Saucony’s Endorphin Speed 6 Adds Foam and Loses Weight at the Same Time

The Endorphin Speed 6 reached Saucony.com and select retailers on October 15, and the number worth looking at is the one on the scale. Saucony put more midsole under this shoe than the Speed 5 carried and brought the weight down anyway. The men’s pair lists at 8.1 ounces against the Speed 5’s 8.4, with a 39 millimetre heel stack where the previous version measured 36. Adding foam and losing mass in the same generation is not how this usually goes.

The Endorphin Speed has spent six generations holding the least glamorous and most useful slot in Saucony’s fast range. The brand positions the franchise across racing, training and everyday speed work, and puts the Speed in the middle of it, calling it the versatile fast-day trainer and racer that bridges daily training and race day. The practical version of that is a nylon plate rather than a carbon one, which makes it the shoe a runner is willing to put through intervals, tempo blocks and long runs with a hard finish without burning mileage off something built for a start line. That slot carries the line commercially, because a runner buys one pair of racers a year and several pairs of whatever sits underneath them. Saucony has been unusually busy here. The brand says it refreshed every model in the Endorphin franchise this year, and the roster now reads Endorphin Elite 3, Endorphin Pro 5, Endorphin Speed 6 and Endorphin Azura. Four resets inside twelve months is a lot of tooling to spend on one franchise.

Saucony names three changes. The midsole is now PWRRUN PBX, a beaded PEBA superfoam replacing the PWRRUN PB blend the Speed 5 ran. The nylon plate has been redesigned, which the brand credits for a quicker and smoother entry into the shoe’s toe rocker. And there is more of the foam, which is where Saucony’s own numbers get slightly loose. The press release says two millimetres more underfoot. The published stack heights move from 36 and 28 on the Speed 5 to 39 and 31 on the Speed 6, a three millimetre gap at both ends. The heel-to-toe offset holds at 8 millimetres either way, so the geometry of the ride is unchanged and only its height moved. Above that sits an engineered mesh upper, with the Endorphin and Speedroll names printed on the sockliner where the press photography shows them rather than where the copy claims them. The launch makeup is White and Citron, a white and grey mesh over a citron midsole wall, with the citron carrying through to an outsole broken by a dark navy section under the midfoot.

The weight figure is the one worth watching, because it is the hardest claim to fake. Lighter foam per unit of volume is the whole arms race in performance running at the moment, and a shoe that gains three millimetres of stack while weighing less than the pair it replaces has either changed the density of its midsole or taken mass out somewhere else in the build. Saucony says the former and names the foam, which is at least a falsifiable position rather than an adjective. The part the marketing moves past is that a taller shoe is a different shoe. At 39 millimetres in the heel the Speed 6 sits well above where this model started, and a trainer running that tall behaves differently at easy paces than it does at the paces the copy was written for. Saucony has made the Speed faster and, in the same move, narrowed what it is comfortable doing. The brand has spent the year pushing the rest of the line in the same direction, including a Daikanyama Endorphin Elite 3 that treated the racer as a lifestyle object.

This is where the brand disagrees with itself. Saucony’s own press release gives a suggested retail of $175. Saucony.com lists all four Endorphin Speed 6 entries, men’s, women’s and both wide fits, at $180, and Running Warehouse has the White and Citron men’s pair at $179.95. Two of the brand’s own surfaces are five dollars apart on the same shoe on launch day, so treat $180 as the number a buyer actually meets and $175 as what the press office wrote down. For scale, Saucony is currently listing the outgoing Endorphin Speed 5 at $129.95, which is the real competition for any runner who does not need the new foam badly enough to pay the difference.

The Endorphin Speed 6 is available now at Saucony.com and select retailers. The men’s launch colorway is White and Citron under style code S101825-1006, the women’s Hue and Celestial pair runs as S101826-1012, and the wide fits carry S101827 and S101828 in Black and White. Sizing is men’s 7 to 13 plus 14 and 15, and women’s 5 to 12. Saucony.com lists it at $180. Stock is live at Saucony and at Running Warehouse, with wider retailer coverage building through the week.

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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