Puma Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 vs Saucony Endorphin Pro 5:
Which to Choose

The headline difference is weight: the Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 comes in around 170g in a men's sample, making it one of the lightest super-shoes you can buy, while the Endorphin Pro 5 sits around 215g. That ~45g gap is real and you feel it in the back half of a long race, where the Puma simply has less to carry. The other big divergence is midsole geometry. The Puma uses a decoupled, split-stack design — the heel and forefoot sections are physically separated — which makes for a firm, hyper-aggressive forefoot-driven ride that rewards a fast, forefoot-biased turnover but feels genuinely tippy and unsettled until you commit to race effort. The Endorphin Pro 5 runs a more conventional unified platform pairing a lively PWRRUN PB (PEBA) top layer over a supercritical PWRRUN HG base with a forked carbon plate; it's still tall, narrow and tippy at a jog, but its rocker rolls you forward more smoothly and forgivingly than the Puma's abrupt, plate-driven snap. Both drop into roughly the same optimal pace window (about 3:00–3:30 min/km), both use thin, gram-shaving mesh uppers that trade durability for speed, and both carry high-but-not-max cushioning. Where they split on use case: the Puma is tuned squarely for the half and full marathon and is at its best when you're holding a hard, rhythmic forefoot pace, whereas the Saucony genuinely stretches from 5K through the marathon, making it the more flexible racer if you want one shoe for the whole calendar.