This an ode to New Balance, which I genuinely feel has made the finest shoe portfolio on the market, if you want to have fun on the road. With the new Fuel Cell lineup, you should have a hard time going somewhere else, if you want a mixture of speed, bounce, and just plain ol’ fun on your run.
Now you’re probably thinking “But Lars, these three shoes have been on the market for almost a year now”. Well, they have, but the missing piece of the puzzle is the newly released New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Trainer v2.
Faults of the old
To be clear. The original New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Trainer was and still is, a fantastic running shoe, and I can eat my words from last year, it actually ended up in my running rotation, despite its flaws.
A lot of people loved the original, but to be frank, it is so soft, heavy, and best suited for slow and up to moderate paces, that it didn’t quite fit the performance name it had been given. A training partner to New Balances' fastest shoe needs to be able to do speed as well.
The softness and the heaviness of it made it more a one-trick pony, a shoe that felt freaking awesome up to marathon pace, and a bit too heavy when you went faster.
The improvements - New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Trainer v2
What they have done differently this time, is just turned the bass down from 110% to 90, and made a more all-round running shoe with a lower midsole stack, that handles close to everything you throw at it.
The New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Trainer v2 is still soft, just not as extremely soft as the original. This has made the shoe a massive 30 grams lighter (over 10% weight reduction), making it a much easier shoe to run fast in. It still works like a charm on easier runs, but only if you manage to keep running slow in it. It’s now finally a real performance trainer.
The biggest updates are the reduction of the midsole stack, which I have already gone through, and a new upper. Last year’s version had a very comfortable and flexible mesh that had one issue. That huge midsole rocker made it harder for the upper to keep the foot from moving slightly in the shoe, and what I experienced, especially if I tried running fast, was that my feet weren’t as securely planted in the shoe as I wanted them to be.
This has been fixed, with a more conservative upper that has a bit more hold, but that doesn’t give the same softness around the foot. Some people will like version one, some the other, but I prefer the new update.
The best lineup for having fun! - New Balance FuelCell
Back to the trifecta of fun running. If you want to have a shoe for easy, longer, and up-tempo days you can do a lot of it in the brand-new New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Trainer v2. If you want to push the pace a bit extra, then the soft and ultimate bounce machine, the New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Elite v3, will help you run fast, and with a smile on your face. And if you want to get away from the carbon shoes for a while, then the extremely light and surprisingly soft New Balance FuelCell Rebel v3 can do every type of run you can imagine, from easy days to tempo runs or an occasional 5k race.
It takes a lot for a shoe to be incorporated into my running shoe lineup. I test too many shoes, and to join my exclusive box of home-stored running shoes, the shoe really needs to excel at something that the others don’t. But all three are there, and there to stay, specially reserved for when I want to have fun.
Didn't you find your favorite?
See our entire collection of running shoes here:
