About the Collection

This collection consists of all of my running shoes. I started running a few years ago and absolutely fell in love with the sport. At the time I owned one pair of shoes, but as you will see the collection has grown significantly! This year is a big year of running for me as I continue to race and gear up for the 2024 New York City Marathon which will be my first marathon. This website has photos and information about (almost) my entire shoe collection. Use the browse page to learn more about each shoe and then head over to the mapping page to see my race history and which shoes I used for each race.

In the collection, you’ll see shoes of different purposes within running. The collection includes daily trainers, speed work shoes, and recovery shoes. You’ll also see different iterations and updates of some of my favorite shoes as well as some variations in size depending on how each shoe fits. 

Why Running Shoes: 

About a year ago, I started working at Fleet Feet on the Upper West Side. Through this job, my running shoe knowledge (and personal collection) grew significantly. Throughout the semester, I noticed how much the running shoe world and terminology mirrored the concepts we discussed around museum metadata. Things like controlled vocabularies, ontologies, and interoperability are relevant to far more than just museums and it was fun to apply them to something I’m an expert on outside of the museum and library world.

This collection also relates to the museum and library world because running shoes can be cultural heritage objects. Many museums with costume collections have running or athletic shoes as part of their collection. The Brooklyn Museum had an entire show dedicated to sneakers and sneaker culture and the Smithsonian has running shoes in their collection worn by significant athletes or in record-breaking races.

Example of Running Shoes as Cultural Heritage:

Pair of running shoes worn by Tony Reed during a marathon in Nairobi, Kenya from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. These are the running shoes Reed wore in the 2007 Safaricom marathon. Completing that marathon made him the first Black person to complete a marathon on all seven continents. 

 

References: 

“Track Shoes Worn by Carl Lewis | Smithsonian Institution.” Smithsonian, www.si.edu/object/track-shoes-worn-carl-lewis:nmaahc_2012.154.55ab. Accessed 7 May 2024.