The morning light in Los Angeles is something special. It’s a city that starts moving long before the sun is high in the sky: along Ocean Avenue at sunrise, on the still half-empty boulevards, among the hills of Beverly Hills. Here, running is not just a performance, it is a daily habit, personal and shared, and a cultural language. It is a worker who leaves the office and slips on a pair of shoes to find some peace, it’s a crew that trains at sunset.

During our West coast days, invited by adidas Running, we experienced the LA running culture and firsthand the launch of the new Hyperboost Edge, a shoe designed less as a technical tool and more as an opportunity to run every day. Born from the codes of race shoes, but translated into a shoe whose ultimate goal is to bring joy to those who wear it. ‘Joy’ is in fact the word that comes up most often when Patrick Nava, General Manager of adidas Running, talks about the idea behind this model: not just running faster, but running more often, longer, more freely, to the point of letting yourself go along the way.

When you say you ‘drive innovation, performance and running culture,’ what are the concrete things you’re doing?

“From a performance point of view, we’re always asking: What is the next technological frontier that can amplify a runner’s experience? That means, of course, marathoners and sprinters at the sharp end of performance – but for us, ‘experience’ also includes everyday runners. How can we help them have more fun? How can we make running feel better, more accessible, more rewarding.

When we talk about culture, we’re looking at the whole ecosystem that lives around running. How do we bring more people into the sport? Because we truly believe in this mission that sport changes lives. If more people run – and run in a healthy, sustainable way – then, in our view, their quality of life improves. So we try to be part of that culture in an authentic way: working with communities, supporting initiatives, helping to keep this movement alive and progressive. For us, that’s a very important part of the job.”

How at adidas do you balance the data – market, performance, numbers – with the more instinctive, emotional side of running culture?

“We are fundamentally grounded in what our tests tell us. Even for the ‘simplest’ shoes, we run at least three rounds of testing. For a shoe like Hyperboost Edge, development took about three years. We tried different foams, different densities and we conducted maybe five, six, ten testing rounds. Sometimes the test groups were larger, sometimes smaller, but always significant enough to understand one key thing: what the runner tells us matters most.

We base our decisions on how the shoe feels: what they like, what they don’t like, what needs to change, where we can do better. Of course, we’re aware of market logic, but at the end of the day we genuinely care that people have a better quality of life – and that running is one of the tools that can influence that. So what people tell us when they try our products is extremely important. That’s where we start, and that’s where we finish.”

Why Los Angeles? What does this city represent for adidas Running in terms of running culture, energy, and storytelling? What do you want people to feel and carry from this experience?

“In my opinion, Los Angeles is interesting precisely because it’s different. Even within the US, it has its own particular running culture. We wanted to give people the opportunity to experience the shoes outdoors, under the sun, in a beautiful climate – to emphasise an environment that could reflect what this shoe is about. The experience we want all to have here is centred on one feeling above all: joy, probably at its highest level. The city, the light, the warmth – they all help amplify that.”

For a runner who’s hearing ‘Hyperboost Edge’ for the first time, how would you describe the idea behind this shoe? What problem or need is it trying to answer?

“In simple terms, it’s a super trainer. That means we take elements from our racing and marathon shoes and translate them into something you can use every day. We didn’t only want to think about speed as the benefit. We wanted to think about freedom and joy.

When we started this project two and a half years ago, we changed geometries, experimented with different chemical blends, and searched for the right foam. At one point we ran a test in our London store with the prototype of what would become this shoe. We asked around 400 people to run in the prototype and compare it to their favourite everyday shoe. Eighty percent of the people who tried it said that If they could wear this shoe home right now, they would. And these were runners at very different levels.

The purpose behind Hyperboost Edge was exactly that: to create a shoe that allows you – whatever your cadence, whatever your preferred pace – to find that meditative moment, that moment of joy when you’re out there. That’s what this shoe is trying to deliver.”

Athleta is very interested in sport as a cultural lens, not just performance. When you think about Hyperboost Edge, how do you imagine it living beyond performance, in today’s culture?

“From an adidas Running point of view, what we’re trying to build is a clear point of view on running – and a strong visual identity that sits across our three main franchises: Adizero, Hyperboost Edge and Supernova.

We asked ourselves: What is adidas Running? Our answer is that it sits at the intersection of performance and culture, but it’s also a very European brand in its aesthetic. We focus on clean, minimalist, geometric lines. Nothing excessive, everything reduced to what’s essential – but still maintaining an elegant, progressive shape. We want something that feels different from what you find on the market, but not loud for the sake of being loud.

With Hyperboost Edge, I think we achieved that. The first time we took it out of the box, our reaction was: ‘This is strange.’ But strange in a good way. And that ‘strange’ is what makes it memorable. If it looks like something you’ve already seen a hundred times, you forget it. We didn’t want that.”

adidas talks a lot about ‘creating the new’ in sport. When it comes to running culture, what does ‘new’ actually mean to you – new tech, new communities, new narratives, or something else?

“For me, ‘new’ is about offering new stimuli. How can we amplify the experiences that different runners are looking for? For some, ‘new’ means starting to run at all. For others, it’s running faster. For others again, it’s running more often, or feeling better while doing it. All the performance shoes we create are designed to take the satisfaction of those needs to the next level – to support whatever ‘new’ each runner is chasing.”

If you had to pick one emotion that you hope adidas Running evokes in people over the next few years – beyond ‘fast’ or ‘comfortable’ – what would it be?

“For Hyperboost Edge specifically, the emotion is joy. Whatever your speed, whatever your distance, my hope is that when you’re running in these shoes, you feel happy. That you get lost in the run. That you get lost in the present moment. If we can give people that feeling more often, then I think we’re doing something meaningful.”