How far would you run to sell a pair of shoes?
With 2025’s edition of The Speed Project upon us, how do brands and influencers fit into the extreme distance ecosystem?
It’s that time of year when hundreds of humans run 340 miles (550 km) from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on an invite-only, unsanctioned, unsupported, unpermitted relay race through the Mojave Desert and Death Valley known as The Speed Project AKA TSP. If you’re looking to capture the grit, determination, resilience, etc that modern runners are searching for, you’ll find nowhere more picturesque.
Accordingly, there are who knows how many rolls of 35mm film developed and untold YouTube documentaries (do a search – you can keep scrolling for days) as people fly into the USA’s West Coast to permanently document traveling hundreds of miles of dark, dusty, and dangerous desert terrain by foot between two of the most artificially-lit bastions of American Excess Culture.
Amy Chapman has run those 340 miles from L.A. to Vegas. Amy has also run 310 miles / 500 km through the Atacama Desert as part of the Chilean edition of the race, a brand extension that TSP founder Nils Arend cooked up when he almost closed the whole operation down.
Increasingly disheartened as more and more brands (and their designated social media influencers) were trying to buy their hot ticket to TSP for some identically-edgy ‘runners in desolate landscapes’ marketing campaigns, as well as increasing numbers of calls for the German native to bring a version of the race to Europe, Nils instead doubled down on the eccentricities associated with TSP, and took it to an even darker, dustier, and more dangerous desert.
Nils told me last year that he wanted “to stay insanely radical with what [they] do, and [they’re] not making decisions because x, y, and z brands want to participate. It’s the opposite.”
“I think it had to start in America for them to be able to build it,” says Amy, who has a decade of professional experience in marketing and communications for and with run brands. “They love a narrative and they love glamorizing and dramatizing everything. I don’t think it would’ve been the same if it started in the UK or Europe.”
And it is glamorous: a foot race through The Wild West is what 99% of the planet’s renegade runners’ wet dreams are made of. There’s a cinematic realism to The Speed Project. It’s Burning Man-adjacent in terms of the hedonistic extremes required to complete the course in the allotted time. The Atacama Desert – the driest desert on the Earth – takes all of that even further.
The mind-altering nature of running extreme distances is well-documented, but when you add starker landscapes with an average elevation of 7,900 feet (2,300m), the race starting six hours early than intended, resulting in a total lack of sleep, and a collection of minds that are fully open to new experiences, Atacama held the perfect conditions for a drug-free out-of-body experience.
“A couple of us were seeing old people and young boys just sitting on the side of the road. The shrines have specific things like toys next to them so you're subliminally making narratives in your head when your brain has a lack of oxygen, and you've been up for 70 hours.”
Is everybody in the Atacama Desert suffering from oxygen deprivation? Unlikely, but those fabled northern roads are known for being uniquely challenging to traverse. And they’re a well-used trucking route, so the lack of sleep isn’t reserved for those travelling across oceans to run through a desert.
“Out of any physical event, it's probably most like a military operation, where you’re cold, out in the field, not sleeping for days on end. You are going to see stuff.”
This recollection and comparison reminds me most of the ever-increasing hallucinations of Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, or if you’re looking to stay in the Western genre, Clint Eastwood’s 1973 revenge classic High Plains Drifter has a similar level of mind-altered manuscript. Less dream, and more nightmare, though? Perhaps.
Just as those conditions exist in the more extreme course that Nils devised, the original LA-LV is no slouch. As the name implies, the goal of The Speed Project is to get from LA to Vegas as quickly as possible. With a team of six, that’s an average of over 50 miles each, and it’s not a flat course.
Amy talks about running LA-LV last year with a brand. Their team did not run the shorter, more challenging, more picturesque Powerline route, staying on the main roads instead. One of the influencers in her relay team was complaining about feeling unsafe on the unsanctioned, unpermitted, not-closed-off course that had freeway traffic speeding past runners at 100mph.
The concern here is that as influencers try to complete challenge after challenge in the eternal quest to create content, they’re eventually going to get themselves into a pickle. This influencer didn’t like running on the side of a busy road, and was surprised to be running there.
“The more commercial it becomes, such as was my experience, the more you get these random people put into teams where brands say ‘I need this influencer in a team.’ It's not your mate, and versus a team story, your story’s going to become more individualized.”
Amy accepts there are benefits to joining TSP as part of a brand excursion, as she did in Atacama as well, but should there be?
“We basically bought this store out of oxygen canisters. If that was my own money, I’d wonder if I could afford it. It becomes more comfortable, but that’s irrational because it shouldn’t be comfortable.”
“If I was to do this with a bunch of mates, we’d do it on a shoestring budget. Where I've crewed my friends for their FKTs, I've done it for free. I've slept in a camping chair on the side of a main road several times. You do this stuff because you love running.”
Amy talks about how for her, more than a focus on challenging oneself, these extreme events are about gathering war stories, and building trauma bonds. It’s the togetherness that is fostered in the outdoors, like in camping culture. It’s telling that one of her favorite moments from running to Vegas was receiving bagels from other teams on the roadside. It’s the camaraderie that remains. Maybe
As the sport of running has grown, this is where the tensions between ‘real’ runners and influencers have begun to spill over, but also where the lines begin to blur. There’s no doubt that running influencers are runners. They are keeping running streaks, getting world records, and gathering up all the major marathon medals. So what’s the problem?
Is it a matter of capitalism ruining the purity of the sport? Nah. If there’s a heightened sense of being sold to, it simply reflects the world right now. The thing that nags away at Amy is the erosion of a sacred community space. What is that authentic human connection traded for? Never-ending challenges? The sale of another pair of shoes? A cool new t-shirt, perhaps. It doesn’t get more transactional. How you react to that is a personal choice. Some people love/hate brands more than others.
With the kind of funding that flies these people around the world, even by helicopter to run four marathons in four countries in one day, for instance. The kind of funding that means their entire job is to run, carefree, but often devoting their life’s work only to themselves, rather than to a community endeavor. Think Matt Choi in New York dressing a e-bike into the crowd. He's running TSP right now, of course.
On the flipside, without those brands’ involvement, would these kinds of experiences instead be reserved for the privileged few who can spare both the money and time to indulge in a round-the-world running adventure?
The relationship between culture and commerce is a familiar trade-off for all of us, in so many parts of our lives. Why should running be any different?
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Raz x
As a marketer who has supported teams 2x at TSP (none with influencers on them!), the allure definitely lies in the storytelling and the racing that can happen under extreme pressure (and with no real prize!). I admire Nils’ convictions and his content engine is masterclass. The TSP scene is a WHOLE other thing entirely (Burning Man is definitely the best comparison.)
I have no idea how I missed seeing this in my inbox, but what a great read! A couple of my former college teammates participated this year, and it was so much fun to follow along. The grit and camaraderie reminded me of why I love running in the first place.
But also I loved reading this: “The kind of funding that means their entire job is to run, carefree, but often devoting their life’s work only to themselves, rather than to a community endeavor.”
Would love to read more thoughts on this, or more about the general frustration with running “influencers.” I have no set feelings either way, but I think that sentence captures the concern so well.