Mike Raspatello,
President, October (Oct.co)
This is probably cheating and I’m sorry if it is. But this is a pair of shoes that represents about 15 pairs of shoes dating back to 1998. But they’re all the exact same pair of shoes. They technically went 991, 992, 993, then 990 to take the best of all three and keep it constant. But it doesn’t matter. You see them below and you know them when you see them. Sometimes people throw in the dark blue version (I have, nbd). Few shoes span the age spectrum that this shoe does.
It has and it will for me. They’ve been the only shoes I’ve run in since high school, and while I’m not running marathons and barely cracking 10-minute miles, I weigh a mere 10 lbs more than graduation day ’99. Success! They were a perfect shoe for a precocious teen trying to signal that they had older friends. And they always went well with a nice pair of shorts above the knee. For the first 6 months of owning these shoes they can double as “going out” shoes. You can’t say that about a lot of high-support pronation control mass market running shoes.
I don’t feel like the earnestness of my memories is really landing here, but it’s still not as absurd as my clear path to being obsessed with this shoe. Went to sleep-away camp and counselors were rocking it, then started noticing high school jocks rock them when they weren’t rocking deck shoes. Because school jocks dressed up like frat boys and frat boys dressed up like rich old men. And we all sheepishly followed this harmless little never-ending trend hoping we’d some day be one of the rich old men. Some blend of irony and utility, it’s undeniably one of the best gym shoes ever created and you’ll never find someone that disagrees.