Every brand has a comfy technical runner now. The adidas Evo SL, Nike’s Vomero 18 Plus and Pegasus Plus, all of it descended from race shoes and sold to people who mostly walk in them. PUMA‘s entry is the Deviate Pure NITRO, $150, out since June 4, and the interesting thing about it is what it leaves out.
The Deviate Nitro 4 is the performance shoe, and it carries a plate. The Pure is the same family with the plate removed and a slab of foam left in its place. Taking out that much rigid material takes out weight, roughly 30 grams against its own sibling by Mike Guillory‘s count, and it lands at 220 grams on his scale against 224 for the Evo SL. Spec sheets put it at 37mm in the heel and 29mm in the forefoot, an 8mm drop.
The foam is the whole shoe
NITROFOAM is nitrogen-injected and PEBA-based, and PUMA has been running it through the Deviate line and its basketball shoes for years now. Here there is nothing between you and it. Mike’s read is that it is comfortable straight out of the box, bouncy without being so soft that your heel sinks and your lower back pays for it later.
Because the cushioning is entirely the midsole’s job, the insole is thin, sitting over a standard strobel. It is there to separate your foot from the board, not to add anything.
Where PUMA put the effort
The upper is engineered mesh, but softer than most. It reads closer to a knit, with the give of a sock rather than the plasticky hand a lot of these runners have. Tighter knit zones do the structural work so the shoe does not need fused panels scattered across it.
Branding is unusually restrained for a shoe with two PUMA cats and a formstrip on it. The formstrip is an outline in rubberized black rather than a filled panel. There is a reflective PUMA on the medial side and another at the heel. The eyelets sit on a fused panel wrapped in something closer to felt, so the reinforcement does not fight the soft look. Flat laces, carried over from the rest of the Deviate Nitro family. The tongue is soft and stretchy, not gusseted, but held in place by bands so it does not slide.
The midsole sidewall is cut into a jagged shape that Mike compares to a car spoiler, white with an Ultra Red accent running through it. Underneath, PumaGRIP rubber is placed only at the forefoot and heel strike zones in a low-profile tire tread, with exposed foam everywhere else. That is where the rest of the weight savings came from.
Sizing and colorway
True to size. If you have worn anything in the Deviate Nitro line, or most other technical runners, carry that size over. Wide feet should try a pair on, though the upper has real stretch.
The launch colorway is PUMA White, Ultra Red and PUMA Silver, style 313905-05, at $150. Mike is explicit that this is not a running review. He is looking at it as a shoe people will wear casually, which is how most of this category actually gets worn, and his argument is that PUMA belongs in a conversation people default to filling with two other brands.
For more, see our PUMA coverage.
-->
