Hybrid fitness racing has grown from a local experiment to a global circuit attracting hundreds of thousands of finishers in under a decade. Adidas is now making a direct play for that audience with a shoe built to do what no general training or running model can.
Adidas has launched the Adizero Dropset Elite, a shoe built specifically for hybrid fitness racing formats that combine running with functional strength stations.
The move places the German brand squarely in a category that has grown from a niche European circuit into one of the fastest-growing mass participation formats in global sport. According to data compiled by Hybrid Fitness Media, HYROX – the world’s dominant hybrid fitness racing series – staged 89 events in 2025 with nearly 780,000 finishers, averaging around 8,750 per event. The series generated an estimated $140 million in revenue last year and now operates across 30-plus countries. With organizers targeting more than one million annual participants within the next two years and over 100 events scheduled globally for the 2025–26 season, the market has attracted serious attention from the sporting goods industry.
Adidas fuses running foam with lifting stability in hybrid racing shoe
Adidas built the shoe by combining technology from two existing product lines. The Adizero Dropset Elite uses Lightstrike Pro foam from the brand’s running range and pairs it with the stability platform of its Dropset trainer. The design addresses the specific mechanical requirements of hybrid racing: cushioning and energy return for the eight one-kilometre runs that make up a standard HYROX event, and lateral support for functional stations including sled pushes, wall balls and sandbag lunges.
The footwear was developed with athletes competing in the format, including two-time HYROX world champion Tim Wenisch, who wore a prototype version to victory at the HYROX Elite 15 Male Singles in Melbourne in December 2025. The Elite 15 division – a head-to-head final between the top-ranked athletes in each season – was introduced for the first time in the 2024–25 season, evidence of how quickly the competitive structure of hybrid racing has matured.
Why adidas built a shoe Puma doesn’t have
The commercial context extends beyond product. Adidas confirmed a long-term partnership with ATHX, the official hybrid competition partner it refers to as part of its “Ultimate Fitness Experience” initiative, currently expanding from initial UK events to additional markets.
The world’s second-largest sporting goods brand has entered the category with a dedicated SKU – rather than a repositioned running or cross-training model – at a time when competition for the hybrid racing market has intensified. Puma signed a global partnership with HYROX covering the 2024–27 seasons, and Reebok has long held a dominant position in functional fitness through its CrossFit affiliation.
The footwear logic differs meaningfully between those two formats. CrossFit demands a stable lifting platform that can handle Olympic weightlifting and gymnastics movements, with running a secondary consideration. HYROX, by contrast, is a standardised race – eight one-kilometre loops alternated with functional stations – which means running economy is as critical as lateral stability. That structural difference justifies a distinct footwear architecture, and the Adizero Dropset Elite has been designed to fill that gap. No equivalent purpose-built race shoe currently exists within the adidas line, nor, notably, within Puma’s HYROX partnership portfolio.
