professional athletes or even those non-professional-but-still-wicked-fast-elite/sub-elite folks who are right on the verge of objectively amazing feats, it's kind of a no-brainer. You'll find the money. You'll adjust in other areas. Your local running store will sponsor you a bit or your mom will get you a nice Christmas present. It's $180-$250 a few times a year, not $10,000.

And realistically, there are plenty of hobby joggers and not-that-fast-but-kind-of-obsessive runners out there with disposable income who would reallllly like to nail that PR or BQ or beat their buddy at the local Turkey Trot. It's not really that weird, as recreational splurges go. For some people it's golf clubs, or fancy heels, nice dinners or a spa day, high-end whiskey or guitars or video games or what have you. For some of our ilk, maybe occasionally it's an absurdly pricey pair of running shoes that work out to $1 a mile or so.

My biggest ethical question at this point, I think, is the durability question, less because of the cost (though the cost ain't nothing) and more because of the life cycle of the shoe. Running shoes aren't the most sustainable thing out there, though some companies have become more conscious of this as of late. If I shell out for a pair of super shoes, I will definitely be in the population that's mostly saving them for races and maybe a key workout here & there. But still, thinking about all the resources and energy that go into making such a shoe, and how long some of the components that can't be repurposed will take to break down, it didn't feel so great to toss them in the shoe-cycle bin at 216 miles.

Will I invest in another pair of New Balance RC Elites? No, but that's more because NB is retooling their whole carbon plate line this year, and though you can still get version 2 of the RC Elites, there won't be another. After this it will all be what they're calling "Supercomp," so I'll be curious to see what changes that involves and if any of those shoes will perhaps be a bit easier on the toeses!