HOKA Mach 6: Tested Review

As an amateur runner with serious racing goals, I’ve struggled to find my place in my local running community in Manhattan. I’ve been with a club for a couple of years, and it's wonderful to have company as I seek to improve at the sport. However, as a mile/5000-meter track racer in a sea of road marathoners, I often feel alone. Team training plans are built around the longer-distance folks and their goals, meaning I either run workouts that are at the incorrect pace and distance for my goals or resort to running alone. It also means having minimal team support at my races.  

I don’t want to waste an ounce of my potential as I build up towards my goal of running a sub-19-minute 5K and whittling my mile time down to the 5-minute 30-second range, so I’ve spent the first half of the year visiting other teams and meeting with running coaches to find a training setup that’s more aligned. It’s been a lot of trial and error. The cadence has been a bit like this: Tuesday with Great Hill Track Club, then a phone call with the coach of Lone Wolf Track Club the following week and more solo workouts than usual. 

But there’s been some reprieve: The HOKA Mach 6 has launched me through several interval workouts, plus a few tempo and long runs, numerous workaday easy miles, and one spritely adventure through the snowy streets of Montreal. The speed-ready, lightweight road-running shoes have eased what I consider the most onerous portion of winter training, when challenging conditions and stiff limbs make every mile feel uncertain but each completed run is a loving promise to your future self. Over the course of 8 weeks and roughly 170 miles, these shoes ushered me into a totally new chapter of my running life. 

Hitting the Ground Running

The first test for the Mach 6 was 7 rounds of 800 meters at 10K pace with one of the running teams I’ve been trialing, the newly founded Manhattan Track Club. I barely glanced at my watch, opting to let the group carry me through the cold, fierce repeats. The Mach 6 is fairly springy, and though designed for the roads, performed surprisingly well at gripping the uneven terrain of Central Park’s packed dirt bridle path, which has some hilly parts and craggy, rocky areas. The shoes allowed me to easily make lateral moves to dodge puddles and find my footing in muddy ground.

The Durabrasion rubber outsole performed well on various terrain types, whether I was running a tempo on asphalt, seeking firm ground during fast intervals after a heavy rain or favoring golf course turf and gravel pathways at the public park near home. Judging the shoe for its intended use case—on the roads, for “everyday speed”—it did an admirable job and felt light and responsive underfoot thanks to the single-stack super critical foam EVA midsole. 

The best compliment I can give a shoe is that I’ve forgotten all about it, and in the midst of my hard workouts, I certainly didn’t notice the Mach 6. I was more aware of the shoe’s feel whilst clocking slower miles, noticing slight discomfort and an awkwardness in my gait. However, while cranking out intervals between neon orange cones my coach had laid out, the Mach 6 propelled me with a springy responsiveness. I was in constant motion, and didn’t waste a single thought on the nature of my footfalls. Instead, I was totally focused on breath and movement, locked into the rhythms of my workout. 

Still Built for Speed

The following week, I returned to the bridle path for a ladder workout. These reps go exactly how they sound: You start short, climb up to your longest reps, then come back down. This week, the assignment was 200-400-600-800-800-600-400-200 (in meters) at a progression from mile to 5K pace, and then 10K pace for the longer intervals and back on down the rungs to a quick finish. The shoes proved themselves versatile, responding well to quicker paces at the beginning as well as the more moderate paces in the middle. 

This experience contrasted sharply with occasions like my weekend long run where the shoe’s propulsion clashed with the purpose of my outing. My heart rate mysteriously skyrocketed, requiring me to slow down unnaturally. When reduced to nearly a walking pace, the shoes feel prone to shuffling, so much so that sometimes I accidentally skidded and audibly scuffed along the ground. When the cadence slows, there’s a bit of that rocking feel that I also notice in my carbon-plated racing shoes at relaxed paces, what another tester described as “a little bit of a rocker at the front of the shoe,” which he said gave him “a good push off.” I associate this feature with a fast shoe, so I would recommend the Mach 6 for quicker runs. This feedback mirrors contributor Kamilah Journét’s review of the previous model, the Mach 5. Both she and a fellow tester agreed that the shoe wasn’t quite suited to slow long runs, and the same generally goes for this update. You’d do better to save these bad boys for workouts, and try a model like the HOKA Clifton 9 (our pick for Best Recovery Shoe and an Editors’ Choice Award Winner in 2023), for easy runs and slow long runs. 

However, there are some improvements on longer runs for the Mach 6. While the Mach 5 testers found the shoe “very heavy” on longer, steady runs, the Mach 6 felt light at all speeds and distances. These feathery, responsive trainers perform best on tempo or threshold runs, and are also ideal for intervals, hill repeats, and speed workouts, giving me a touch of turbo when I need to find another gear. HOKA advertises the Mach 6 as a potential race shoe, too, and that checks out: They earned me the fastest 200 meters of my life in a 4x200m relay to end the indoor track season. 

Playing the Long Game

In terms of fit and feel, I noticed no discomfort in these neutral trainers, but overall, they were a sharp contrast to the other more cushioned trainers I typically oscillate between throughout the week. The Mach 6 has a low-profile cushion bed intended to keep your feet closer to the ground while incorporating a firmer material for efficient push-off. The only weird feel I ever had in them was when I went straight from running to weightlifting. These are 100% running shoes, and I do not recommend attempting to back squat or deadlift while wearing them. That made me feel off-balance and my weight rocked back and forth in them.

While bantering with my potential new teammates one morning, I shared that I have wide feet (specifically in the toe box region), and not every brand or model of running shoe accommodates that reality, even if they carry wide sizes. It seems I’ve found my brigade, as some of my wide-footed companions knew just what I meant. I was pleased to find that the Mach 6 trainer was roomy and comfortable in the toe box, but still hugged my foot securely. It fit true to size, and I had no discomfort with the heel or the refined and updated anatomical tongue.

I’ve only put about a month and change’s wear on the Mach 6s, but I sense that they’ll hold up through the end of my spring training cycle, and possibly longer, about 5-6 months in total. As one New Mexico-based tester put it, “I am impressed with the durability of this shoe, specifically the sole compared to other Hokas.” After about 100 miles, he said, “the Mach 6 sole hardly shows any wear.”Because they’re a lighter shoe, with less cushion and foam, they seem like they may wear down a bit more quickly than my other daily trainers, but not significantly so. HOKA says this model was updated “for enhanced durability with strategic rubber coverage in the outsole,” so it seems likely they’ll go a bit further than their predecessors.  

Fit for Ambitious Road Runners

Towards the end of this shoe’s testing period, the work I put in started to deliver: I ran faster races times than what I’ve previously achieved at this time of year and  placed first in my age group at a 5K race in Atlanta. Two weeks later, my time at the Carlsbad 5000 was just 15 seconds shy of my fastest ever performance. Currently, I feel on the precipice of some personal records in both the mile and 5K. 

This shoe is well suited to both ambitious road runners chasing fast times and weekend warriors who want that extra pop. I fall into the former camp, and while I still haven’t decided on a new running club, I now have an educated guess about how I’ll approach the next phase of my athletic career. I’m going all in on what I love, and that means training with the other trackies, running short and fast, and doing it all in shoes that were made to go as quickly as I can take them.