Top Running Trends From The Running Event 2024!

The Running Event brings together running brands from around the world to meet with runners and running stores to showcase their products for the coming year. 

We went out to TRE to check out all the latest shoes, apparel, accessories and nutrition, and here are some running trends we spotted for 2025.

The Stack Height Of Your Favourite Shoes Is Going Up

Some of the best-selling shoes in the world are getting more foam underfoot as stack heights continue to grow as more consumers look for plush comfort in running shoes. 

In 2025, the next versions of popular shoes like HOKA Clifton, Brooks Ghost and ASICS Gel Nimbus – all in the top 10 best-selling running shoes in the US – are getting an increase in stack height, and in particular the amount of foam in the forefoot. 

We’ll also see Nike revamp their Vomero line into a max-cushioned shoe with the Vomero 18 growing up to 46mm-36mm (from 39mm-29mm in the Vomero 17).

Max Cushion Continues To Grow As Shoes Change Shape 

In general, max stack and highly cushioned shoes continue to grow as a category. 

It’s a big move towards comfort, and it’s something which works across the industry: these are great for casual runners who go for one or two runs a week, they are great as recovery or easy day shoes for runners with higher volume, and they are comfy for walkers and people who wear running trainers for work. 

There are going to be a lot of choices with stack heights of 40-45mm in the heel, and this extra height has also seen the geometry of the shoe change slightly, with more of a rocker shape to help move through the gait cycle. 

High stack and comfy cushioning doesn’t just mean squishy shoes for easy runs though, and brands are also making more responsive shoes in this category, with the super trainer max-stack shoe with a carbon plate continuing to be part of many shoe line-ups. 

Franchise Extensions

Running brands have their hero shoes and they regularly update that franchise with the next model. In 2025, we’ll see big updates to HOKA Clifton and Mafate, Brooks Ghost and Glycerin, New Balance SC Elite, and Nike Vomero. 

Some brands are now extending those franchises, so we’re seeing the hero brand with a model that’s Plus, Premium, Max, Elite, or something similar.

Nike have done this with their Pegasus line, adding a Pegasus Plus and Pegasus Premium, and they will be doing the same with their Vomero and Structure lines. 

We’re seeing this with brands like Brooks (Ghost, Ghost Max) and On (Cloudsurfer, Cloudsurfer Max). It’s taking a familiar and trusted line, keeping the hero shoe, then giving something extra to appeal to different runners. 

Running Shoes As Lifestyle Shoes

We want shoes which can help us run lots of miles, but we now also want them to look good when we aren’t running in them. That means running shoes we can wear at work or on a night out, as well as when we’re running. 

So running shoe designs are coming to look more like lifestyle shoes; using materials not typically seen in running shoes (like Brooks Ghost Max Suede); and having colours which appeal to commuters as well as runners. 

Running Apparel as Fashion Wear

As well as running shoes getting more stylish, we’re also choosing to wear some of our favourite running brands when we aren’t running. That means we want technical gear which is fashionable to wear whether we’re running or not, and this extends to outerwear like jackets which we could wear to the track or to a bar or restaurant. Brands like Bandit, Tracksmith and Satisfy are great examples of fashion and high quality technical gear crossing over. 

Colour Pops & Pastels

Almost 30% of running shoes sold in the US are black, and if you add the three most popular colours together (black, blue, white) you get two-thirds of all running shoe sales. 

Looking around TRE at the shoes coming in 2025, we saw a lot of bright red being used through next spring and summer, plus purples, oranges and yellows, often with a white or off-white as the main shoe colour.

Race day shoes typically continue to be bright and bold in design, either as simple single-colour design, or with lots of colours making them stand out. 

In daily trainers, moving through 2025, there are going to be lots more muted pastel colours coming, so away from the neons of race day shoes, and towards a softer colour palette. This links into the idea of running shoes as lifestyle shoes. 

Limited Colour Drops

Imagine your favourite running shoe gets a new colourway where there’s only a limited number of shoes available, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. It’s something seen in sneaker culture, and while it doesn’t yet appear to be a big running trend, it’s something that we might start to see more of. 

We have seen an aspect of this with launch colourways of supershoes (like Nike Alphafly 3 in the Proto colours), and the new Saucony Endorphin Elite 2 will have a limited run colour when it comes out in spring, before a wider release colourway. 

New Colours For Existing Supershoes

While we get excited about new releases, we shouldn’t expect to get a new version of our favourite shoes every year, especially racing shoes which take a huge amount of research to develop each new iteration.

But we can get new colours of those shoes. For example, it seems unlikely that we’ll get a new Nike Vaporfly or Alphafly in the near future, but we should expect more colours of the current shoes to be released, and we’re already seeing new colours in adidas’s Adizero Adios Pro 4. 

Focusing On Foam

Brands are talking more about their foam.

They want you to understand what makes one foam different to another, and why that matters. They want you to be able to differentiate between their comfortable everyday foam and their high-performance foam. They’re talking about how some shoes are getting layered with two different foams, or how they’ve developed a new composition of an existing foam which is more responsive. 

This is pretty nerdy stuff, but with those brands investing so much in research to develop and optimise those foams, they want us runners to fully appreciate them. 

Wild Midsole Designs

As the stack goes up on running shoes, it puts a lot of midsole on display and brands are getting funky with the colours and designs of the shoes. 

That might be distinctive colours on the foam, it could be striking geometry or patterns, or could be cut outs in the foam, with some revealing mid-foam technology. 

Supershoe Tech Into Daily Trainers 

Brands are investing a lot into research for supershoe technology, but their learnings aren’t just staying in the fast shoes and it’s extending down into daily running shoes.

This could be changing a shoe’s geometry, it could be the outsole patterns, the upper materials, the foam composition, and much more. This all means that the top tech is going into all new running shoes, and making them even better for us. Among others, Nike is doing this with their Vomero 18 and Saucony is putting their race foam into their Endorphin trainer, while we’ve already seen a shoe like New Balance Rebel v4 using performance foam in an affordable daily trainer. 

Likewise, performance apparel tech is extending down into daily running kit. It’s continually improving all of our running kit, throughout the market – from the expensive performance end through to what we wear each day in training.

Supershoes For Slower Runners

There’s good research which shows that carbon plate supershoes can help faster runners to go even quicker, but there’s also research which shows that at slower speeds, and with the different biomechanics of slower runners, the technology is less effective, and may even slow runners down. 

But just because a runner isn’t chasing a sub-three marathon, doesn’t mean they don’t want to benefit from carbon plate technology and the energy return and propulsive geometry that those shoes offer. 

So we’re going to see brands take the tech of supershoes and utilise it for mid-packers, where we still get the lovely thick and responsive foam and a propulsive plate, only the recipe of the shoes have been adjusted to work at a slower pace. On Cloudboom Max is a great example of this shoe and it looks to be released in summer 2025. 

Which Shoes We Choose

The biggest shoe brands in the US continue to be Brooks and HOKA, and they perform particularly well in the everyday trainer space and max-cushioned shoes.

But in races, Nike is the most-worn running shoe brand overall, especially with men and faster runners over the marathon distance – in a large data collection from US races, the results showed that over one-third of men running a marathon wore Nike. Saucony is the second most popular shoe for marathons, and Brooks is third. 

The pace of runners also seems to determine shoe choice. If we compare Nike to Brooks in marathons, there are many more Nike wearers who run under four hours, and from around 10-minute mile pace or 6-minute km pace and slower (that’s around a 4:15 marathon, which is about the average overall marathon time), more runners are wearing Brooks than Nike.

In half marathons, Brooks is the most popular brand overall, with around one-in-five runners choosing Brooks. HOKA is the second most popular shoe for half marathon runners in the US.

Local Activations, Run Clubs & Community

Running shoe brands are typically global, and whether you’re in Seattle, Stockholm or Sydney, you get the same shoes released worldwide.

But brands are looking to activate and make their brand relevant in specific markets, and that means having a global reach with a local accent. Working with local running clubs and coming up with local activations around new shoes is going to be something that’s important to a lot of companies in 2025, so look out for your favourite running brands in bigger cities near to you. 

One Thing We Didn’t Hear Much About… 

There’s a lot of talk about foams, responsiveness and energy return, and about lightweight uppers, and grippy outsoles, and plate technology, but one thing we didn’t hear many brands talking about was sustainability. 

Maybe the focus at TRE was on telling the performance story of these shoes, which is obviously important to most people there, but it would be nice to hear more about how brands are trying to improve their products in terms of the amount of recyclable and sustainable materials they use, as well as the performance advances. 

There were some exceptions here, including Hylo and Mount To Coast, who are both doing a great job in this space, but as an industry, we could do better sharing sustainability stories. 

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Are there any trends here that you are most interested in or surprised by?

Lead image by Max Photography Austin for The Running Event