The maverick mind behind The Speed Project
The secretive annual spring pilgrimage from Los Angeles to Las Vegas known as The Speed Project bucks trends to get wilder and more purposeful, just like its creator Nils Arend
Variety is the spice of life. It sounds simple, but to achieve it, we need to do something different. Maybe something radically different. Radically human.
Running a 340-mile (540 km) relay race with no set route, no markers, no aid stations, and no marshals across the Mojave Desert in two days is certainly different. That is The Speed Project.
The first edition of the invite-only, unsanctioned celebration of running and community masquerading as a harrowingly spartan endurance event took place in 2013. Things have changed in a decade.
It was the mid-2000s and Nils Arend was a roaming runner - he’d run the Hamburg Marathon just before moving from Germany to Los Angeles - so explored his new home via that activity. After a few years of running sub-3hr marathons, he decided he wanted a form of movement less rigidly organized than what was on offer. He wanted a new culture - something that appealed to his creative mind - but didn’t know exactly what that was.
While running 20 miles from his home to his friend’s place, Nils came up with an idea. They’d run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas… but they’d need to figure out the route - maybe along the way. With a magnetic personality to match his wild ideas, everyone he spoke to about it was onboard without discussion.
Radical - if you hadn’t figured - is a word that Nils is fond of applying to real-life situations.
