Beyond the Shoes: How the Running Industry Affects Run Culture
Running shoes and apparel are important for any runner. Therefore, the running industry, which consists of companies, race organizers, and advertisers targeting runners and influencing running culture, is similarly essential to a runner’s sports experience. The running industry has been dramatically growing in the last half century, in tandem with the recreational running boom. The industry is known for adapting to new technology, trends, and fashion. Chicago Area Runners Association Senior Development Manager of Community Development Dominique Sabbs speaks to the recent ways the running industry has worked to mold itself to the time it’s in: “For many years, running marketing was shifting to being very gendered, and now there is also a huge change in unisex clothing and shoes to add an extra layer of inclusion.” Throughout the past 50 years, many of the changes in the running industry to be inclusive and welcoming to runners have resulted from the advocacy and ingenuity of running consumers. There are many instances when women have taken control of their sports participation and made space for themselves, even if the existing running industry did not provide it for them first.
Despite the prevalence of brands like Lululemon, Athleta, Fabletics, and others targeting female consumers with athletic and athleisure apparel, sports bras were just hitting the marketplace only fifty years ago. In 1977, Lisa Lindahl, Honda Miller, and Polly Smith invented the jog bra by sewing two jock straps together. These women sought to address their personal needs after Lindahl started running and found traditional bras not compressive or comfortable enough. Their invention would revolutionize all women’s sports, so much so that the Smithsonian houses a prototype of the jog bra.
The prototype of the Jog Bra was made from two jock straps sewn together. Smithsonian Magazine
The jog bra exemplifies how women have had to fill in the gaps for themselves in sports designed around men. When women began to compete in marathons in the 1960s and 1970s, they found creative ways to use non-running or athletic clothing for their performance, such as the jog bra invention. Kathrine Switzer has written about pulling together her marathon outfit for her first Boston race in 1967 from her old sports uniform and ballet tights. Regarding her outfit choice, she said, “I got the idea from my old hockey tunics, which were easy to run in as they allowed total leg movement and, with ballet tights, no chafing.” Switzer goes on to express that the construction of men’s running shorts was made from canvas and uncomfortable even for men. Her commentary is important: running was just becoming a widespread recreational sport in the United States, and there were not nearly as many shoe and apparel brands on the market as there are now. However, men still had some official running options, mainly with shoes, while women had no specified running gear. Women had to hodgepodge together running outfits, mainly pulling from the uniforms of more established female sports, such as field hockey and had to wear men’s shoes until the 1980s. I interviewed Nancy Rollins, who has run over 100 marathons, starting with the 1980 Chicago marathon. When she began running, Rollins remarked on the lack of gear availability: “The gear just was not in great shape for quite a long time,” Rollins said, “There was not a lot of variety; it was nothing like what it is today.” The first women’s running shoe was the Waffle Racer by Nike, which debuted in 1978. This shoe had the signature Nike waffle sole, and including a woman’s last made it a women's shoe. The basis for the sole and design of the shoe are made from molds called shoe lasts. While women can wear men’s shoes comfortably in many cases, female feet are typically narrower and shorter. These distinctions can affect the arch's placement, the toe box's size, and the shoe's width. Therefore, a shoe designed around a woman’s foot benefits overall foot health and comfort, especially when running 26.2 miles. Creating a running shoe with a female last and female-specific workout apparel such as the jog bra marked a revolutionary moment in women’s athletics. Women were now seen as viable consumers in the running industry, enough that the industry made products for them. Women are now major consumers in the United States, making up sixty percent of all annual activewear sales.
This photo is from the 1972 Boston Marathon, the first with an official women’s field. Switzer ran the race with the bib number F6. Patrick A. Burns, The New York Times via ESPN
The Rise of Women’s Running Brands
Today, women are driving consumers, yet until the late 1990s, there was still not a significant amount of availability in the activewear marketplace. That changed with the rise of companies like Lululemon, Athleta, and Oiselle. In the 2000s, a surge of women’s activewear brands began to pop up and dominate the clothing market. While leaving shoes to Nike, Brooks, Saucony, and the other dominant brands of the twentieth century, these new brands sought to address comfort and style issues in the running clothing sector. Oiselle is a Seattle-based women’s running apparel company founded by Sarah Bergeson. It started because Bergeson was unhappy with the waistband fit of her running shorts after having a baby and sought to create shorts that had more comfortable features for all ages and types of runners. In doing so, she took what was then an unusual approach in the running industry: asking women what they wanted in their products. Bergeson is among the only female CEOs or executives in the running industry. The leaders in the running industry are historically white and male, which reflects how they produce their products and materials. Retired professional long-distance runner Lauren Fleshman wrote in her memoir, Good For A Girl, about the ways the running industry, specifically her former sponsor Nike, tried to target marketing to women without their input. She says that John Hoke, the designer of the female-specific Nike Goddess store in the early 2000s, said: “Women weren’t comfortable in our stores, so I figured out where they would be comfortable—most likely in their own homes. The [women’s] store has more of a residential feel.” Fleshman explains that efforts such as Nike's have not been well-received because, ultimately, these PR stunts emphasize the company’s historic tone-deafness toward women.
Internally, in the running industry, sponsored female athletes feel the effect of sexist practices towards women in the sport, such as through maternity leave policies. Retired professional distance runner and Olympic marathoner Kara Goucher has advocated in the running industry for better maternity benefits and overall treatment of female athletes. During her pregnancy in 2010, she faced suspensions and pay cuts from Nike, which caught her off guard because she continued to train and engage in marketing and advertising throughout her pregnancy. Goucher documented her experience in her memoir The Longest Race, exposing the abuse she experienced on Nike’s elite running team, the Oregon Project. She notes that Nike even monetized her pregnancy, having her pose for a billboard shot to catch new consumer demographics, yet Nike still used its contract powers to find ways to reduce her salary. Since then, other professional athletes, such as former Nike runner and multi-time Olympian Allyson Felix, have come forward with similar stories about Nike using their pregnancy to make irrecoverable pay cuts despite these women continuing to be monetary assets to the company while pregnant.
Kara Goucher, holding her son after The 2012 USA Half-Marathon Championships. Duluth News Tribune
Fleshman has experienced two sides of the running conglomerate’s approach towards women. In her memoir, she discusses how Nike was willing to hear her ideas about improving their female-targeted advertising and vocalized how they wanted to improve their image with women. Yet, their approach to making these changes and the sexist practices within the company, such as maternity policies, eventually forced Fleshman to leave the brand. A positive Fleshaman takes away from her work with Nike is the famous ‘Objectify Me’ ad campaign, which publicized Nike’s first shoe solely designed for women (this differs from the women’s waffle racer since it was initially a men’s shoe just inserted with a women’s last). Fleshman wrote most of the Objectify Me ad, showing her standing up and staring at the camera. In an interview with her current sponsor, Oiselle, Fleshman discusses how the initial concept Nike presented her was a photo of her in the nude with the words “Nike Objectifies Women.” She found this not to be targeted to women but rather the “male gaze,” so she presented an alternative that Nike was receptive to. Nike then turned the Objectify Me ad into posters that lined the bedrooms of thousands of aspiring female teenage runners, showing them a representation of power not completely laced with the sexualization of women.
The Nike “Objectify Me” ad featuring Fleshman. Google Images
Female Runners in the Media
Combatting the sexualization of women in athletics is a pervasive problem in all sports, often leading to advertisements that fail to celebrate and inspire women and instead present unrealistic and unhealthy standards. An article published by the University of Calgary analyzes how advertising targeting female runners sends mixed messaging to consumers. Author Carly Drake found that in the sixty advertisements she studied from January and February 2017, the issues of Runner's World, Women’s Running, and Canadian Running, women’s mental and physical fortitude is “celebrated” but in possibly unhealthy ways that perpetuate physical and beauty standards. For example, Drake defines “obligatory running” as a “run at all costs mentality akin to exercise addiction.” This theme appears in many advertisements Drake looked at, where advertisers layered images of women running alone at dawn with messages such as “I will not run away from pain.” Drake notes that most advertisements show elite athletes or women who fit the conventional physical standards of an elite athlete: lean, tall, and fast. The connection a consumer can make from this type of marketing is that to belong in the distance running culture, you must fit this mold. By flooding billboards, magazines, and online ads with images of either elite athletes or lean models, women, especially young women, will internalize that that is what they need to look like to be a runner, leading to increased drop-out rates of female runners.
An ad that Drake analyzed. The ad originally ran in an issue of Women’s Running. University of Calgary
Often, running carries a feeling of elitism and exclusion regarding speed. Barriers to entering a race based on your finishing time exacerbate this elitism belief. In response to running brand Track Smith’s annual ‘Boston Qualifiers (BQ) Only’ gear they released after the Boston 2024 entries were released, the organization Diverse We Run released a statement summarizing the effect that exclusionary aspects of the running industry can have on the greater culture of the sport:
“No one is saying we shouldn’t celebrate achievements or have standards. No one is saying a race can’t have qualifying times. The problem is when a brand (or race event, or governing body … etc.) claims to be a ‘champion for the AMATEUR RUNNER‘“(i.e., ‘for everyone’) in theory but still reinforces exclusion and elitism in practice.”
The leaders at Diverse We Run identified companies like Track Smith's influence on consumers. Track Smith has released the BQ-only gear since 2015 and has received criticism in the past for the gear only being made for time qualifiers and not registered charity runners. The company has also faced critiques about its available sizes since its sizing only goes up to a woman’s 32-inch waist. All of this frustration reached a boiling point in 2023 since their Instagram post introducing the gear began with the quote, “This is not a jogging race,” from former Boston Marathon race organizer Jock Semple, who notoriously advocated against the inclusion of women in the marathon, and is infamously pictured trying to pull Kathrine Switzer out of the race in 1967. The brand quickly removed the post and issued an apology for not considering the effect that using a quote from Semple would have. However, the moment still acted as a push for more conversations around how the running industry continues to celebrate certain types of athleticism, such as pushing past pain and highlighting those with the most incredible speed, which is isolating to recreational and amateur runners who similarly feel a great sense of accomplishment completing their races, but do not receive the same accolades from the media and running culture broadly.
The Running Industry and Amateur Runners
In conversations with amateur and recreational runners, specific themes arose when asked about their relationship with the running industry. Many women said they had noticed a dramatic shift toward racial and body-type inclusion in the past decade. They see a broader range of clothing sizes in activewear and see themselves more accurately represented in advertising. The growing popularity of marathons may account for the change toward more inclusive gear, apparel, and race practices. Chicago area runner Lindsey Gerba ran her first marathon in 2003, and she speaks about the change she has noticed since then:
“Before I did a marathon, I had this preconceived notion that marathon runners looked a certain way, and I think one of the most interesting things is that if you go to a marathon start line, you see every type of person. Now, you see every body type, every age, all of it. I think that is such a powerful thing. Popularity in the sport has gone up, and from that, I think people see other people they can relate to and think, ‘Oh, maybe I can do that too.’“ ““
A barrier to entering running is the belief that it is only for “certain people,” which is why the way media and companies portray running is essential to the culture of the sport. If people do not see themselves reflected in the sport’s messaging, they do not feel welcomed into that space. Sabbs speaks to her observations in the running industry:
“Especially speaking as a woman of color, when it comes to inclusive sizes, we are seeing way more than we ever did, but I do think there is a way to go in terms of quality and price. There is a lot more investment in creating shoes for women and plus-size runners.”
The investment Sabbs refers to comes in many forms, such as running apparel, but also in how the running industry works to address deeper structures of racism and privilege present in running culture. A moment of reckoning for the running industry came after the tragic murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who, while out for a run, was murdered by two white men; in Running While Black, Alison Désir discusses how, in the wake of the murder of Arbery, she worked as a consultant on an industry-wide task force to address racism in the sport. What she discovered was a lack of willingness to take accountability for how running has participated in racism and white supremacy. Even after the tragic murder of Arbery, Désir expressed the challenge and frustration she felt in having to explain to the white members exactly how racism is prevalent in running culture. She wrote about the isolating feeling of being “the only” in predominantly white running groups and the differences in freedom white people feel when running compared to the fear that People of Color feel in public spaces. Chicago area runner Maria Coleman expresses that “when you are in a running club that is a white running club, there is a difference in how you feel greater than that of male versus female. There is a difference in the interactions in a running club when it comes to race.” Due to the long history of exclusion in long-distance running, deeply rooted social structures perpetuate distance running as a white space.
The Running Industry Diversity Coalition was formed in 2020 and is working to identify and reckon with these stereotypes and racist practices within the sport. The formation of the RIDC marks a tangible step towards accountability in the running industry; however, many brands have not yet partnered with the coalition, such as some of the largest running shoe companies in the world, like Nike and Adidas. It is essential to address current runners by including all levels of athletes in conversations about apparel, shoes, and other facets of the running world to combat the intimidation that runners feel about “looking the part.” The companies that greatly influence long-distance running culture must take responsibility for the sport to repair the systems of elitism and exclusion that have prevented people from participating in the past. While this discussion has focused on the running industry as a company, it is also the duty of the runners, predominantly white runners, to identify how we have maintained this culture, whether intentionally or not. As the marathon continues to grow in numbers and diversity, it is the running industry's and its runners's responsibility to be accountable for transforming the future of running culture. A lesson I took away from my research into the running industry is that there is success when the industry collaborates and listens to its runners of all levels. As demonstrated by how women have broken into the running world, when runners of all backgrounds have agency and control in running culture, the gaps and failures in the industry begin to be filled.
