Running Is Booming. Sales Are Breaking Records. So Where Are Last Year's Pairs?

More people are running than ever before.

The 2025 Paris Marathon set a world participation record: 56,950 runners, with 51% running a marathon for the first time. The 2026 London Marathon received 1.1 million ballot applications — roughly equal to the total number of marathon finishers worldwide in an entire year. Running race participation has now surpassed pre-pandemic levels, with marathon finisher numbers up 26% year-on-year.

Trail running is following the same trajectory. UTMB Index race participation in the first half of 2025 was 2.4 times higher than the same period in 2022, with over 800,000 race starts in just six months. 42% of those runners were competing in their first-ever trail event. Ultra-distance races between 50 and 100 miles saw a 77% participation jump in 2024. Female trail participation has grown 2.6 times in three years.

From Shanghai to Chamonix, from parkrun to ultramarathon, the running community is growing and getting younger. Under-25s now make up over 10% of major marathon fields, double the share from five years ago.

This is a genuinely good thing. For public health, for communities, for the brands that serve runners, and for the retailers that connect them to the right product.

And the brands are thriving:

adidas posted record revenues of €24.8 billion, with running growing more than 30%.

ASICS hit a record €4.79 billion, profit up 55%, and took the number one spot in performance running across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

On Running grew sales nearly 30% with operating profit up over 200%.

Hoka grew 35%. New Balance hit $9.2 billion, up 19%. Brooks posted a record year, up 16%, with China sales up 245%.

Every one of these brands is investing in innovation, athlete partnerships, community, and marketing. adidas alone spent €3.08 billion on marketing in 2025. Nike's advertising budget exceeded $4 billion in 2024. Between those two brands, that's more than $7 billion a year.

The products are excellent. The communities are real. The growth is deserved.

But there is a question that sits underneath all of this: where are last year's pairs?

The gap between growth and end-of-life — and how it gets hidden

For every record quarter, the volume of shoes reaching end-of-life grows in step. In France alone, 3.5 billion new textile and footwear items were placed on the market in 2024 — 10 million per day. Sneaker sales jumped 6.8%, with 107 million pairs sold.

France operates the most mature textile take-back system in Europe: nearly 48,000 collection points, managed by Refashion, with over 14,000 registered members. And yet only 32% of products placed on the market are collected. 44% of French consumers still say they don't know where to drop off used clothing and footwear. The infrastructure exists. The convenient channel — retail — remains underutilised.

But here's the harder truth. Even within this best-in-class system, less than 10% of items suitable for reuse are actually resold in France. The rest is exported. Globally, the pattern repeats: Ghana imported 144,000 tonnes of used clothing in 2023, Kenya over 185,000 tonnes — a figure that has tripled in a decade. Fewer than 30% of those imports are resold. The rest becomes waste.

With the EU's ban on destruction of unsold textiles taking effect for large companies from July 2026, there is a real risk that volume currently being destroyed simply gets reclassified and exported. The problem doesn't disappear. It moves.

And under the EU's Greenwashing Directive — enforceable from September 2026 — the gap between claiming circularity and proving it becomes a legal exposure, not just a reputational one. If a take-back programme routes products to export without visibility into what happens next, that's not a circular economy. That's a logistics chain to someone else's landfill.

The answer is simpler than the industry is making it

Strip away the regulatory complexity, the acronyms, the technology roadmaps — and the core challenge is remarkably human: how easy is it for someone to bring back an old pair of shoes when they buy a new pair?

That's it. That's the behaviour. A person walks into a store to buy running shoes. They have a worn pair at home, or in the car, or in their hand. If the store makes it easy to hand them over — and captures what's returned — the entire system starts to work. Collection happens. Data is generated. Products route to the right destination. The customer feels good about it, and the retailer now has their email and a reason to stay in touch.

This isn't a technology problem. It's an availability problem. And retailers are the ones who can solve it, because they're the ones standing in front of the customer at exactly the right moment.

The money exists. The question is how the ecosystem uses it.

If a brand's sales grew 20–35% last year, did its investment in end-of-life grow at anything close to the same rate?

For most, the honest answer is no. Not because they don't care — the complexity is real — but because end-of-life is still treated as a cost to manage rather than a capability to build.

And yet the investment doesn't have to be either/or. When take-back is done well through retail partners, it generates customer data, email capture, and brand-specific product intelligence. That's not a sustainability cost. That's a marketing channel.

Retailers increasingly understand the value of retail media — connecting brands with customers at the point of purchase. Take-back creates the same opportunity at the point of return.

Brands have invested heavily in direct-to-consumer channels — and successfully. DTC gives control over the brand experience, the data, and the margin. But there is one thing DTC cannot replicate: the physical moment of return. When a customer walks into a store with a worn pair, that moment is rich with information — who they are, what brand they're returning, what condition the product is in, and what they'll buy next. That data creates value for the retailer, the brand, and the recycler downstream.

Retailers are already managing this interaction in some markets — training staff, allocating floor space, handling logistics. In most cases, without meaningful brand support. The operational cost sits with the retailer. The sustainability narrative sits with the brand. That imbalance won't hold.

The opportunity is for brands to recognise that retailers are offering something valuable: a scalable, trusted, in-person channel for take-back that generates real data and real customer relationships. That's not a cost centre. That's an asset.

Retailers are reaching out. The window won't stay open.

In some markets, retailers are already inviting their brand partners to cooperate on take-back. They're offering to collect products in-store, capture data on what's returned, and share those insights with the brands whose logos are on the boxes. It's a genuine partnership offer — one that creates value on both sides.

Some brands are engaging. Most are hesitating. The reasons are understandable: internal budgets aren't structured for it, the commercial model isn't proven at scale, and there's a sense that legislation like Digital Product Passports will eventually create the data layer that makes this easier. But DPPs are years from full implementation. They won't solve the problem of shoes sold last year, or the year before, or the millions already sitting in wardrobes with no digital identity. Last year's shoes are today's problem, and they can be addressed now.

In the Netherlands, INTERSPORT, RunnersWorld, and EK Sport stores are already doing this — capturing customer and product data at collection and routing to recycling partners with full traceability. NNormal, the trail running brand, is placing take-back programme boxes in retail partner stores, not just their own — investing in end-of-life at the point where their products are actually sold. That's what brand-retailer cooperation looks like when it's intentional.

But here's the reality: retailers won't wait forever. They're building this capability because it serves their customers and their business. The brands that come to the table now will help shape the system and share in the data it generates. The brands that don't will find that their retail partners built it without them — and the customer insights, the email capture, the product intelligence went somewhere else.

It starts with a simple question: how easy is it for someone to bring back a pair of shoes when they buy a new pair? The brands and retailers that answer that question together will lead what comes next.

Growth is good. But growth without proportional investment in end-of-life is a liability that compounds with every pair sold. The solution starts with the simplest question in retail: how easy is it to bring back an old pair when buying a new one? The brands and retailers that answer that together will lead what comes next.

Sources: Paris Marathon / Marathons.com (2025). London Marathon (2026) via sub3-marathon.com. Running USA / SGB Media (2024). UTMB / Strava (2025). Running Insight / UltraSignup (2025). adidas AG FY2025 press release, adidas-group.com. ASICS FY2025 via Sporting Goods Intelligence. On Holdings AG (2025). Deckers / Hoka (2024). New Balance (2026) via CNBC. Brooks Running (2026) via businesswire.com. Nike / Statista (2024). Refashion consumer survey (2024), pro.refashion.fr/en/marketer/all-about-collection. Refashion activity report and barometer (2025). Refashion / Maison du Savoir-Faire (2025). European Environmental Bureau (2025). Ethical Business Africa (2025). ESG News (2026). Latham & Watkins (2025).