Joanna Wietrzyk and PUMA Are Making HYROX History

There are moments that don't need decoration, and Joanna Wietrzyk's world record run is one of them. At HYROX Warsaw, with her mother watching from the stands, she stopped the clock at 54:25, wearing the PUMA Deviate Elite NITRO HYROX, and she'll be the first to tell you she never saw it coming.

"It just happened so effortlessly, without even having to think about it," she told me. The meet before, in Phoenix, she'd come agonizingly close to the mark. This time, with no real expectation of breaking it, she shattered it.

For an athlete only two seasons into the sport, that kind of clarity under pressure is rare. At 24 years old, with her mother in attendance, it's the type of memory that doesn't fully register until long after the finish line.

The shoe underneath her has its own story. The Deviate Elite NITRO HYROX is PUMA's first performance shoe built specifically for the demands of HYROX racing. Wietrzyk credits it as more than equipment.

"It was bouncy enough in the run, but stable enough in the lunges," she said, and that balance gave her the confidence to trust her legs through every transition, carrying directly into her placement at the World Championships this year.

Her partnership with PUMA has been part of that story since day one. "It's an amazing honor," she said of the sponsorship, one she's carried since she first laced up competitively.

PUMA's move into HYROX wasn't a side bet; it's a long-term investment in a sport built on contradiction: endurance paired with brute force, speed offset by control. Wietrzyk described the athlete feedback loop as constant, extending all the way to the world championships, where direct input from the team shaped her race day decisions in real time.

That feedback shows up in the shoe itself. HYROX asks a lot of a runner: running, pulling, and lunging across eight stations, and a shoe that isn't built for versatility can work against you. "We've seen that over time," she said, describing how the wrong footwear compromises performance across modalities that have nothing in common with each other.

Shoes that hold up across every station, she said, are non-negotiable for anyone serious about the sport. Coming off a season where she swept every HYROX Major, becoming the first athlete in the sport's history to complete the Grand Slam, Joanna is now setting her sights on the world championship title, after finishing runner-up.

Two years in, with a world record and a Grand Slam already behind her, she's only getting started. Stay locked into Sports Illustrated's Kicks On SI for all your footwear news from the running world and beyond.

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