The Skechers AERO line has been one of those quietly underappreciated collections of running shoes.
We’ve reviewed the AERO Spark and AERO Burst, both of which turned out to be really solid everyday trainers. Then there was the AERO Tempo, while not our favorite, which took things in a slightly faster direction and showed that Skechers was clearly interested in coming for race day.
And now we have the AERO Elite.
Following the trajectory of some other under-the-radar brands putting out seriously good speed shoes this year — looking at you, Topo — Skechers is jumping into the race-day shoe game with its first true racing shoe.
And, man, I think this could be a really interesting option for a lot of runners.
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It’s super light, has a seriously nice ride, looks like a race shoe, and at $225, it comes in well below what many of the top-tier race shoes are asking these days. In other words: Skechers is no longer just quietly making good running shoes. They might be making shoes you actually want to race in.
I mean watch out Vaporfly, the Aero Elite is coming for you. Seriously.
Looks
This is a sleek-looking shoe. There’s really no other way to put it.
The AERO Elite fits right in with the current crop of high-end racing shoes. It has that streamlined, aggressive-but-not-ridiculous look that tells you this shoe was built to go fast. And, yes, this is a Skechers.
This ain’t your father’s Skechers.
The Elite looks clean, fresh and modern, and if you lined it up next to a bunch of other elite racing shoes, I don’t think anyone would immediately point at it and say, “Hey, that’s the Skechers.”
Construction
Specs
- Stack: mm/32mm
- Drop: mm
- Weight: 6 oz (Men’s 9)
Upper
The upper is a huge upgrade from the AERO Tempo.
We liked the Tempo as a shoe, but its upper was…interesting, to say the least. At times, it felt like Skechers was still trying to figure out exactly what it wanted to do up there. It wasn’t our favorite part of the shoe. The Elite is a completely different story.
It uses a TPEE-based FitKnit upper that is unbelievably soft. Pull your foot into this shoe and it immediately has that glove-like feeling you want from a race-day shoe. There’s not a lot of extra stuff going on. It just feels like the shoe is wrapping around your foot and telling you, “Yep, let’s go run.”
For a shoe that is clearly designed to move quickly, the upper is surprisingly comfortable right out of the box.
Midsole
Skechers has been using its Hyper Burst foam platform for years now, and we’ve seen a few different versions and formulations show up across the AERO lineup. The AERO Elite takes things to another level with Hyper Burst Pro and supercritical ATPU foam.
If you’re going to build your first true race-day shoe, you might as well throw the good stuff at it.
The ride is fantastic. What surprised me most is how good this shoe feels right out of the box. There’s plenty of softness here, but it doesn’t feel mushy or sluggish. Instead, it has this really smooth transition that makes the shoe feel fast without beating you up.
Then there’s the carbon-infused Quantum Plate. Skechers describes the plate as a web-style design, inspired by the H-shaped plates it has used in previous shoes. The idea is to provide propulsion while allowing the shoe to retain some of that smoothness and flexibility. Whatever the engineering explanation, the important part for me is that it works.
The Elite feels fast, but it doesn’t feel like you have to fight the shoe to get that speed.
Outsole
Keeping the weight down means making some compromises, and the outsole is one of them. There’s a relatively thin layer of rubber on the bottom of the Elite. It provides enough grip for normal road running, but this isn’t an outsole designed to survive years of abuse. And that’s OK as this is a race-day shoe.
The thin rubber helps keep the overall weight ridiculously low, and if you’re buying a shoe like this, you’re probably not expecting it to be your daily trainer that you put 500 miles on.
Conclusion
I’ve been a fan of Skechers running shoes for a while now, particularly the AERO line, but the Elite feels like a different animal. It almost feels like a mind meld between Skechers and the current generation of elite race-day shoes.
You put it on and think, “Wait…Skechers made this?”
The AERO Elite feels like it belongs right up there with the big-name race-day shoes — you know the ones — but at $225, it comes in at a considerably lower price than many of the shoes occupying that space. That doesn’t automatically make it the right shoe for every runner, and we’re not going to pretend that one shoe is going to magically turn any of us into an Olympian.
But for runners looking for a lightweight, plated race-day shoe without spending $275, $300 or more, the AERO Elite not only deserves a look – it deserves your investment.
I’ve liked what Skechers has been doing with the AERO line for a while. With the Elite, I think it’s time to stop thinking of Skechers as the company that makes those other running shoes and start paying attention to what they’re actually putting on the road. This is a race-day shoe. And a really good one.
