Retro Runner Rehab: Brooks' The Truth

This weeks’ retro runner – Brooks’ ‘The Truth’ – is a relic of 90s sneaker wars – an artifact from a time when brands were going bold or bust to win punter’s affections. When this Brooks runner came out, claims of groundbreaking advances in running technology were routine. And with every development coming with increasingly esoteric lingo, it can’t have been an easy time to distinguish which brands were full of hot air and which were telling the truth. So Brooks made it easy. They released a new shoe with eye-grabbing technology, named it The Truth and plastered the name on the tongue writ large so as to avoid confusion.

It isn’t a stretch though to assume that Brooks were making a statement with this model. Releasing a shoe with such a flagrant deviation from the early 90’s support du jour and calling it The Truth can’t be completely coincidental. Maybe Brooks thought that the shoe’s graphite and carbon fiber plates were the future?

Alas if that was the truth, we simply weren’t ready for it. The absence of virtually any record that the shoe existing only denotes a short-lived production, but all the building blocks of a solid runner were there. There’s the Indy 500 rubber outsole, the urethane foam midsole, 3M on the logo and even a neoprene bootie. If this shoe were to be reissued its release would definitely attract some oddballs, but we’d be at the front of the queue.

Retro Runner Rehab is a column where we bungee into the world of bygone running shoes, scoop up our favourites and throw them back in the spotlight. Check out the stars of our previous features .