the rx:sky is a trail shoe from speedland, the portland footwear brand, made in collaboration with saysky in copenhagen. it costs $299, it has no laces, and the carbon plate comes out. after a couple hundred miles it is our favorite daily trainer. plate in, it is a workout shoe. plate out, it is an easy-day shoe. on gravel, cinder and rolling singletrack it is a trail shoe, and the outsole still looks close to new, which is what makes the price make sense. that's three shoes for $299. in our opinion it is not a shoe for the most technical trail, and we found that out the hard way.
disclosure: speedland sent us the rx:sky to test, and swapped the size for us when the first pair didn't fit. we're big fans of all that the speedland team is doing. but that never buys coverage.
the technical details
in a men's 9 the weight is about 8.9 ounces, or 252 grams. stack is 41mm at the heel and 34mm at the forefoot, for a 7mm drop. the midsole is atpu foam, with a drop-in midsole insert that comes out, and a rigid carbon plate that also comes out. the outsole is speedland's feathercast with 3.5mm lugs. the upper is spacer mesh reinforced with high-tenacity fiber, and both the upper and the outsole glow in the dark. there are no laces. a boa li2 dial runs the wrap across the top of the foot and a reverse velcro strap closes the heel. sizes run men's 5 to 14, and speedland says it does not take custom insoles. price is $299.
10 seconds to change the dynamics of your shoe
plate in, plate out
out of the box it is hard to tell what the shoe is for. it looks great, and it looks fast. the stack and the plate say road racer. the lugs and the name on the box say trail.
the removable parts are the premium positioning. with the plate in, you can feel it, a little pop off the forefoot that wants to go faster than you planned. with the plate out, it is a soft, easy shoe for the days that are supposed to be soft and easy. same shoe, two jobs.
plate out for easy days
a gravel shoe
the rx:sky has been the shoe on almost every run since july. it does intervals on a cinder track, which is where i do workouts because i don't like a real track. the shoe flowed through a personal best beer mile on cinder. it did 689 meters of climbing at lake whatcom, on non-technical up and down singletrack, and it cruised. it has done stroller miles with my daughter and easy miles with two dogs. and it has done a lot of road, where it keeps getting better. on the cinder track in particular, it is exactly right.
in the wild. the thumbs up is the short version of this review
so we would call it a gravel trail shoe, the way bike people talk about gravel bikes. rolling singletrack without many roots, fire road, gravel, cinder, and pavement in between. on all of that it is light, it is responsive, and it doesn't feel like a compromise anywhere.
not for the rooty stuff
the one place it didn't give me that same no-compromise ride was technical trail. i wanted this to be the shoe i could rip down sketchy terrain in, so i tried to make it one. at the larrabee lakes 50k in august, on roots and rock, i turned an ankle about eleven miles in and dropped. it kept me off trails for a couple of weeks and on a treadmill instead.
in retrospect this one is on me, not the shoe. my wife asked me on the way out the door whether i was sure that was what i wanted to race in, so she probably knew. a tall, soft stack with a plate under it is a lot of shoe to place precisely on roots and rock. if your running is mostly that, in our opinion this isn't the shoe for it.
half a size down
i have very narrow feet. in my usual size 10 i was swimming, and the boa couldn't pull enough volume out of the upper to fix it. speedland swapped me into a 9.5 and it locked in. there was a little heel rub on the first day and none since.
it raised a question i hadn't asked in years, which is whether i have been wearing the wrong size my whole life. that's another conversation. the practical advice is that if your feet are narrow, try a half size down before you decide the boa isn't for you.
wet socks, dry runner
the one thing we would change is breathability. my runs are in the pacific northwest, and my feet run hot. on an eight-mile run i can finish barely sweating, but with the socks squishy and the shoe soaked through. the upper holds heat and moisture in.
that is probably hard to solve with a boa closure, which needs a structured upper to pull against. something between this upper and the more open mesh on some la sportiva trail shoes would be the thing to try. if you were hoping the leadville version fixes it, believe in the run's review describes the rx:ldvl as the same shoe without the saysky branding and the glow.
one odd thing on heat coming off the shoe. on runs over an hour, the carbon plate gets noticeably warm underfoot. as my father-in-law would say, that's physics. the foam turns a little of every footstrike into heat, and carbon carries heat better than the foam around it, so the plate is where you feel it. it hasn't caused a problem. it is worth knowing if your feet already run hot.
the outsole still looks new
this is the headline. after a couple hundred miles the outsole looks close to new. typically the carbon racers and super shoes in our rotation are shredding their outsoles after a few runs, and quality from pair to pair on some popular trainers has been hit or miss. we have zero concerns about the build quality of the rx:sky.
the feathercast outsole, 3.5mm lugs and all
so with a couple hundred miles on them and the shoes still looking new, the price reads differently. $299 is a lot for a trail shoe. but this is a workout shoe with the plate in, an easy-day shoe with it out, and a gravel and light-trail shoe either way, and it is still in one piece. it's the kind of value the speedland team wanted to build into their own brand after years at some of the big shoe companies. it is a whole quiver of shoes for one price.
our take
we featured speedland in july because two footwear veterans were building shoes their own way in portland. after a summer and fall in the rx:sky, the shoe holds up its end. keep it off the gnarliest terrain, size down if your feet are narrow, and expect it to outlast the shoes around it. also, the people at speedland are a lot of fun. if you want to expand your thinking about shoe design and feel a little punk, take in kevin fallon's instagram. the "fuck around fridays" posts are a look into some combination of a high performance lab and frankenstein's lab, with an oregon trail can-do spirit.
read our speedland brand story and the saysky story, find speedland on syndicate, or go to speedland direct.
