It used to be the shoes worn by college and high school cross country and track-and-field runners were mainly either black or white, sometimes blue.
That’s not the case as much anymore.
As a matter of fact, it’s not as easy to find those runners these days wearing a black, white and blue competition shoe. Instead, they prefer solid or multicolored bright shoes — frequently sporting vivid neon designs.
That rainbow fashion trend has been popular for nearly three decades now, and continues to grow in interest. Colored shoes entered the global spotlight during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta when U.S. gold medal sprinter Michael Johnson ran in colored shoes.
Chris Farley, the owner of the five Pacers Running stores in the metro area, said the color of running shoes is always a big business topic among the stores’ decisionmakers.
“We saw the shoe color craze explode in the early 2000s with all the different colors,” said Farley, a runner himself when he attended Yorktown High School in Arlington and still a runner today. “Stores by then were offering many different colors of shoes.”
Farley said while black, white and blue shoes have returned to fashion, the most popular colors today are pink and anything neon.
“We sell a lot of shoes with colors. You have to have that style in your store now,” Farley said.
Many shoes consist of multiple colors. Some runners even wear a different colored shoe on each foot.
Also, runners will switch colors throughout a season hoping to improve their performances.
To see those many different colors, watch the start of any high school cross country meet, girls or boys, when dozens of runners are squeezed together at the starting line.
“The start of those races looks like a Sherwin Williams paint store,” said former Bishop O’Connell High School standout runner Max Greczyn, now an assistant running coach at the school and still a runner who recently clocked a personal-best time of 4:09.7 mile on an indoor course.
In high school, Greczyn ran in many different colored shoes, and he enjoyed the look, wearing them to win two conference and two state cross country championships.
“If I saw a pink shoe on a store shelf, I would buy it,” Greczyn said.
He also wore bright neon orange shoes for a while.
“I looked like a traffic cone. It was fantastic,” Greczyn said.
Shoe colors have become a big topic of conversation among runners, with Greczyn saying he has had many such talks.
O’Connell cross country and track-and-field coach Jim Connor said he doesn’t much pay attention to his athletes’ shoe colors. The coach explained that high-school teams don’t issue competition shoes — the athletes or their parents purchase those themselves.
“What I do know is that runners do talk about shoe colors all the time, some more than others,” Connor said.
One such runner was 2026 O’Connell graduate Lance Jayme.
“Lance knew everything about the colors of shoes, which were the most popular and where to get the best deals on buying shoes,” Connor said.
In addition to the different shoe colors are the variations of colored shoelaces. A runner wearing orange shoes might have screaming green laces.
As for runners’ socks, those can now be bright-colored, no longer all-white or all-black.
The variety of colors worn on the bottom of a runner’s torso now most certainly conflicts, color-wise, with team uniforms.
A runner might be wearing blue and white uniform jerseys and shorts, with green, orange, yellow, teal or purple shoes, socks or laces. That happens all the time.
