Saucony Endorphin Elite 2 - Running Perfection

Weight and size: I use a US Men's 11 and the shoe weight 220 grams on my scale. Picked up this shoe as my 2025 race shoe.

Upper: The upper is also 1 piece that dissapeared on the run. I never had any issues with width or length but I will note it is a bit shorter so if you have very long feet you'd want to try it on in-store first before purchasing. Laces are perfect and aren't too elastic while not creating any pressure points like with adidas lacing.

Midsole: The best part of this shoe is this foam. Walking in it before running it felt incredibly unstable and it still mostly did on the run. Note is that you should make sure you have good ankle stability. Cornering with this shoe can be a little sketchy but isn't too dissimilar to the Alphafly 3 in that sense. As the run progressed it felt like the foam got a bit stiffer, not to an extreme but felt closer to the AdiosPro 4 by the end then the squishy marshmallow feel at the beginning. It has a bit of that sensation you got with the old vaporflys with how much the shoe compresses and shoots back. The carbon plate wasn't that noticeable which was a bit of a surprise. Definitely felt it working but could ever feel it like I can in my Adios Pro 3, Cloudboom Strike, or ZoomFly 6.

Outsole: I wish I could give more thoughts here but my run was on a dry road with no puddles so I never got to see how it worked wet. But I will say that it was grippy in the dry and certainly and improvement over the previous saucony outsoles.

Ride: I'm adding an extra section to explain the ride of the midsole and shoe in general. The lateral side cutout is very nice and you never notice it and it helps making sure I don't roll inwards with my foot. It is a very smooth ride. One thing I disliked largely about the original Elite 1 and the Alphafly 3 is that they felt mechanical in a sense. You didn't feel like you were running and that the shoe was doing a lot of the work for you. This foam and midsole design on the Elite 2 feels incredibly natural and at HM pace it felt like no effort holding a steady pace and just cruising.

Score 9.5/10 -0.5 stability on corners This score may be different in the future for me depending on how it functions on wet surfaces.