Nike’s Most Anticipated Running Shoe of the Year Rewrites the Rulebook (Now Available)

The brand’s biggest shoe since the Vaporfly packs decades of innovation into its state-of-the-art midsole.

Published January 30, 2025

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Nike has never made a shoe quite like the Pegasus Premium. That’s more or less the point.

The highly anticipated shoe, announced all the way back in April of 2024 and now available for purchase, might sound like an elevated take on the longstanding Pegasus, now in its 41th iteration (excluding one-offs and trail variants). But everything about it defies conventional classification.

Up the Air

At face value, the new shoe rounds out Nike’s Pegasus lineup, which also includes the Pegasus 41 and Pegasus Plus.

As far as Nike is concerned, the throughline across the series is an overall focus on responsiveness, with shoes in the Vomero and Structure lineups prioritizing comfort and stability, respectively.

The headline attribute of the Pegasus Premium is the sculpted, full-length Air Zoom unit — a first for Nike and something in the works for the better part of the last decade, starting with the Zoom All Out trainer from 2016.

Its purpose, says Kathy Gomez, the vice president of NXT Footwear at Nike, is to act as a “spring-like mechanism” that increases energy responsiveness when paired with specific foams, similar to the carbon-fiber plate of shoes like the Vaporfly.

Fully loaded

On that front, Nike threw the kitchen sink at the platform of the Pegasus Premium, equipping it with both ReactX (as seen in the Pegasus 41) and ZoomX (the same stuff in the record-setting Alphafly), with the aforementioned Air Zoom unit sandwiched in-between them.

In other words, the midsole of the Pegasus Premium packs three distinct eras of running-shoe innovation but not without one hefty caveat: a men’s size 10 weighs in at a whopping 11.5 ounces.

For context, that’s a 10 percent increase over the base Pegasus 41 and more than many maximalist trainers traditionally reserved for long, slow miles, including Nike’s own Invincible 3 (10.9 ounces) — likely to be replaced by some new variant in Vomero series.

That’s a whole lot of weight to hulk around on everyday runs around the neighborhood. And it would be more if not for a new ultralight upper fashioned out of engineered mesh and circular knit.

Nonetheless, Nike’s team is betting the responsive qualities of the Pegasus Premium, and its full-length Air Zoom pocket, will be enough to entice runners seeking a little more oomph in their weekly rotations — even if it’s not explicitly clear whether the shoes are designed for workouts, easy runs, long runs or some combination of the three.

Assuming they’re right, there is just one final hurdle to get over.

The Pegasus Premium will cost $210. That’s nowhere near the price tag of the $260 Vaporfly and $285 Alphafly, of course. However, it does bridge the gap between “trainers” and “racers” designed for world records, FKTs or, if nothing else, personal bests.

Then again, this wouldn’t be the first time Nike has rewritten the rules of running shoes. And when it does, the rest of the pack tends to fall in line.

The Pegasus Premium is now available in a gray launch colorway, with a black version coming in March.