Nike removed a window display at its Newbury Street store in Boston on Friday after a sign reading “Runners Welcome. Walkers Tolerated.” drew heavy criticism online. The vinyl went up Thursday ahead of Monday’s Boston Marathon and came down the next morning, leaving an empty panel in the multi-window display.
In a statement Friday afternoon, Nike walked back the campaign.
“We want more people to feel welcome in running, no matter their pace, experience, or the distance,” the company said. “During race week in Boston, we put up a series of signs to encourage runners. One of them missed the mark. We took it down, and we’ll use this moment to do better and continue showing up for all runners.”
Nike is not the official footwear sponsor of the Boston Marathon. Adidas is. The Newbury Street signs are part of an ambush marketing tradition the brand has leaned on for years, in which it blankets host cities around the World Marathon Majors with its own creative to steal attention from the official sponsor.
The backlash
The response was fast. Runners, coaches, and athletes with physical disabilities called out the word “tolerated,” arguing that walking during a marathon is not a lesser form of participation. Some runners choose walk breaks as a training and racing method. Others need them to finish.
As per Runner’s World, Robyn Michaud, who has run 50 marathons and races Boston in the adaptive division, wrote on Instagram, “Due to a spinal cord injury I HAVE to take walk breaks. Even with a cyst in my spinal cord, I still regularly break 5 hours in Boston and plan to again this weekend. Thank you for TOLERATING me, @nike. Perhaps you should swing by the adaptive and para staging area on Monday to see what true grit is all about.”
Amy Gougler, a Houston-based run coach and personal trainer with close to 16,000 Instagram followers, posted a reel addressing the sign, as reported by Canadian Running. “We should building a more inclusive community, not isolating and belittling people that are a part of it,” she said. “As a run-walk runner, this is offensive. I qualified for the Boston Marathon using the run-walk-run method. Does that mean my marathon is worth any less or only just tolerated because I took walk breaks?”
For Many, Walking is part of marathoning
Walk breaks are common at Boston. The course climbs the Newton Hills through miles 16 to 21, and the back half of the race punishes runners who went out too fast. Cramping, heat, cold rain, stomach trouble, a tight hamstring at mile 18, all of it sends plenty of qualified runners into walk intervals to save their race.
The run-walk-run method, popularized by 1972 Olympian Jeff Galloway, is used by a large share of recreational marathoners, including many who have qualified for Boston. It is a plan, not a workaround.
Then there are the charity runners. Roughly 10 percent of the Boston field gets in through official charity partners, raising tens of thousands of dollars each for causes like Dana-Farber, the Boston Children’s Hospital Trust, and Tedy’s Team. The rest qualified by running a fast marathon somewhere else.
For 2026, the men’s qualifying standard was 2:55:00, a pace of 6:40 per mile. Because more runners hit that number than the Boston Athletic Association could accept, applicants had to run another 4 minutes and 36 seconds faster than the published standard to actually get a bib.
Not Nike’s first misfire
This is not the first running event where Nike’s copy has drawn complaints. Last Saturday, the brand’s signs at Peckham Rye Park in South London read, “You didn’t come all this way for a walk in the park,” with “Runners only” placards along the weekly ParkRun course.
Kirsty Woodbridge, global head of communications for ParkRun, responded on LinkedIn. “People DO come for a walk in the park. And they come a VERY long way. And they are SO welcome,” she wrote. “They come all this way for a walk in the park from perhaps never taking a step out of the front door.”
At the 2025 London Marathon, a Nike billboard carrying the line “Never again. Until next year.” was pulled after social media users pointed out its unfortunate echo of Holocaust remembrance language.
Competitors used this week’s misstep to draw a contrast. Altra, the ultra-running shoe brand, posted an image on Instagram of a sign reading, “Run. Walk. Crawl. No matter how you do it, just stay out there.”
Some runners on forums like LetsRun.com argued the whole thing is working as intended. “This ad doesn’t sell anything, but it gets us talking about Nike,” one user wrote. “It’s a single piece in an advertising campaign, and your browser/socials will spit other Nike ads at you after viewing this thread.”
