Why Some Runners Are Addicted to Buying Running Shoes – Runner’s World

The boxes are stacked like books, hurried and askew, one atop another until the towers—just inches from the ceiling—begin to buckle. They lean together, one color, one brand into the next: the orange Nikes, the black Adidas, the blue Brooks, every label facing out- ward. David Iding stores them here, well over 300 pairs, on the second floor of his century-old home in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, in his daughter’s old bedroom, where they obscure the baby-blue walls and clutter the creaking pinewood floors, and where a January sun filters through finger-smudged windows to bathe the room in a soft wintry glow.

Hair wrapped in a loose bun at the nape of his neck, Iding—still “half hippie” at 52, he claims, and a recovering alcoholic—reaches for a black Adidas box at the very top. He opens the lid to reveal a pair of lightweight trainers, well worn, yellow and blue, the Adidas Adizero Boston Ekiden, size 11. He lifts one shoe from the box, bobs it up and down to gauge the weight, just 10.6 ounces. He digs a thumb into the foam, glides it across the mesh, rolls it over, laughs a little.

“These are some ugly dogs,” he says.

For Iding, the shoes are an obsession, driven by an addictive personality and the quest for the perfect shoe, but also by the stories in their soles. Now and then, when the funds are running low, he’ll sell a pair or two on eBay. But for the most part they stay here, stacked and waiting to see the light again. Inside the lid, he’s recorded the shoe’s curriculum vitae: the Philadelphia Marathon, the New York City Marathon, the dates, the finish times, the total mileage after every race. The Philly run was nirvana, the best race of his life, his first Boston qualifier. November 18, 2012. “I ran that entire marathon without any pain, I swear to god,” he says. “It’s just mind-boggling.”

When he hit Kelly Drive, about five miles from the finish, tears spilled forward. He was 13 minutes ahead of his Boston qualifying time. After so many years of substance abuse, of smoking too many cigarettes and too much weed, of drinking himself useless, he was finally experiencing achievement. He crossed the line at 3:16:39, the digits still scrawled inside the lid.

“It was crazy,” he says, closing the box and placing it back on top. “Those will not be sold.”

Iding is not alone. Many runners save a pair or two of old shoes for the memories they keep, the nerves they still trigger—however faintly—when they open the lid and peek inside. Others simply to track their mileage month after month. But for some, purchasing new shoes—and holding on to the old ones—is a compulsion. They’re chasing the perfect fit. They’re humoring nostalgia. They’re answering an obsession.

Compulsive buying (CB) isn’t recognized as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. But it’s not an unobserved phenomenon, either. When German researcher Emil Kraepelin first clinically described it in 1924, he termed it “oniomania,” or “buying mania.” Today, CB is defined by “a preoccupation with buying and shopping, characterized by frequent buying episodes, or overpowering urges to buy that are experienced as irresistible and senseless,” according to a survey of the literature in The American Journal on Addictions.

“A lot of compulsive buyers will focus on a particular object,” says Dr. James E. Mitchell, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of North Dakota. One of his patients collected only tropical fish; another, “very expensive, fine-tooled cowboy boots.” He’s never encountered a running shoe obsession, but as a former long-distance runner himself, he can easily picture one.

“You do get fixated on the running. And one of the things you worry about is your shoes.”

Running brands feed into that compulsion. Brooks updates the design—shape, tooling, material—of every shoe in its lineup yearly. They add new colors every six months, and quarterly, they introduce new special-event shoes. That staggered rollout is pretty standard in the running shoe industry—and it works, often fueling consumers to purchase shoes they have little practical use for. The Ugly Sweater edition of Brooks’s Levitate 2 model, for example, complete with a set of jingle bells, sold out in just two days.

“They know that if we find a shoe we like, we’re not going to buy just one pair. We’re going to buy 10,” says Christy Nielsen, 43, a physical therapist and competitive distance runner in Omaha, Nebraska, who freely cops to a shoe obsession. She purchased the Ugly Sweater shoes immediately after their release in November 2018. “And then in six months, they’re going to change the style a little bit, so now we’re…gonna want to buy these.”

According to Mitchell’s aforementioned survey in The American Journal on Addictions, CB is prevalent in an estimated 6 to 7 percent of adults, and that prevalence has risen over the past 20 years. More importantly, Mitchell says, “a lot of these people have other [psychological] problems,” most often anxiety and depression, but also compulsive hoarding, substance abuse, binge eating, and other impulse control disorders. Nielsen battled anorexia in her college years, for example, and admits to other obsessive tendencies, though she’s never been diagnosed with CB.

“So I was obsessive about running, then I was obsessive about not eating. It goes from one thing to the next,” she says. “It could be worse than running shoes.”

Andrew Hetherington

The oldest pair in Iding’s collection is 37 years old, and until recently, he still occasionally wore them camping. He props them on a box beside the window, a pair of crusty blue Adidas with serrated yellow stripes—“traditional Adidas Boston coloration,” he says—the light accentuating every wrinkle in the mesh. They look fragile, mummified, like they belong in a glass case, or maybe the trash. Unlike the several hundred pairs of newer models surrounding him—many of which strategically expose the midsole to shed weight—the outsoles of the Adidas Marathon 80s are covered entirely in rubber, or “carbon” as Iding often calls it in the lexicon of his shoe-obsessed tribe. The tread is stamped with circles and the original Adidas leaf. The midsole—after decades of use—is flat and hard.

“I used to love these for cross country, for running on grass,” he says. “You’d get a little bit of a bite, you know.”

Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Iding moved to nearby Marshall—a small farm town—in the seventh grade. His family life was a byzantine jungle of halves and steps, of miles and years removed, of bit parts and minor actors. He was an “oops” himself, he says, “the red-headed stepchild trying to integrate.” Iding had always been an athlete as a child, but after so much confusion at home he developed an edge, he says, a little punk rock, a little fuck you, and there had always been something about cross country, hadn’t there, a subtle protest against the football jocks, against the mainstream sports, against the rah-rah fandom that never seemed to accompany the runners.

“Cross country was for the independents, you know what I mean? A lot of the kids didn’t fit in anywhere else,” he says.

Iding joined the team his freshman year. He was instantly hooked.

“I knew on a subconscious level that I could go for a run and all of these teenage anxieties—how to ask a girl for a date, how am I gonna do on a math test—would be gone by the time I got done running,” he says.

Iding’s high school team was tough. So tough they won the state championship his sophomore year. Iding was the only underclassman to letter. He became addicted to the spiritual aspects of the sport, that subconscious freeing of the mind. And he was swept up by the larger world of the sport, by long-distance runners like Alberto Salazar and Benji Durden, his favorite, making headlines across the country, building cachet, the major shoe sponsors behind them. Though he hadn’t started collecting yet, he was already keenly interested in what he put on his feet.

“There was stuff happening with American distance running at the time, so the cultural piece had a lot to do with it. But today it’s all about different experiences. A different manufacturer comes out with some kind of hook and it’s like, ‘I’ve got to find out what that’s about.’ It’s like that quest for the perfect shoe.”

He likely could have kept running at a D-II school, but he’d long had his sights set on Michigan State, where his father often took him to football and basketball games as a kid. He knew he’d never make the team, so in the absence of running, he turned to partying instead, and just like before, he dove in headfirst.

“It was just like the running. In no time, I’m drinking with the heaviest drinkers on campus. I was totally straight in high school, and then it was like a freaking light switch. Drugs and alcohol both.”

He’d enrolled as a journalism student and later switched to communications, but it wouldn’t matter. After three years, his GPA flatlined somewhere below a 2.0, which precluded him from continuing. So he packed his bags, now a 20-year-old college dropout with a chip on his shoulder, and drove with a friend to his mother and half-sister’s home in Palm Springs, California, looking for work. They tripped acid along the way, three days in the Grand Canyon, out of body, out of mind. They stayed with his family for just a week before his sister found the journal he’d kept during his road trip and booted them both.

He found a few odd jobs in California, lost them all to drugs and alcohol, eventually found himself living with a Vietnam veteran with severe PTSD in a seedy studio apartment. He woke one morning to find his roommate clutching a handgun and rocking in a fetal position on the floor.

“It got crazy scary. I was unemployable, just a complete wreck.”

And he could have been dead, he realized. He was basically homeless already. He worked up the nerve to call his father. He moved back home in 1989. He cut his hair. He interviewed with the pre-packaging company his father worked for. They needed a man in Exton, Pennsylvania. He borrowed $1,000 from his dad and hit the road in his ’81 Honda Accord, the floorboards so rusted out he had to pin down the floormats with his feet to keep from getting wet as he drove. He eventually settled in Downingtown, six miles from Exton and similar enough to Marshall that it felt like home.

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Growing up a farm girl in small-town Treynor, Iowa, nobody told Christy Nielsen she was a runner—though you wouldn’t know it today, the totes in her garage brimming with old trainers, the closet in her bedroom, the shoe organizer hanging from the door inside her laundry room. In the seventh grade, she ran an 800-meter sprint in 2:36 the first time she tried. She competed at states every year, but no one ever pulled her aside, pumped her up, defined her potential. She calls that “bad coaching.”

“If I, with nothing, could run a 2:36, I should have been amazing. But nobody really grabbed on to me back then and said you could be awesome.”

She studied psychology at Creighton University in Omaha, and later exercise science, but she didn’t join the track or cross-country teams. She didn’t play any organized sports at all, still suspect of her potential. Instead, midway through her freshman year, she started running again, solo this time, for herself, and she remembered how much she loved it. But when Creighton learned what she was up to and the coach came calling, she declined. She liked running alone, and by then, she’d transformed herself into a marathon runner, beating some of best runners in the state. During her last year at Creighton she ultimately relented and ran three races for the team, but her heart was in the marathon.

She ran the 1998 Grandma’s Marathon along Minnesota’s North Shore just before interviewing for the physical therapy program at Creighton. With a 2:49:05, she qualified for the 2000 Olympic Trials, which she ran a few years later in Columbia, South Carolina, while still earning her degree. She was “totally overtrained,” she says. She ran a 2:58:32 and placed 91st overall. Still, she was ecstatic to compete at such a high level. Seven weeks later, she ran Boston, and in both 2004 and 2008, she competed at the Olympic Trials once again.

She kept active in the marathon scene even after she completed her doctorate and started practicing in Omaha.

“It’s funny,” she says. “When I started working at the hospital, the guy who hired me was like, ‘Would you like to work with runners?’ And my line was, ‘Hell no. They’re absolutely crazy.’”

Along the way, she picked up a few sponsors. First Clif Bar. Then Saucony, who stuck with her for over a decade. They initially sent her eight new pairs and a uniform. Then they offered 50 percent off every pair. She just kept ordering.

“I was running 140 miles a week,” she says. “And then as a therapist, when you’re telling people to switch their shoes every 300 to 500 miles, I’m looking at every two and a half weeks. You retire a pair, they still look great. So why would I get rid of them? So it kind of started then.”

She’s not as competitive as she used to be, but the shoes keep coming. Her friends often joke she could have paid off her student loans by now, if it weren’t for the shoes spilling out of every corner of her house. She can’t help it, she says, though she’s entirely self-aware.

“Even to this day I’ll walk into my closet and say You don’t need any more shoes, and the next day I’ll buy two pairs, because oh those are sweet!” she says, laughing. “Since I’m not the frontrunner anymore, I want to do something where I can still be top dog.”

Andrew Hetherington

For Iding, leaving California was a start, but it was hardly a flawless pivot from the life he left behind. He kept drinking. He kept doing drugs. He met a woman, had a daughter, left the woman, bought a Harley and obsessed over it like he did the running and later, the shoes.

“I don’t know how to half-ass my interests. I’m all in all the time.”

He met another woman. He married her. They had two daughters. Only when the marriage began to crumble did Iding slow down. Step back. Take stock of what he had and what he didn’t, and more importantly, why. The strange bit, he says, is that not long before, he’d picked up running again for the first time since high school. The marriage wouldn’t last, but the running did, and so did the sobriety. He started running marathons. He’s since run Philly four times. Boston three times. New York twice. He ran his PR, 3:08:11, at Philly in 2014. He still dreams of running all six Abbott World Marathon Majors.

By 2011, he was running 40 to 60 miles a week, working through a new pair of running shoes every few months. When he found a model he liked, he’d wait for them to go on clearance and stock up, buying several at a time. Like the booze, the drugs, the Harley, and the running itself, he fell in. He studied all the specs, compared the new purchases to the old, established a hierarchy. Some pairs have never been worn, likely never will be, and they’ll be worth more if he finds himself short on cash again, he says.

“Usually the ones that are just mileage get put in the box,” he says, “but the ones that irritate something or don’t feel right or whatever, those can be hangout shoes, they can be work shoes. There’s a hierarchy all the way down to lawn-mowing shoes and then they have to go.”

He makes no bones about it: He’s still in recovery. But the running helps. So does the job, which keeps him busy every hour of the day. After working pest control in Downingtown for over a decade, a job he excelled at, he finally wrote up a business plan and stepped out on his own, forming Environmentally Considered Pest Control in August 2013. After five and a half years, he’s built up a client base, hired some part-time help, and begun turning a healthy profit even while eschewing petrochemicals, a nod to his hippie half.

“The thread through all of this,” he says, “is that I just don’t know how to quit, whether it’s good for me or not. But that perseverance is why 2018 was a very successful year.”

Like Christy Nielsen, like so many others with obsessive or addictive tendencies, Iding simply refocused that energy elsewhere. Today it’s pest control. Today it’s running shoes. Those who have struggled with the darker side of obsession know it gets much worse than a bedroom full of boxes.

He grabs the Ekidens and flicks off the light, the collection in wait until the UPS man arrives again.