Eight years into the supershoes era and, from a position of relative anonymity in the marathon world, Puma completely shocked everyone — including its own team.

“We were all like, ‘holy s***, we have something unbelievable,” says Erin Longin. “The advancements were incredible, so extreme, we were in the lab seeing results that we had never seen before. We knew we really had something special.”

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Longin, Puma’s vice president of running and training, is speaking to The Athletic from their offices in Massachusetts. That “something special” was the third iteration of the company’s Fast-R shoe, which launched publicly in April for the Boston and London marathons.

This Sunday, like for those marathon majors, 100 sub-elite athletes have been recruited for the New York marathon. They are targeting sub-three-hour performances, and Puma, as part of what it calls ‘Project3’, gave those athletes Fast-R 3 shoes to train and race in.

“We weren’t forcing anyone to wear it,” Longin says of Boston and London, where Project3 athletes had to sign agreements not to post pictures on social media because the Fast-R 3 was not yet public knowledge.

“It was (a case of), ‘If you love it, and it works for you, you can wear it on race day’. We ended up with such a big presence of runners running in it. That helped with visibility,” Longin adds.

Puma says 69 (just over one-third) of the runners bettered their personal bests. Thirty-eight Project3 athletes improved their PBs by at least three minutes, a target for which Puma paid $3,000 (about £2,250) to each athlete — the sportswear company gave out a six-figure total in prize money.

Those are numbers they hope to increase again in New York this weekend.

Runners pictured crossing the Verrazzano Bridge at the start of the 2019 New York marathon (Emilee Chinn/Getty Images)