The Hoka Mafate 5 Is Everything We Love About the Brand’s Trail Runners

The Hoka Mafate 5 might not be as familiar to some as the brand’s Clifton, but you have to understand: Hoka was born on the trail. And it all started with the Mafate—not just Hoka’s first trail shoe, but its first shoe, period. So, I guess you could call this latest installment in the Mafate series kind of a big deal. Hoka certainly does, and the much-anticipated Mafate 5 serves as a powerful reminder of how the brand earned its enviable market share across terrains.

I recently had the opportunity to test the Mafate 5 during a week of trail running through the French Alps, about an hour’s drive from Annecy, where Hoka was founded in 2009. Across an insanely wide spectrum of conditions—from trudging below the treeline of Mont Blanc to bombing down technical switchbacks at 7,000 feet, perhaps a little faster than one would consider “responsible”—I was able to put the Mafate 5 through its paces to help you decide if the latest iteration of Hoka’s flagship trail shoe deserves a spot in your off-road rotation.

A Hoka Frankenstein (in a Good Way)

The Mafate 5 is a decidedly unique and visually striking shoe unlike any of its forebears. But when you really analyze it, it starts to look more like a Mafate greatest hits album. The stretchy, breathable vamp above the toe box is reminiscent of the Mafate Speed 4. The minimalist tongue is a throwback to the Mafate X. But rather than some kind of Frankenstein cobble job, the Mafate 5 is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts, with its components working together—both functionally and visually—to produce what is, in my opinion, the brand’s most streamlined trail offering to date.

Perhaps the most noticeable update from the previous model, aesthetically speaking, is that the Mafate 5 looks faster than ever, thanks to the increased heel-to-toe drop. For the Mafate 5, Hoka literally doubled the shoe’s drop, dialing it up from four millimeters in the Mafate Speed 4 to eight millimeters here. Hoka also went super minimal with the upper, which is mostly a single piece of lightweight warp-knit fabric wrapped in a grippy flow-molded TPU cage. The result is a shoe that is simultaneously strikingly sleek and a tour de force of engineering innovation.

An, Ahem, Groundbreaking Change

The first Mafate was designed with the very specific goal of recreating the smooth, flowy feeling of free-riding down a mountain. Granted, the prototype had a cushioned stack tall enough to make John Travolta blush, but midsole technology has come a long way over the past 15 years, and the Mafate 5 brings this objective full-circle with a deceptively low profile in something of a victory lap.

Similar to the air-filled tires of a mountain bike, the Mafate 5 seems to take jagged, uneven terrain in its stride. In a way, it’s the opposite of the Hoka Speedgoat 6, with its heightened ground feel—something that Hoka acknowledges might deter some runners who prefer to feel the texture of every rock and root along the way. To create the sensation of flatness regardless of the actual happenings underfoot, Hoka did something drastic, flipping the shoe’s dual-layer midsole to have the softer, more impressionable foam at the bottom to effectively mold around the ground. This might just be the Mafate 5’s greatest achievement. I’ve never felt anything like it.

Long Live the Mafate

Hoka markets the Mafate 5 under the banner of “for the long run,” but there’s more nuance to this slogan than the simple implication that the shoe is adept at carrying you across vast distances—which it certainly is. (I clocked several athletes sporting the Mafate 5 as they set off to complete this year’s Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc—arguably the world’s gnarliest off-road ultra, spanning 108 miles through three countries.)