How to Clean the adidas Adizero Evo SL: Mesh, Foam, and Road Grime

Cleaning a running shoe is a different job from cleaning a terrace shoe. A Samba picks up scuffs. An Evo SL picks up sweat, road spray, and the fine grit that works its way into a mesh upper over a few hundred miles.

The Adizero Evo SL is built from an engineered mesh upper over a full-length Lightstrike Pro midsole, with a Continental rubber outsole underneath. The EXO version swaps the upper for a textile build with the EXOSKELETON fit system and runs a sculpted rubber outsole. Both share the same care logic: the upper is thin, the foam is the expensive part, and neither of them wants heat.

Can you machine wash running shoes?

Hand clean them. The mesh on a racing-derived trainer is deliberately light and open, and a wash cycle stretches it out of shape around the midfoot where the lockdown comes from. The tumbling also works on the bond between the upper and the midsole.

The Lightstrike Pro midsole is the reason to be careful rather than casual here. It is the same foam adidas puts in its carbon-plated racing shoes, and it is the most expensive component in the shoe. Soaking it and then drying it fast on a radiator is a good way to change how the shoe rides.

Step one: dry first, then strip it down

Let the pair dry fully before you start, especially after a wet run. Working on a damp mesh upper pushes grit through the weave instead of lifting it off.

Pull the laces and take the sockliner out. On a shoe worn for actual mileage, the sockliner is where the sweat lives, and leaving it in keeps the inside damp for days.

Step two: the mesh upper

Dry brush the whole upper first with a soft brush. A lot of road dust comes off without any water at all.

For what stays, use a cloth or soft brush with warm water and a small amount of mild detergent, working in light circles. Engineered mesh is thin by design. Scrubbing hard fuzzes the surface and can open up the weave, and that damage shows from across a room on a white pair. adidas puts it well in its own cleaning guide: scrub rather than rub.

On the EXO, the EXOSKELETON overlays are a smooth synthetic and wipe clean with the same damp cloth. Run the cloth along the overlay rather than across the join, so you are not driving water under the edge.

Step three: the Lightstrike Pro midsole

Wipe the midsole with a damp soapy cloth and a soft brush. Firmer pressure is fine on the foam sidewall, and most of what dulls a white midsole is surface dirt.

Two things to avoid. Do not soak the foam by running the shoe under a tap, and keep solvents away from it. Rubbing alcohol, acetone, and household degreasers have no business near a performance midsole, whatever they do for a leather upper.

Step four: the outsole

The Continental rubber outsole is where you can be firm without thinking about it. Brush the grit out of the lugs, then a melamine eraser takes off the worst of the road marking.

While you are down there, look at the wear pattern. Rubber worn through to the foam at the outer heel or the forefoot tells you where the shoe is in its life, and that is more useful information than how clean it looks.

Step five: sockliner, laces, and drying

Wipe the sockliner on both sides with a damp soapy cloth and stand it up to dry separately.

For the laces, adidas publishes a method: soak them in warm bleach water, massage the bleach through for a minute, then wring them out and press them dry in a folded microfiber towel. That works on the white laces the standard Evo SL ships with. Colored laces go into warm soapy water instead, because bleach lifts the color out of them.

Stuff the shoes with paper towel and dry them at room temperature with airflow around them. No dryer, no radiator, no hair dryer, no sunny windowsill. Heat is what breaks down the adhesive holding a shoe together, and it is the fastest way to turn a cleaning session into a repair job.

Allow a full day before they go back into rotation.

How often is worth doing this?

Brush the upper and wipe the midsole every couple of weeks if you are running in them regularly. Pull the sockliner and air the shoe out after any wet or hot run, which does more for how the pair smells than any cleaning product does.

Rotating two pairs helps more than any of this. A shoe that gets a full day to dry out between runs stays fresher, and the foam gets time to recover between sessions.

What cleaning cannot fix

Mileage. Lightstrike Pro compresses over the life of the shoe, and no amount of cleaning brings the bounce back. If the ride has gone flat, the shoe is finished as a training shoe regardless of how good the upper looks. A clean pair with dead foam is still a dead pair.

More Evo SL reading

See the complete Adizero Evo SL guide, which men's Evo SL to buy, and what the EXOSKELETON actually changes. For other materials, our general guide to cleaning sneakers covers leather, canvas and suede, and how to clean and wash GORE-TEX covers waterproof pairs.

Browse the Adizero Evo SL collection when it is time to replace them. Every pair is authenticated in house before it ships from our Portland, Oregon warehouse.

— Anthony from West Coast Deals