New Balance Ellipse Review

The New Balance Ellipse is for you if...

You crave plushness and want your foot surrounded by soft cushioning

You want a comfortable, safe daily training option that can keep easy miles enjoyable

You don't need to pick up the pace, and just want to have a pleasant ride

What is the New Balance Ellipse made for?

The Ellipse is the latest Fresh Foam-centric daily trainer to hit the market from New Balance. Following the example of its sibling shoes--like the More, the 880, and the 1080--the Ellipse leans on New Balance's beloved midsole compound to provide a soft, cushioned ride for all your lifestyle needs and daily mileage.

The detail work here, and aesthetics, help differentiate this new model from those other Fresh Foam offerings. With a snugger fit, a less pronounced rocker, and a slightly redialed version of the foam, New Balance has introduced the Ellipse as a fun daily trainer to add bounce and energy to your standard mileage runs. And, while we didn't find the Ellipse nailing that particular target, we did find the Ellipse to be a great option for runners who are setting out for casual, comfort-focused mileage.

The Ellipse is very good at providing one specific type of experience, with plush comfort as its primary focus. But runners who want more range, or runners whose footstrike disagrees with the shoes' emphasis on plushness, will walk away disappointed.

Comfort

If you like thick, soft, abundantly cushioned shoes, then you've come to the right place. The Ellipse puts comfort front and center with an exceptionally soft underfoot foam, a thickly padded heel collar, and a pillowy tongue.

Underfoot, the foam strikes a balance between being softer than the New Balance 880, especially when walking, but firmer than the 1080, especially once you start running. It's the type of shoe that you can wear all day, as well as on your runs, with compression as its strong suit instead of energy return or responsiveness.

Looking into the negatives a bit, the shoe offers little support, which became problematic for some of our testers. With so much emphasis on the cushioning and keeping things plush, those of us accustomed to more structure underfoot found immediate issues with discomfort. Down towards the toe box, we also found issues with dimpling as the shoe's overlay materials would sometimes crumple around the metatarsal head.

Performance

This is tricky. We strive to measure performance based on how well a shoe fulfills its intended use case--for example, a max-cushioned shoe isn't expected to "perform" in the same ways that a super shoe is. But with the New Balance Ellipse, we found ourselves splitting finer hairs than usual-- considering the difference between the New Balance's stated use case for the shoe versus what we actually found it to be good at.

Although New Balance has pitched the Ellipse as a fun, bouncy experience, what we found was more of a cushioned, pillowy ride that was good for casual or recovery runs. We sank into the shoe too much to pick up the pace well, and the rebound wasn't what we'd describe as "bouncy." But if we remove the brandspeak from our minds and reset our expectations, approaching this instead as a recovery shoe, then it hits that particular mark very well for some of our testers. It can carry you through long blocks of training, and will feel good to step out in for run after run after run, as long as pace isn't a concern.

Fit

The fit of this shoe is mostly true to size, with one of our testers (who routinely sizes up a half size with New Balance) doing the same here and feeling satisfied. With a slightly wider toe box, we felt like we had plenty of room for our feet to swell throughout our runs. The tongue had enough cushion that the laces didn’t cause hot spots or discomfort on the instep of our feet, and the thick heel collar kept us feeling secure. It is a voluminous shoe that still hugged our feet well and emphasized cushioning all around.