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.
On the eve of the 2024 edition of LA-LV, I sat down in Venice Beach with The Speed Project’s malcontent creator, Nils Arend, to find out how he maintains the spark after a decade.
How has running culture changed while TSP has been in existence?
“The interesting thing with running is that 10 years ago running was a sport, and now running has become a lifestyle. It's enriched by other elements: music; fashion; certain event formats. So when you say ‘running culture,’ I think about running as a lifestyle, not just a sport.”
The Speed Project has been at least partially responsible for that shift in urban running culture. The ineffable cool of you, a runner, photographed running solo across stark, semi-developed landscapes was peak Instagram fodder in a moment when IG was blossoming fast into our 12 hours of daily screen time, helping us connect with like-minded runners everywhere.
TSP’s taglines are #NORULES #NOSPECTATORS - a nod to the original ethos of a close-knit group of friends going on an adventure together. That OG team made a 17-minute film of their travels that was screened around the world, such was the interest. That set the tone, but Nils fast understood the beast they had unleashed. With a quick search, you can see that every team makes a YouTube documentation of their journey now.
“We had this funny idea that anybody who creates a film about their Speed Project experience, we're going to give them a t-shirt saying ‘I also made a TSP documentary,’ but everyone thought it was too passive-aggressive, so we didn't do it.”
The mischief didn’t come to pass, but the sentiment lingered.
RADICAL CREATIVITY
The brightest, most imaginative minds are drawn to the creative industries, and that’s where Nils ended up when he landed in Los Angeles. We live in a world of high consumption, and the most celebrated brand advertisements require the most energetic, radical creativity to fuel the endless purchases of modern life.
A point came where even being in a creative role wasn’t being true enough to himself. Nils recalls how his entry point to his professional world came from “building immersive, different environments” when organizing raves in warehouses, churches, swimming pools, anywhere in Stuttgart. He translated that into attractive content to be consumed by all.
After a decade of intense business-building, however, Nils “exited corporate America” in 2019, and now lives something of a minimalist nomadic existence, spending time in Kenya, Central America, Los Angeles, Europe, and anywhere else the wind takes him as he works on projects on a case-by-case basis. Without a permanent home, he wishes he could have a dog, but he can’t even own a plant with his lifestyle.
He talks about running as giving him “a certain level of fitness allows me to go on any kind of adventure at any time - freedom through physicality.” With his new lifestyle, however, he talks about his focus shifting dependent on the environment. He talks of having to temper his ego when he returns to L.A. and runs 10 miles with old friends, who are maybe more in practice than him.
If these past few years have been something of a reflection and adjustment for him, it makes sense that a man who openly says that he goes against the norm nearly pulled the plug on even having a 2024 edition of The Speed Project. It also makes sense that he had another huge, even more sensational situation cooking at the same time.
AN ESCAPE
The Speed Project fits into an odd-shaped niche where people call it the Fear & Loathing of running (because of the journey to Vegas), or the Burning Man of running (that’s in Nevada, too, but the Javelina Jundred has taken that title), and the Fight Club of running (because of its underground, invite-only status). The truth is that it sits somewhere in the middle of all of that.
It’s a primal, human escape from the rampant grind of earning money to spend money. It’s a pilgrimage to test the resilience of your body and mind among and against a community that acts as a mirror for your own instincts. Runners come together from far and wide to run. Maybe to win. Maybe just to be in amongst it.
That the race starts and finishes in two of the most ostentatious displays of American capitalism is a beautiful irony.
One criticism of TSP is that it’s a seemingly insane thing to do. It’s an ultramarathon, but it’s a road race, rather than a trail race. It’s a race, but unsanctioned, so without any familiar creature comforts to lean on. Your team is your community. It’s you versus the road.
While insiders primarily see a celebration of running and friendship that they return to year after year, many on the outside perceive it to be more of a tough event to conquer or be conquered.
Nils says that The Speed Project is also influenced by his “punk rock backbone and attitude.”
“It’s not just demolition for the sake of destroying something. We're breaking something with a clear intention to get to a specific result, and not for the sake of breaking it. I think a lot of people are drawn to The Speed Project because there's a thread. There's a meaning behind it; a backbone to it. It’s not just, ‘We’re going to fuck shit up.’”
RIP TSP?
As the pandemic rolled through and brought with it a new wave of runners, who more often had a different, more holistic view on running - for themselves, rather than for merit - TSP gained notoriety as a destination race. More and more overseas teams were flying thousands of miles to run. More and more brands were entering teams to run The Speed Project. Thousands of big box dollars were being spent on (successfully) finding newer, faster routes across the desert.
Was it becoming too corporate and mainstream for a man rooted in old school punk ideals? Even though there has never been a corporate sponsor of The Speed Project, after a decade, was The Speed Project close to (whisper it) selling out?
“Six to eight months ago, I even said out loud that we're not gonna do L.A. to Las Vegas. It was getting too hyped, and I felt like, ‘Is it still representing me?’ I went through the same thing with my old company and I'm all about radical decisions if they're grounded in the right reasons.”
It was a conversation with his friend, musician and activist Daniel Dart, that persuaded Arend to persevere and go ahead with TSP 2024. Dart had put a team together, and he argued that if the goal of TSP was to touch the lives of as much of the running community as possible, then remaining “authentic” might prevent that from happening in the same way that it stopped Dart’s old band, a peer of The Offspring’s, from doing the same. Dart’s former bandmates are now either dead or drunk - not in a position to touch any lives with their music, either way. He didn’t want Arend to have the same regrets.
“I reflected on why The Speed Project exists, and it’s because we came across a very beautiful, wild experience, and we took on the responsibility to share this with others. Now, there are a lot of people who want to have that experience, and we pull the plug? It seems not fair. So how can I design it in a way that I'm gonna continue to love the shit out of my experience? Because if I love it, I'm gonna be capable of creating something meaningful for others.”
TO CHILE
“That's where Atacama really came into play. I want to stay insanely radical with what we do, and we're not making decisions because x, y, and z brands want to participate. It's the opposite.”
After almost a year of planning, a new, surprise chapter of The Speed Project took place across the Atacama Desert, Chile in November 2023. If the 340 miles from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with its rest stops and desert-civilisation seems tough, understand that the Atacama route is more extreme and less friendly, with harsher temperature changes, more vert, and zero amenities. Runners (and their bare-bones crew) needed to carry whatever they required to complete the course.
When the pandemic halted TSP in March 2020, the pivot to a decentralized, digital, global event later that year bore this Chilean fruit. Truly coming out of the TSP community, the idea of Atacama emerged from an other-worldly image entered in the photo contest. Nils immediately recognized a level of intensely savage landscape that excited him.
The Atacama Desert is also a dumping ground for 100,000 tons (and counting) of discarded fast fashion, taking up an area the size of New York’s Central Park. It’s something that the new TSP event is aiming to highlight, spread awareness, and maybe even help solve. If LA-LV is about escaping capitalism for a weekend, ATA rubs our noses in the very worst effects of it.
“We went on this journey with the Chileans, and what we communicated to them is, ‘We're going on an adventure together. If that's the end, that's successful. If we reflect after, and feel like this is worth being shared with others, then we might. But no expectations. At the end, it was pretty clear that this is insanely radical.”
“Now, after 10 years of L.A. to Las Vegas, I think it's the right move. I know what people would expect: Paris to Berlin! And we could probably get 500 teams to do it.”
That’s the radical human known as Nils Arend. As soon as a glimmer of safe, corporate culture threatened his brainchild, he led by example and went back to basics, influenced primarily by his own disgust of a sanitized life. If The Speed Project made a name for itself as a refuge from the bright lights of modern life, its new Chilean chapter is a dark reaction to that.
In this safe new world, where the AI culture of the corporate world is threatening to sand off every interesting edge that we have, we need a thousand more Nils Arends.
Will it be another decade before his permanently itchy feet reach another crossroads? Only time can tell, but until then, we’ll be watching the TSP coverage on IG, and maybe we’ll get an invite next year. It’ll be better then anyway.
Ways to make running suck less covered today
Find a team to run 300 miles across an American desert
Be ok with being the version of yourself that you are today
Stay true to your values and build something that thousands of people want to experience
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Links & More
Running to Create with author Brendan Leonard
There are many creative people in the running world, and Brendan Leonard is one of the elites in that respect. Read my profile of him, including some fascinating insights into how you can use running to fuel your creativity.
There are plenty of TSP articles online, but you can watch that OG TSP documentary right here. It’s great:
Encouraging my fellow subscribers to enter the Janji raffle. I won one week and have been living in the pants I used the gift card for. Great quality! Thanks for hosting the raffle, Raz!
Radical story Raz 😉
Fantastic insight into what makes Nila and TSP work.