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I am a bit bummed. We had a referendum in Hamburg to apply to become a host city for the Olympic Games in 2040 or 2044. The overwhelming majority turned it down.
It would have been so cool and so great for the city. We just hosted the Iron Man triathlon right in the middle of the city and I think we would have been such a great host city with most venues nearby and also near the water. Not to mention the 6 billion ⏠that would have been invested into infrastructure, housing and sports facilities.
Well, now some other city will benefit from this.
Hrmpf.
Anyhow, read these carefully selected articles about running now and then go running!
Runners turned into Mean Girls: Satisfy x Adidas
Satisfy now has almost half a million followers on Instagram. It has also truly crossed over into fashion. Revenues were around âŹ11 million in 2025âstill a speck compared to Nikeâs $50 billionâand itâs now sold at Mr Porter, End., SSENSE, etc. Its tees in particular are popular; theyâre often worn with trousers and jeans. Satisfy might be rooted in trail running, but its customers are also firmly in the city.
When sports brands try to plug âlifestyleâ collections and when luxury fashion brands try (and constantly fail) to launch fitness collections, no one can deny that this organic global acquisition of the fashion customer is impressive.
I love it. Satisfy x Adidas is the one collab everyone is talking about. Who will top this with a collab nobody thought about?
The race I couldnât miss
I remember it as if it were yesterday: listening to friends and teammates like Xavi Cadena, Anna Serra or Agusti Roc describe what it was like to run through the wall of sound at Sancti Spiritu. âItâs the Alpe dâHuez of trail running,â they said. âNothing compares to it; you have to experience it.âThat was 2007, my first year racing internationally in the Skyrunning World Series. At the time, Zegama was the series finale in September. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of spectators. Despite the rain and the bitter cold on the summits, thousands had hiked for hours just to stand there, cheer for every runner, and celebrate the sport.
Some runner from Spain is now also on Substack and writes about some race. So awesome to have him here!
Are men or women more durable runners?
Women are traditionally better at pacing than men â data shows that women are 18.3% better at keeping an even pace than men â and men have a reputation for going out too quickly, then fading as the distance goes on. Instead, women can stick to a consistent pace for longer, leading to a consistent race where they end up overtaking many men who went off too quickly.
As the study explains, this is because womenâs bodies can handle fatigue better than menâs. Despite both men and women seeing similar reductions in running economy, which refers to how efficiently your body uses oxygen to maintain a certain pace, women had better fatigue resistance, less force loss and a more stable metabolism. Perceived effort was also lower in women than in men, with menâs perceived effort levels rising more steeply than womenâs.
I find this research really fascinating. Also, women are probably just tougher and can endure more pain than menâŚ
âMaybe the suffering is the pointâ: what does it take to run 163km up and down a mountain?
âYou start looking at the course map, and the elevation profile, and you start to have impostor syndrome.â
These thoughts can creep back in when you are so tired that putting one foot in front of the other becomes a herculean task. âYou just think, no way â no way I can do this.â
The race begins before dawn on Friday at Scenic World in Katoomba. By 11am on Saturday, she has been running for 30 hours.
As her GPS watch buzzes, telling her she has just passed the 117km marker, the warm confines of an aid station â a checkpoint providing water and food â awaits.
As I am currently just in the slog around the park phase again, trying to recover and get back into shape, I read these kinds of articles with so much awe and really want to be able to run that long.
My First Ultra: Where "Me" Became "We"
âIsnât this incredible? Can you believe we get to do this?â
I did not share his enthusiasm, but his knee was shot and he couldnât run either, and we fell in step together, talking about our reasons for being out there. Somehow the last few miles dissolved and the finish line appeared. We ran across it together, into a crowd of finishers who cheered like weâd won the whole thing, despite the fact that Iâd missed the official cutoff by 30 minutes.
Hereâs what I know now that I didnât know at mile 20: I would have stopped there. The race would have ended quietly, a private failure nobody would have noticed but me, but Dean showed up. Then the volunteers. Then the man with the bad knee. Each of them carried a little of what I didnât have. Each of them took me a little further than I could have gone alone. The version of me that crossed the finish line didnât exist that morning.I did not finish this race â we did. It was a 50k, for cancer, together.
Yes, it is. Itâ really something else. And it is incredible.
If you missed last weekâs edition, you can read it here:
Now, go running!
â Nico
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