Running Medal Hanger vs. DIY Display: What Works

May 21, 2026

Most Runners End Up with a Shoebox. Here Is Why That Happens.

You finish a half marathon on a Sunday morning, get the medal draped around your neck, feel incredible for about 48 hours, and then put it on your dresser. A month later it is on the floor. Six months later it is in a box with three others. This is not laziness. It is what happens when there is no obvious, low-effort place to put something you genuinely care about.

The problem is not motivation. Runners who log their splits obsessively and track their VO2 max are not people who do not care about their achievements. The problem is that most medal storage solutions require either too much effort to set up or too much space to justify. So the shoebox wins by default.

This post is for runners who have accumulated three or more medals and want to actually display them, but have not found a solution that feels worth the effort. We will go through the most common DIY approaches honestly, cover what they get right and wrong, and explain when a dedicated display board is the better call.

What DIY Medal Displays Actually Look Like (and Where They Break Down)

TikTok and Pinterest have made DIY medal displays look deceptively simple. The most common approaches runners try are pegboards, curtain rods with S-hooks, command strips with adhesive hooks, wooden dowels, and repurposed picture ledges. Each one solves part of the problem and creates a different one.

Pegboard setups are genuinely flexible. You can rearrange hooks, add shelves for race bibs, and expand as your medal count grows. The real cost is time. Cutting pegboard to size, priming and painting it, mounting it level on a wall, and sourcing the right hook sizes takes a full weekend afternoon if you are being honest about it. If you enjoy that kind of project, it is a reasonable choice. If you just want the medals off the dresser, it is overkill.

Command strip hooks are the fastest option, but runners who use them consistently report the same issue: medal ribbons are long, medals are heavier than they look, and the hooks start pulling away from the wall within a few months, especially in humid spaces like near a laundry room or basement gym. One runner in the r/running community described losing three command strip hooks in a single week after the room got warm during summer. Adhesive has a weight tolerance, and a collection of ten finisher medals will find it.

Curtain rod methods look clean in photos and cost almost nothing if you already have the hardware. The limitation is that race bibs have nowhere to go. A finisher medal and a race bib are paired memories, and most curtain rod setups force you to either frame the bib separately, pin it to a corkboard nearby, or just leave it folded in the packet. The display ends up feeling incomplete.

Wooden dowel DIY builds are popular on YouTube and they can look genuinely good. The honest downside is that the tutorials understate the skill involved. Getting a dowel mounted level, attaching hooks at even spacing, and finishing the wood so it does not look rough takes more carpentry confidence than most runners have sitting around. The TikTok version always seems to come out cleaner than the real-world attempt.

The pattern across all of these is that DIY displays optimize for one thing: holding the medals. They rarely solve the bib display problem, the personalisation problem, or the setup time problem simultaneously.

What a Dedicated Medal Display Board Actually Offers

A purpose-built running medal hanger solves the combination problem that DIY approaches handle separately. The BLAUBECK Running Medal and Bib Display Board is a wall-mounted display that includes medal hooks for hanging multiple medals, slots or clips for race bibs, and a built-in chalkboard panel for writing race names, finish times, or whatever matters to you about a specific event.

The chalkboard detail is the one that tends to get overlooked in product descriptions but makes the most practical difference in actual use. When you have fifteen medals from fifteen different races, the medals themselves become hard to tell apart. The ribbon colours vary, but the shape and size of most finisher medals are similar enough that you lose the story behind each one. Being able to write directly on the board, next to the medals, keeps the context attached. You can note the race name, the year, a finish time, or just a word that captures what that day meant. That is something no hook-and-rod setup can do.

Installation requires wall mounting with screws. The board is not freestanding, and the hardware is included. On standard drywall you are looking at a fifteen-minute setup with a drill and a level. Concrete walls require appropriate anchors, which are straightforward to source separately if your specific wall needs them.

This is not the right solution if you rent and cannot put screws in walls, or if you want something completely portable. It is the right solution if you have a dedicated training space, home gym, hallway, or bedroom wall where your running history can actually live.

The Honest Comparison: When DIY Wins and When It Does Not

DIY is genuinely the better call in a few specific situations. If you have a large wall, more than thirty medals, and the carpentry skills to build something custom, a DIY pegboard or built-in shelving setup will give you more display area and more flexibility than any off-the-shelf product. Scale is where DIY wins.

DIY also wins if the building process is part of the point. Some runners want to make something with their hands. That is a completely valid reason to spend a Saturday afternoon on a pegboard project, and the result will have personal meaning that a purchased board cannot replicate.

But for the majority of runners, the honest answer is that the DIY display never quite gets finished. The pegboard gets bought and sits in the garage. The command strips go up and start failing. The curtain rod looks fine but the bibs stay in a drawer. The project that was supposed to take an afternoon becomes a background task that never gets prioritised.

A wall-mounted display board that ships with everything you need and installs in under twenty minutes removes that friction entirely. The medals go up the same week you decide to do it. That matters more than it sounds. Every week those medals sit in a box is a week you are not getting any value from having earned them.

There is also a practical argument about durability. Screws in a wall hold far more weight than adhesive strips over time. If your collection grows, a properly mounted board is not going to fail at hook number eight the way a command strip arrangement might.

Making the Display Work for Your Space

Before mounting anything, it is worth thinking about where the display will actually have impact. A few practical observations from runners who have gone through this process:

Hallways near the front door are a popular choice because you see the display every time you leave for a run. That visibility is motivating in a way that a bedroom wall is not. The downside is that hallways are often narrow and the lighting is poor. If your hallway has a light source nearby, it is a strong option.

Home gym or training room walls are the most logical choice if you have the space. The display reinforces why the training matters, and the chalkboard panel becomes a natural place to set a goal for the next race alongside the results from the last one.

Stairwell walls work well architecturally because you see the display from multiple angles and distances. The installation is slightly more involved because working on a stairwell ladder requires extra care, but the visual result is often the best in the house.

One thing worth knowing from runners who have set these displays up: leave more horizontal space between hooks than you think you need. Finisher medals have wide, sometimes oversized ribbons, and if the hooks are too close together the medals overlap in a way that obscures the detail on each one. Spreading them out, even if it means using only part of the board to start, makes each medal readable.

The chalkboard panel works best with standard chalkboard markers rather than traditional chalk. Traditional chalk smudges easily in a high-traffic area. Chalkboard markers give a cleaner line and do not transfer onto the medals or bibs when they are close to the writing surface.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many medals can a wall-mounted medal hanger hold?

This depends on the specific board and hook configuration. Most dedicated running medal display boards are designed to hold ten to twenty medals comfortably, with spacing that keeps the medals from overlapping. If your collection exceeds that range, a pegboard with adjustable hooks gives you more flexibility to scale. For most runners who have been racing for one to five years, a standard board covers the full collection.

Can I display race bibs alongside my medals on the same board?

Yes, and this is one of the main reasons a dedicated display board is worth considering over a simple hook setup. The BLAUBECK board includes bib display functionality alongside the medal hooks. Bibs and medals from the same race displayed together preserve the full context of the event in a way that storing them separately does not.

Will screws damage my wall when I eventually take the display down?

Screw holes in drywall are small and straightforward to patch with a small amount of spackle and touch-up paint. This is a five-minute repair that most renters and homeowners handle routinely. The tradeoff is a more secure, weight-bearing mount compared to adhesive alternatives that can pull larger sections of paint or drywall surface away when they fail under load.

What do I write on the chalkboard section of the display?

The most common choices are race name and year, finish time, city or course name, and personal records. Some runners use it for a current training goal rather than a past result, which turns the display into something forward-looking rather than purely retrospective. Chalkboard markers give a cleaner result than traditional chalk and are easier to update when you want to change what is written.

Your medals are physical proof that you did something difficult. They deserve to be somewhere you can actually see them. If the DIY route suits you, go that direction with full commitment. If you want something that goes up this weekend without a project attached to it, the BLAUBECK Running Medal and Bib Display Board is worth a look. One board holds the medals, the bibs, and gives you a place to write the story behind each one.

Recommended: Running Medal Hanger & Bib Display Board with Chalkboard — Wall-mounted display board with included mounting hardware.