Good Morning! 🏃🏻♂️
Yesterday when I walked through our city park with the dog, I noticed an unusual high number of people running around with running vests. They seem to be a thing now, aren’t they? I think it’s a great development, not just because runners should hydrate, but because I assume that more and more people are getting serious about running. Sure, people can run short distances and take running serious, but it is just two weeks until the Hamburg Marathon and so I assume that these runners are into their last stretches of Marathon training. I love it when I see the blue lines on the streets of Hamburg. Nope, I won’t run this year, I still have trouble walking. But I will cheer the runners on, that’s for sure!
Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻♂️
Why Is Japan so Much Better at Running Than Everyone Else?
Which brings us to Japan: There were more American women at every tier in the marathon, but among men, Japanese men were way ahead at every tier, beginning at sub-2:10—about 2:1 in many cases.
To put it another way: About one in six sub-2:35 performances by men worldwide were by a Japanese man. And though it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, the general population of Japanese men roughly accounts for only 1.5% men in the whole planet; meaning only one in every 65-70 men in the world are Japanese.
Which reminds me: I have to get back to that 10.000 page volume by Haruki Murakami which is waiting on my nightstand. Talking about endurance…
Should you use AI for your training plan?
A generous reading of the literature is that chatbots (usually ChatGPT) might be a decent starting point for beginners who (i) don’t have access to professional services and (ii) don’t have underlying medical issues or complicated needs. In that narrow use case, AI would be better than taking a stab in the dark, as beginners are inclined to do. For everyone else, AI is, at best, an adjunct to professional services, but never a replacement for them.
That conclusion raises an obvious question: if we trust AI to optimize traffic flow, detect banking fraud and even drive our cars autonomously (an innovation about 15 years away, at most), why do they stumble on something relatively simple like writing a training plan? How can the same technology seem at once futuristic and strangely archaic? To understand why chatbots struggle in this space, let’s look under the hood at how they generate their responses.
I think this will change radically within the next 12 months. Right now, people are using a plain vanilla LLM and wonder why it is not as good they expected. Soonish, our personal running coach agent will know so much more about us than any human coach ever could. For better or worse.
Yes, The Speed Project is Still a Beast
The Speed Project began, like many running feats do, with a couple of friends hyping up each other’s crazy ideas.
Nils Arend, the race’s charismatic, mohawked cofounder, had been considering what it might look like to run as fast as possible from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. With the help of coach Blue Benadum, the two brought together a team of six runners, rented an RV, and set off early in the morning on March 29, 2013.
The Speed Project is a really cool cultural and commercial phenomenon. Would you love to run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas?
The Mountains Are Getting Crowded
It’s a bit like when that band you and your friends loved suddenly gets commercially successful. You’re happy for them, yes, honestly. They worked hard, got the talent, they deserve it. But the feeling shifts. What once felt like a shared secret now belongs to everyone. Something intimate becomes public domain.
Or think of what happened to skateboarding. Once a bunch of punks celebrating a counter-culture, then a youth movement, now a global industry with coaches, academies, Olympic medals, and million dollar brand partnerships. Nothing wrong with that. Growth is not betrayal. In fact, it’s the most natural process of all. But it changes the emotional geometry. When something expands, the space between its people rearranges too.
Trail and ultrarunning feel similar right now. The thing that used to feel a bit quirky and nerdy, misunderstood by many, loved by few, is suddenly everywhere. More visible, more accessible, more structured, more commercial, more crowded. Not worse. Not better. Just different. A niche discovering it isn’t a niche anymore.
Or to paraphrase Yogi Berra: The mountains are so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.
The Authenticity Economy: Rendezvu and the Next Wave of Trail Running Sponsorships
The economics here are worth pausing on. Brand subscriptions create a revenue floor with compounding stickiness. The more a brand integrates its data and partnerships into the platform, the harder it becomes to leave, while the recurring revenue keeps stacking for Rendezvu. Transaction-based commissions create the ceiling. As sales volume through the platform grows, revenue grows with it for Rendezvu, for partner brands, and for hosts.
The deeper advantage is the flywheel. More brands attract more hosts. More hosts build more consumer trust. More consumer purchases generate better brand data. Better brand data attracts more brands. At scale, any athlete can recommend and earn from any partner brand. Any brand can efficiently reach the high-intent buyers in any sport. Any consumer can get trusted recommendations from the athletes they already follow. Each side makes the others more valuable, and that dynamic gets stronger, not weaker, as the platform grows.
Most readers probably do not know that I started blogging in 2003 and ran the first commercial blogger campaign in 2005, so I am always interested in new concepts to move influencer marketing forward. And as the trailrunning niche is growing, this makes so much sense now.
If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:
Now, go running!
— Nico
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Glad your newsletter wasn’t too crowded for my article ;-) Thanks for the mention!
Thanks for the mention! Interesting to know you were so involved in the early days of blogging :)