That was 2011. Roll Recovery is now in Fleet Feet, Boulder Running Company, and running stores around the world. Olympic and world champions use the R8. So do NFL and NHL teams, and so does NASA. The company has never taken outside investment, didn’t run a digital ad until a few years ago, and got its first wholesale order because Adriana carried a prototype up a flight of stairs while Jeremy waited downstairs, sweating.

I went to their new Boulder HQ to find out how that actually happened.

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Guest snapshot

Who: Jeremy Nelson and Adriana Nelson, co-founders of Roll Recovery Where: Boulder, Colorado. Adriana grew up in Romania and came to the US on a scholarship Day job: Building the R8, R3, R1, and now the Solace footwear line, self-funded since 2012 Runner notes: Adriana ran 69:59 to qualify for the world half marathon championships for Romania, later switched her allegiance to the USA, and finished second in her marathon debut in Chicago. Jeremy ran 2:39 in Chicago on a few months of training after jumping into her workouts

Who are Jeremy and Adriana?

Adriana’s running career started with a threat. Her PE teacher in Romania told her that if she didn’t represent the school, she would sit on the bench for the rest of the year. She was 13. She ran a 1K in 3:05 with no training, beat a field of hundreds in Bucharest, and then ignored the coach who came looking for her afterward. The same thing happened again in high school over 1500m, except that time the woman at the registration table refused to let her leave until she handed over her address. Six months of real training later she won a national title. A few years after that, a letter arrived asking if she wanted to come to the States.

Jeremy is a mechanical engineer who had been a cyclist and trail runner in Boulder. He met Adriana a month after she arrived to train professionally, and he had never watched anyone work at that level. He asked how many times a week she trained, expecting her to say five. She said 14. He started riding alongside her sessions, got bored going slow, and jumped in. His account of that first workout, a 6K-4K-2K at altitude, involves a lot of wheezing and Adriana looking back over her shoulder laughing.

What he brought was a fresh set of eyes. He hadn’t come up through the American high school and college system and hadn’t accumulated the injuries, so he could see the gaps. One of them was recovery. Adriana had professional PT, massage, and chiro. Jeremy had a foam roller and the Stick. He went to Home Depot, pulled the wheels off an old pair of rollerblades, and started prototyping in the garage. The eighth design worked, which is why he called it the Rev8, which is why you know it as the R8.

Here is what stuck with me from the rest of the conversation.

The tell was that she kept stealing it

I asked how much the athlete half of the partnership legitimized the tinkerer half, and Jeremy’s answer was better than my question. When he couldn’t find a prototype in the house, he knew it was a good one, because Adriana had taken it. Sometimes he’d find it on the couch, still sweaty. That has been the product development filter ever since. Test it until people love it, then produce it.

What they learned later is that pro validation buys you credibility, not customers. Jeremy was designing for the serious athlete. The market turned out to be the person who just signed up for a first 5K. You can rattle off every Olympian using your product and the customer at the expo will still ask the only question that matters to them, which is whether it works for their pain. Roll Recovery shifted its messaging accordingly.

Selling the house

In 2011, while pacing Adriana through a training block in Scottsdale ahead of the Olympic Trials, Jeremy wrote the business plan. Then came the harder conversation. He had a whole speech prepared about how they would need to sell everything they owned and max out every credit card, including the house they had just built in Fort Collins. It was Easter. He got about two seconds in before Adriana said let’s do it.

Her reasoning is the part of this episode I keep coming back to. That house meant more to her than it did to him. Her family had been homeless for a couple of years when she was young, moving bags from grandmother to uncle to whoever had a spare room, and owning a home was the whole point. Her answer was that she hadn’t grown up on gold and silver and was fine starting from zero again. She had used the R8. She knew it worked.

They moved into the smallest apartment they could find, rented a storage unit and a tiny office so they would have a commercial address, and ordered 2,000 units. Jeremy’s math for whether this was survivable: if we sell one a day, we can eat.

Funded by prize money

There were no investors. Jeremy took meetings early and the question was always some version of have you done this before, and the answer was no. So he borrowed money from his mom, which was a significant thing in a family that didn’t have much of it, and she was the first person he paid back. A former colleague who knew him as the guy sketching product ideas in his notebook instead of writing reports put in a little. That was the entire cap table.

Everything else came from Adriana’s race winnings. They planned her season on the back of an envelope. If she got into Chicago, if she placed at Peachtree, that funded a production run. Prize money from the majors took 3-6 months to actually land, which is its own education in working capital, and the patent bills ate whatever was left. Jeremy’s line on it is that it’s easy to blow other people’s money and very difficult to blow your own, which is why the rule every employee hears at Roll Recovery is to spend it like it’s your own money.

Two magazines and 16 units on a display

They were shooting photos in Keystone with Jonathan Beverly, then editor in chief of Running Times. Jeremy mentioned what he was building. Beverly shrugged and said send me one. So Jeremy sent him the very first production unit, the only one he had, with a prepaid return label and a note asking for it back. He is aware of how that reads. Two months later they were on the cover, an editor at Men’s Journal saw it, came through Boulder, and made the R8 Gear of the Year in 2013. That was the inflection point.

Retail came next, and Jeremy got defensive about it. Boulder Running Company was the best store in town and Mark Plaatjes, who owned it, was both a world champion and a physical therapist, which made handing him the product feel like opening a box he couldn’t close. So Adriana took it upstairs to his office. Mark rolled it on his leg, put his head down, and asked where this had been when he was running.

The buyer, Amanda Charles, asked for a wholesale price. Jeremy didn’t have one and threw out a number. She asked for the retail price and he said $99. She asked if he had a display, and he had exactly one, obtained by telling a factory he needed a sample of an order he had no intention of placing. Sixteen units fit on it, so 16 became the minimum. They left town to race in New Orleans, and on Sunday night Amanda called with good news and bad news: sold out, and your price is too low for the margins to work. San Francisco Running Company came second, after they met Brett and Larissa Rivers at their first TRE.

Jeremy’s advice for a brand trying to break into running retail today is the least glamorous thing you’ll read this week. Start with one account and win it completely. You’re an accessory. If you’re not on the shelf, that store still eats dinner that night, so earn the spot. Then a retailer walks past your rep at TRE, says that thing sells in my store, and the second and third accounts start coming to you. Adriana’s addition is that you have to set yourself up for a long ride, and that if your only vision is a fast exit, none of this works.

Why they never raised

Cash flow, as Jeremy points out, is the number one reason businesses die. Outside capital solves that right up until you burn through it and struggle to raise more, and then you’re only deciding how long to bleed. His read on the tradeoff is unusually clear for someone who picked a side.

Venture is built for speed, and it has to be. Nine losses and one big win only works if the winners can scale fast, and software can, because you can’t win software one account at a time. Hard goods can go gradual, which is why he keeps seeing consumer product companies show up at two trade shows looking enormous and disappear within two years. Not raising means every decision is theirs, and it also means more pressure now that there are two kids at home and no option to go top up the account when things get tight. He is careful to say this isn’t advice for everybody. It’s what worked for them.

I wrote a guide to fundraising which dove deeper into this:

We got into the three ways to grow a company: sales-led, where you hire hunters; marketing-led, where you pour money into Meta; and product-led, where the thing is good enough that people tell their friends. Cheaper, and considerably harder.

Applying training logic to a P&L

I asked how the athlete’s drive to improve reconciles with a business that doesn’t need to grow 50% a year. Adriana treats it as a training block. There’s a goal at the end, you have to be patient enough not to overtrain or get injured, you still have to grind every week, and you can still arrive at the start line and have it not happen, at which point you ask what worked and why. Jeremy’s version is the marathon analogy: six months of training and you can bump your knee on the flight and never take the start. Two years of product development and you can decide not to launch, which they have done. Roll Recovery could have its logo on many more products than it does, and the discipline lives in the no.

They started running competitively in 2007 and are racing the age group world championships in Tokyo next year, which makes it a 20-year span of showing up.

The hiring philosophy follows from all of this. Given the choice between the smartest person and the most competitive one, Jeremy takes the competitive one, and nearly everyone on the team is an athlete. Matt Hensley, VP of Business Operations has been there 12 years and Andrew eight or nine. In the old warehouse they had Olympians packing boxes and the CU cross country team helping ship orders. They ran timed competitions assembling R8s and got it down to 45 seconds. People have asked whether there’s a 10K qualifying standard to work there, more than once.

The footwear bet

The Solace line took four years of design and about six years of thinking about it first. The observation behind it is that athletes research performance shoes obsessively and then spend the other 10+ hours of the day in cheap flip flops from Target.

Two build details tell you how this company operates. The foam is Bloom, which strips the worst of the EVA and blends in an algae byproduct. They barely market that, because customers rank comfort first and sustainability well down the list, but they wanted it right from sourcing through end of life. And most recovery slides are a single piece of injection-molded foam, which is why they can sell for $30 and why a factory can produce thousands a day. Jeremy watched that process and couldn’t bring himself to do it, so Solace is built on a press mold, the same construction as a high-end running midsole, two densities, 80 pairs a day. Almost nobody will ever notice. He will.

The sales pitch, as ever, isn’t one. People look at the price, hesitate, put them on, and ask for a second pair for work.

Very important note: I love this sandal.

PR came back around

We both landed in the same place on this. Earned media mattered enormously in 2013, went quiet during the influencer boom, and is credible again now that most recommendations are visibly paid for. Roll Recovery works with Verde Brand Communications and has never paid for coverage, in Outside, the Wall Street Journal, or Forbes. Jeremy’s framing is that if you send product to a writer and hear nothing back, they didn’t like it, and that silence is the signal. It’s also why it means something when they do write. Adriana adds the honest caveat that a magazine has 10 editors and a lot of it comes down to whose hands it lands in and whether that person happens to need what you make.

A word on Halo

Halo is a hospitality platform built by runners for the way people actually travel to races. They work with brands, event organizers, and leagues to fix one of the most operationally painful parts of any event, which is lodging. If you’re a brand, Halo turns a hotel into your home base at a race, a branded clubhouse where your athletes and community actually stay together, the experiential piece done right without you managing hotel logistics from scratch. If you’re an event organizer or a league, Halo houses your people, locks in better rates, and layers in real community and perks so the lodging becomes part of the experience instead of a headache. And if you’re heading to a race yourself this year, same platform, better rates, real community, and perks from their brand partners. Reach out to their team and tell them you heard about Halo on Long Run Labs, or send me a note and I’ll connect you directly.

Hilary from Halo and Monica from rabbit got into exactly this on the July 28 episode, and it pairs well with this one.

A word on Popfly

The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Takeaways

• If it needs a marketing army, it might not be a good product. The gut check is what happens to your growth the day you switch the ads off.

• Ideas are free, inventory is not. Prototyping is the cheap part. Tooling, revisions, and a purchase order for 2,000 units are where it gets real.

• Win one retail account completely before chasing 10. Your second and third accounts should come to you because of how you handled the first.

• Credibility and conversion are different jobs. Pro athletes make people believe you exist. Regular customers still need to know it fixes their pain.

• Listen but don’t listen. Everyone will have a strong opinion about your company. Deciding which ones are yours is the job.

Where to find Jeremy and Adriana

Roll Recovery is at rollrecovery.com. Both of them offered to talk to any founder who wants advice, so take them up on it. I’m happy to help make that connection.

New to For The Long Run? Start here.

For The Long Run is a weekly conversation about the why underneath the miles. I started it in 2019 to understand what actually keeps people running long, strong, and motivated, and it has since grown into the Long Run Labs Network. Long Run Labs is the show that grew out of it, focused on the people building the outdoor industry.

Start here: forthelong.run/start-here

Listen to the full conversation with Jeremy and Adriana Nelson on Long Run Labs wherever you get your podcasts.

Production: Emma Benner, Sandy Boy Productions.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

You couldn’t walk across Chamonix during UTMB week without passing multiple brand events.

That’s the context for everything that happened in the valley this year. Not the races. The arms (I mean foot) race around them.

The pattern is easy to describe once you’ve seen it a few times. Every marathon major has a similar problem, as does Western States to some degree. A brand books a meeting point, brings an athlete, plans a route, lays out coffee and something to eat, and hires a photographer. Two hours of running produces several days of social content. The runners are guests and marketing assets in the same motion. Most of it is nice enough. It’s also completely interchangeable. Swap the logo and nothing else changes. And that’s part of the problem.

This year it ran into a wall. Chamonix elected a new mayor in the spring who has been blunt about the town having had enough. He’s asked UTMB to shrink the exhibitor village and keep it on Place du Mont-Blanc, and he called out the brand programming that piles on top of the official races specifically. 9,000 residents absorb something like 100,000 visitors during race week. The activation layer isn’t just tiresome to the people who notice it anymore. It’s politically constrained.

So the question every brand in that valley should be asking isn’t how to do more. It’s what justifies the space you’re taking up.

Paul Neutzner, Global Brand Strategy for Outdoor at On wrote something on his way into Chamonix that stuck with me. The question isn’t whether brands belong, it’s how they show up, and what he’s most interested in is whether a brand’s presence ends up enriching the place or extracting from it. He also said better frameworks for brands are needed.

Four of them showed me one this week.

Two that found a subject

NNormal ran a shakeout run, the most copied format of the week. Theirs was about something more, however. They stopped along the way to show what all the foot traffic is doing to the plants, animals, and the ground underneath it, and you came away having learned something about the trail you were standing on. You can’t swap a logo into that. Same format as everyone else, completely different execution and it was core to the brand. They didn’t have as many participants as they would have had with just a regular run, but the people who did join are more likely to be core to their brand, and appreciated the connection and uniqueness of the event, bringing them closer to the brand at the same time.

Shokz took people on a hiking tour of the valley with a narrated track playing through the headphones they were there to sell. The product was the delivery mechanism for the experience rather than the point of it. It’s also the only activation I heard about that answers the mayor. It moved people out of town and into the mountains instead of adding another crowd.

Both work for the same reason. They gave the format a subject core to the ethos of the brand. Most activations are a non differentiated event with a logo on it, and you leave with nothing to describe except that the coffee was good.

rabbit went at it from a different angle.

The clubhouse

They took over Hôtel & Spa Le Faucigny, a short walk from the finish, close enough that you could see the branding from just past the line.

The location is a key detail, because it isn’t about visibility the way most activation real estate is. Finishing a race puts you in a strange state. You’re wrung out and elated and looking for somewhere to put the feeling, and mostly you want to sit down near other people who just did the same thing. A space right there doesn’t interrupt that. It extends it.

The measurable version is foot traffic from people who’d never heard of rabbit. They walked in because it was there and open and obviously for them. You can’t buy that with an influencer roster, because the people you’re reaching aren’t following anyone’s trail running account yet.

The programming inside was small. Workshops and events with people actually embedded in the community, a few at a time vs hundreds. Nothing about it was built to fill a grid.

Four jobs at once

What separated the clubhouse from a well-executed popup is that it was doing more than one job.

It was a customer space, in the sense above.

It was also where rabbit met distributors. They don’t have much European distribution right now, and everyone worth talking to about that was already within a mile of the building for a week. Booking a conference room and hoping for meetings is one thing. Having a place people already want to walk into is another.

And it was a listening location. Monica, rabbit’s CEO, spent most of the week just being there and around the village, talking to customers who mostly had no idea they were talking to the person who runs the company. Walking around the valley she’d spot someone in rabbit kit and tell them she liked it, and get back unsolicited feedback from someone with no reason to perform.

That’s the one I keep thinking about. Companies pay research firms real money to produce what Monica got for free by standing in a room for a week without a title on her shirt. We also hosted an industry night where we spent a good chunk of the time talking as both industry folks and consumers ourselves about the activations and what we liked/didn’t like. This took place on Thursday evening, after much of (but not all) activities had happened.

The economics

I asked Monica about the economics of the clubhouse and she was straight with me: the Chamonix P&L isn’t settled, and the clubhouse was never meant to be a revenue stream. She sees it as leverage inside a brand activation strategy.

So the rest of this section is my read, not rabbit’s.

They put the thing in a hotel. Le Faucigny is a working business with rooms that take bookings, and people were booking and paying for them during race week, through rabbit, via Halo's platform. Whatever the final numbers look like, that is structurally different from renting an empty storefront or partnering with an existing retail location and dressing it up for six days, though plenty of brands did that too. One of those has revenue running through it. The other has only outflow.

That’s the part worth copying, and it has nothing to do with whether rabbit turned a profit. The usual activation spends marketing budget to produce content and impressions, then hopes for commercial effect nobody can attribute. You know the cost going in and you take the return on faith. Picking a venue that’s already an operating business changes the shape of that spend before you’ve programmed a single thing inside it.

Then add what else was happening in the building. Distributor meetings for a market rabbit barely operates in. A week of unfiltered customer feedback. Discovery from people wandering in off the finish line.

I don’t know what it cost. I do know almost nothing else in trail running marketing is doing four jobs at once, and the things that are will be the ones still standing when the town starts asking harder questions.

What it costs them

It would be dishonest to write this without naming the tradeoff. The clubhouse reached far fewer people than a shakeout run with a well-known athlete would have. Small means small. Less content, fewer impressions, fewer bodies through the door in a week where attention is the currency.

rabbit knows this, betting depth compounds where reach doesn’t. I think they’re right, but it’s a bet and not proof. If your targets are set in impressions and broad awareness, this looks like underperformance for at least a year, but I think that is the wrong lens, especially for a smaller brand.

The one that didn’t play

On was in Chamonix all week and ran none of this.

No clubhouse, no branded shakeout, nothing on the village floor or other things they’ve done in the past. They spent the week on their athletes, on retail partners, and on planning for what Paul calls On x Outdoor everywhere, not just in Cham. I sat down with him and two colleagues on Friday and the reasoning matched the post: real credibility in road, a thinner position in European trail, and more interest in the runner who’s trail-curious than in the crowd already standing in the village.

You could read that as ceding ground. I think it’s the fourth answer, and the cheapest one to copy. Declining the format costs nothing and is available to every brand in the valley, which is exactly why almost nobody does it. The pressure to have something in Chamonix is pressure to be seen by the industry, not by customers, and sitting the week out means being confident your customers aren’t there.

The tell that it was a decision and not an absence is that they came anyway. You don’t send your team to Chamonix to not do things unless the not-doing is the point. That said, there’s a lot more that can happen behind the scenes for brand folks, where quality > quantity. I had a couple of meetings that could yield more of an outcome than anything else I’ll do all year, for example.

The one that bought reach

HOKA, the title sponsor, isn't losing anywhere that shows up in Deckers' numbers. But the front of the sport is fragmenting fast. iRunFar's Western States count had HOKA at 27.6% of start-line shoes this year, down from 32.6%, and the combined share of the top two brands fell from 45.5% to 36.5%. Seven brands cleared 5% of the field, where last year it was six. Mount to Coast went from nowhere to third. That's the backdrop for a brand with a charter to be everywhere and to dominate trail. Most of what I saw from HOKA was subtle and respectful, their branding seemed to be in all the right places (everywhere, mainly). They had a presence at the one aid station I made it up to (La Flégère), and I had some good conversations with their team.

I saw a lot of coverage from the influencers that they flew out to Chamonix, and perhaps it was because I was jealous not to have made the cut, but I am not sure what the focus was: was there an in person component for the runners in town or was it a purely digital experience? Did I miss something? Perhaps the intent was to take some folks on a press trip to UTMB (which is how it appeared), but I experienced their social activations (and the people behind them in general) 100% through Instagram, vs seeing anything myself in person, outside of seeing Ryan Montgomery running through the streets on Sunday in HOKA gear, and spending a bunch of time with Raz of hearing about it. The group runs and events I saw seemed to be runs for influencers (which there were a lot of, and not just from HOKA).

More on ACG below, since I know y’all are curious.

The launch as the activation

A lot of brands released new products during the week, to the point where it now feels less like a trend and more like an expectation. ACG’s version was the strangest and the most interesting. They unveiled the Picklejus, a big-mountain shoe three years in development, built on a new proprietary outsole called GOATEK. It doesn’t come out until late 2027, but I got it on my feet while sipping on a margarita with pickle juice in it.

A launch with no product for 15 months is mainly about attention. But run it through the tests and it does pretty well: you leave with something to describe, and the thing you describe is the shoe rather than the event. Announcing it at UTMB, at a race where Vibram is an official partner with its own testing space, while telling everyone you’ve replaced Vibram with your own rubber, is quite a message all in one week.

The tests

Plenty of activations in Chamonix were nice. That isn’t what made these four worth writing about.

Between them they give you three questions to ask about anything else that happened that week.

From NNormal and Shokz: does the person who showed up leave with something to describe other than the brand, that still links back to the brand?

From rabbit, and this is the hard one: is the spend doing more than one job, or is it only buying attention?

From On: are you doing this because your customer is here, or because your industry is? This last one is a question we should be asking more (particularly those of you reading this who are in the industry); it was a topic we talked through at the industry night with and . We had to remind each other that so often we are thinking about the optics as it relates to other brand folks; those brand folks aren’t the ones buying the shoes, and that perhaps the people showing up to shakeout runs don’t actually care that they’re not differentiated, they’re there to have fun, see friends, and perhaps meet their heroes. But I still think we have an obligation to at least try and be different and unique, and ultimately that leads to a more interesting event for the end consumers.

Anyways… Clear all three hurdles and you’re doing real work for the business and real work for the people who walk in. You’ve earned the space. Clear none of them and you didn’t build an activation. You’re just contributing to the noise that the Mayor of Chamonix is talking about, which is happening at every major race/event these days.

Enriching or extracting, in Paul’s words. The valley has decided it can tell the difference, and it’s about to start asking on everyone’s behalf.

Unrelated, but perhaps more useful than anything above, in its own way

Where to eat in Chamonix, from a week of high quality research.

As a reminder, the waitstaff is not expecting (or wanting?? Remember - they’re paid a living wage!!) you to tip, which was a weird feeling the first few times.

Burgers. Poco Loco or L’Hydromel.

Sushi. Sushi Shop. Yes, sushi. Also fast and takeaway, which became increasingly useful as the days got longer and the free time got shorter.

Tacos. Stories, right next to L’Hydromel. Yes, I was surprised they were good given we were in France.

Baguette. Fornil Chamoniard, a five minute walk from the main downtown area. It happened to be on my way into town. Get a sandwich, or just get a plain baguette and eat it walking like I did a few times.

Pastry. Aux Petits Gourmands has the best pain au chocolat in town. I had several.

Coffee. The easy answer is Moody’s. They even had cold brew. I had a lot of Americanos and cappuccinos around town. They were all pretty good.

Gelato. Amorino. 'Nuff said. Trust me.

Were you in Chamonix? What are your takeaways?

I’m curious about industry info, and best food spots too!

Leave a comment

A few more thoughts

I’m also specifically curious to hear feedback about ACG and HOKA. I had a lot of conversations with ACG’s exec leadership both in the US and globally, and am cautiously optimistic around their positioning and seriousness in trail and beyond. It has become a real business unit (ACG), not just Nike Trail, with a proper P&L to be held accountable to, and goals that seem to go beyond a 6-12 month cycle. They’re signing younger athletes who are performing well, and it’ll be interesting to see how they show up for LA 2028 and the hopeful addition of trail running to the Olympics. I’m also curious to see if ACG follows a similar model to The North Face, where their athlete team includes snow/climbing sports too.

A note on why Halo sponsors Long Run Labs and Second Nature/ and : I went looking for them. Halo runs the hospitality layer for brands at races, taking over a hotel or a house and handling the booking, the logistics, and the operations so the brand only has to worry about what happens inside. I think this model is a real differentiator and one of the better ways to connect a brand to its customers, and I want more brands to try it. rabbit runs clubhouses with Halo in Chicago and New York, and I’ll probably stay at the New York one. If you want an intro, tell me.

And I’ll leave you with this video of the start of UTMB. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re all there for, and the races absolutely delivered some insanely captivating performances. Pretty wild how many people got out there, and at a 69% completion rate, a higher percentage of people finished than ever before, in part due to the wonderful weather from Friday evening through Sunday morning. It rained both before and after that, ironically (and during most of CCC, UTMB’s 100k race).

See you in London?

I’m now in London for ’s Run Culture: Live event this weekend. I’ll be doing a fireside chat with , and enjoying my first visit to London!

Are you in the area? Join us! I have a few 50% off vouchers, shoot me a note if you want one!

I wanted to talk to her ahead of race week because this spring she moved into a job that didn’t exist before she took it, and the title itself is a curious one. Elite athlete relations and inclusion programs sound like two different departments until you realize that the pros are the visible surface of the sport, and who wins, who gets covered, and who ends up in the photography all feed the same representation question about who thinks this sport is for them, a topic I’ve talked about quite a few times here before and on the pod.

Listen to the episode

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Guest snapshot

Who: Karen Merlin, Elite Athletes and Inclusion Programs Manager, UTMB Group Where: Les Contamines, France Day job: Elite athlete relations and inclusion programs across UTMB World Series

Who is Karen?

She grew up outside Seattle, came to France for a ski season 20 years ago, and stayed for the place and her eventual husband. She has been at UTMB about five years, the first four in marketing and communications (she helped coordinate my conversation with Michel and Catherine Poletti; the founders of UTMB!). She has two kids, and still takes photos of the Alps like a tourist.

We recorded on the Thursday before race week. It airs the Tuesday of UTMB week, and by the time most of you read this I will be in Chamonix.

Here is what stuck with me.

The scale question

I asked how UTMB thinks about growing without repeating whatever skate and ski got wrong during their boom years. The first answer was the one you would expect, about constant conversation and respecting the heritage of Mont-Blanc. So I asked the smaller version: what does too far and too fast actually look like?

Her answer was that UTMB runs 65 events, and there are more than 22,000 trail races in the world. They have a lot of visibility, but they are one piece of the ecosystem alongside local races, run clubs, and shops.

Her version of restraint is adding a handful of events a year instead of trying to be everywhere (even if it seems like that’s what’s happening), and going where a community is already asking for a race. Whether that holds as the calendar grows is a good thing to keep watching. But the number is a useful re-adjustment if you spend a lot of time online and/or reading the comments, where UTMB can feel like the entire sport.

How things actually change inside UTMB

This happens via organized athlete bodies. The PTRA on anti-doping, a women’s working group, separate groups on sport and environmental questions.

Karen was clear that this is not UTMB announcing decisions and athletes reacting to them. Her stance was that both sides have to be open to exchange and compromise, and she described the earlier years as having road bumps, which is a generous way to put it given how openly, uh, challenging that relationship was not long ago.

Paths to Parenthood came out of the women’s working group inside the PTRA. So did a chunk of the feedback on the UTMB Index revision, where athletes pushed back on how scores lined up against how the courses actually ran. What’s important to know is that individual complaints did not move the organization much, and a structured counterparty did.

The 20K problem

I have been going through RIDC data on why people who are trail-curious never actually go, and the finding that stuck with me is that cost is not the blocker. RIDC data below. The blockers are informational. What shoes do I need? What do I carry? What do I do if I see an animal? How do I even find a trail?

Report linked here.

I brought that topic up to Karen with the brand folks who listen to this show in mind, because if the barrier is education rather than price, a lot of money and effort going toward discount codes and sales is pointed at the wrong problem. I saw my own version of this in campaign data this year with the podcast network. On a campaign I ran with a half dozen shows, the two smallest shows (both hosted by dietitians) beat much larger general running shows on cost per acquisition by a very wide margin. Not because of larger audiences, but because the hosts are teaching people how to fuel for distance running, not just sharing coupon codes.

Her answer had two parts. The first is content, and UTMB has new material in production aimed specifically at first-time runners.

The second is the one I had not thought about. UTMB races are generally 20K, 50K, 100K, and 100 miles. For somebody who has never run on dirt, 20K is not an entry point, it is a goal race; that can be 3-4+ hours or more. So part of her work is pushing events in the series to add shorter distances, the dip-your-toe version, and then building a path that lets a runner move up without each step feeling like a whole different sport.

Road running has the 5K at the bottom of every ladder and you can find them nearly every weekend in most cities. Trail histoically starts at a distance that requires you to already be a runner.

The hotline

This is news, and I have not seen it mentioned yet. UTMB is adding a hotline this year so that runners who experience unwanted behavior or an uncomfortable situation on course have a way to report it and reach someone who can act on it.

It sits alongside the rest of what they have built into the courses: kits for women stocked at aid stations, dedicated changing spaces, dedicated toilets. Perhaps it removes a reason somebody might decide not to start. If you work at a brand that talks about accessibility, this list is a decent benchmark for what the work looks like once it stops being a campaign and becomes a line item.

The index freeze

I asked what we got wrong ten years ago about women’s careers, given how many of the biggest names right now are in their thirties and forties. Karen went to the professionalization of the sport and sponsor support, and then to a detail inside the parenthood policy that deserves some extra attention.

Athletes can freeze their UTMB Index.

The Index gates race entry. It gets used in sponsorship conversations. It shapes who gets coverage and who doesn’t. Freezing it means an athlete stepping away for pregnancy, IVF, adoption, or other reasons will not come back to a decreased score, a lost start line, and a weaker position in terms of sponsor negotiations. That is a policy about leverage, and it is the piece I would study if you are involved in athlete contracts.

Forty two and forty two

This was a fun one. UTMB audits its own content coverage internally, and Karen said it runs around 42% covering women, 42% covering men, with the rest landscapes and other visuals.

I would love to see other organizations publish the same figure. Right now UTMB may be the only one that can.

I spent this past weekend covering the Leadville Trail 100 Run on behalf of Life Time, and it was impressive how intentional they were with providing equal coverage. Check it out at https://www.instagram.com/leadvilleraceseries. That team walks the walk; trust me.

Why the field got so deep

Visibility compounds. I wrote about this after Western States, around The Trail Running Flywheel. Broadcasts let you follow a runner’s story in real time, the story pulls people in, the fields deepen, and the racing gets better. She pointed out that you used to see one or two women with a runaway lead, and now there are enough lead changes and enough contenders that the outcome is wide open, like we saw at Leadville this past weekend.

She also pointed to Rachel Entrekin at Cocodona, and specifically to Entrekin saying “why not me?” Karen’s argument was that the phrasing did the work, because other women (and men) heard it and recalibrated what they were allowed to attempt.

We got into something I have believed for most of my 15 years around ambassador programs, which is that women tend to tell the whole story of being an athlete rather than only the performance layer, and that is a large part of why the partnership math keeps working out the way it does. Karen made the point that the inspiration is not gender-specific, and she is right. I am as invested in Rachel’s story as anyone she was speaking to.

Rachel and I spoke on FTLR earlier this year; it was awesome.

What brands still get wrong

Salomon signing Grayson Murphy mid-pregnancy is the example I come back to (and will keep referencing). I spent a weekend with Grayson at Big Alta with Salomon, and watching a world champ shuffle up a hill and have to walk was the most relatable thing I saw all year from a pro athlete.

Karen’s version of this is that there have been a lot of pregnancy announcements lately, and what is new is that brands are putting a spotlight on them instead of letting those athletes disappear for a season. People are at their most relatable when they are building a family, or hurt, or not able to run. Brands that only show up for the wins are not just leaving the most useful material on the table, but they’re not truly supporting the whole human.

What is still open

Prize money has been split evenly between men and women since 2018, so I asked what gaps remain. Anti-doping came first, then making people feel welcome on course, then a broader idea about protecting athletes across the World Series.

What Karen asks of media this week

I asked her to put the PR hat back on and tell us how not to be a problem in the valley. Park where you are supposed to park. Speak kindly to people even when you badly want the shot. Protect the natural spaces.

Then she said that you can always find things to complain about, and that this week is a privilege worth enjoying. Her instruction was to soak it up, say wow, and look out for each other out there.

I’ll definitely be saying wow a lot!

Her race week picks

From someone who lives on the course:

• The PTL start, Monday morning. They head out for 300 kilometers with their spirits high.

• The Monday panel on championing space for women in trail, at the fan experience.

• The Elites presentation, Wednesday. Max hype.

• ETC over in Courmayeur, where she says the ambiance is unmatched.

• The women’s watch party, Saturday, in the fan experience, right where runners come through.

• The finish line at five or six in the morning. Quiet, and her favorite moment of the week. As she put it, they come back changed.

Come find me: Tech in Running, Wednesday at 2 p.m.

I am hosting a panel for TrainingPeaks during race week.

📍 L’Hydromel, two blocks from the finish line, Chamonix 🗓️ Wednesday, August 26, 2 p.m.

Host: Me!

Panelists:

• Lynch, Amazfit

• Arnar Larusson, Tymewear

• Doug Stewart, Elite Trail Team

• , Hoka and Trail Society Podcast

We are getting into where the data helps, where it is noise, where it falls short for women, and what the next few years look like for athletes and the brands building for them. Come say hello, especially if we have only ever talked online. It is my first time in Chamonix and I am here!! (actually, I’m still in the airport in Geneva. I’m coming soon!!)

I’m also co-hosting an industry conversation night with , similar to what he did with Aaron Lutze at TrailCon.

A word from our sponsors

Halo. The hospitality platform built by runners for the way people actually travel to races. Branded home bases for brands, better rates and real community for event organizers, and a lot less hassle for everyone else. Reach out to their team and tell them you heard about Halo on Long Run Labs, or get in touch with me and I’ll make the intro. Hear more from their CEO/Founder in our episode. I’m thinking about staying at their clubhouse in New York for the marathon with rabbit. Let me know if you’re going!

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Takeaways

• The hotline is a headline. UTMB is adding an on-course reporting channel for unwanted behavior this year.

• The index freeze is the smartest part of the parenthood policy. It protects race access and sponsorship leverage, not just goodwill.

• UTMB measures its own coverage. Roughly 42% women, 42% men. Almost nobody else in this sport can produce that number.

• Scale is 65 against 22,000. Useful context whether you think UTMB is too big or not big enough.

• Education is the entry blocker, not cost, and the ladder starts too high. UTMB is adding shorter races because 20K is a goal race for a beginner, not a first one. That is where growth money should go.

Where to find Karen

Karen Merlin is on LinkedIn. UTMB is at utmb.world.

New to For The Long Run? Start here.

For The Long Run is a weekly conversation about the why underneath the miles. I started it in 2019 to understand what actually keeps people running long, strong, and motivated, and it has since grown into the Long Run Labs Network. Long Run Labs is the show that grew out of it, focused on the people building the outdoor industry.

Start here: forthelong.run/start-here

Listen to the full conversation with Karen Merlin on Long Run Labs wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator/athlete/brand partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

I said what you say in those meetings. Sounds great, let me think about the structure. After we wrapped, I closed the laptop and sat there for a minute, because something felt strange and I couldn’t place it.

Here is what it was.

Ten years ago I was at InsideTracker, in my mid 20s, still early on in my career, and sitting in rooms where the CEO and the board members and outside advisors did most of the talking. I watched those people closely. I observed and studied how they framed things, how people listened to them, and what they seemed to know that I didn’t (yet) know. The outside advisor in particular was a role I could barely comprehend. You mean this person doesn’t have a full time job? Or more surprisingly, this is what they do full time? Someone who showed up a few times a year, said a few things, and changed the direction of the company.

That was the chair I was looking at from across the room, and a fund manager had just asked me to take a seat right in it.

The post I didn’t know I was writing

I put something short on LinkedIn afterward. Just a few words; an offhand thought that crossed my mind and made it past the “should I post this?” filter.

Ten years ago I was looking up to and admiring the people doing the work I’m doing now. Fun reflection. Onwards.

I did not include the trigger. I didn’t mention the meeting or the fund or the chair. I wasn’t trying to make a point. It was one of those posts you write because a feeling needs somewhere to go and you have a phone in your hand. You know, what Twitter was originally meant for; the random thoughts that we wanted to share with the world.

left a comment on it:

“That’s living in the gain!”

Christian spent 15+ years owning an outdoor brand before selling it and moving into executive coaching, and he came on Long Run Labs back in the spring. Roughly 15 minutes into that recording, the conversation flipped. He stopped being the guest and started asking me questions I did not have good answers to. I left all of it in the episode, and have listened back to it a few times.

One of the things he gave me that day was Dan Sullivan’s frame from The Gap and the Gain. I bought the book and read it soon after. Short version, because I already wrote the longer version (linked above) when the episode came out:

The gap is the distance between where you are and the horizon you’re chasing. It is, by construction, uncloseable. Move toward it and it moves.

The gain is the distance between where you started and where you are standing right now. It is fixed. It already happened. Nobody can take it.

Most of us spend our whole working lives measuring against the horizon and almost none of it measuring against the start.

I understood that in May. I wrote about it in May. I recommended the book to people in May.

And then in August I accidentally did it, without noticing, and a friend had to tell me in a comment box.

Knowing a frame and actually digesting one

There is a real difference between those two things and I don’t think we talk about it much.

Knowing a frame takes an afternoon. You read the book, you nod at the good part, you can explain it at dinner. Digesting one takes months and you cannot schedule it. It shows up sideways, attached to something specific, usually when you’re not looking for it.

I picked the book up again after that meeting. Not because I was trying to do a gratitude exercise. Because something had happened that I had no language for, and the language turned out to be sitting on a shelf where I’d left it.

That’s most of what a good conversation does, I think. It doesn’t change you on the day. It leaves something in the house that you find later when you need it.

The part I didn’t expect

The comments did something the post couldn’t do on its own.

Simon Freeman of replied with a line I keep thinking about:

“And here you are inspiring people who hope, in ten years, they’ll be doing the work you are now.”

Read that against the post. I wrote about looking up at people. Simon pointed out that while I was doing the looking up, a stack of people were looking up at me.

Another commenter (hi Eva!) put it even more plainly, mirroring my own sentence back at me: they look up and admire the work I’m doing right now.

So here’s the point I want to make:

Your gain is somebody else’s gap. The exact position you can’t see any value in, because you’re standing in it and it just feels like Tuesday, is the position somebody else is grinding toward and cannot yet reach. That’s a structural fact about where you’re standing, and it’s also the reason the gain is so hard to see from the inside.

You are the worst-positioned person in the world to evaluate your own progress. You have full access to every doubt, every near-miss, all the imposter syndrome (who else deals with this?) every thing you meant to ship and didn’t. What you do not have access to is what you look like from across the room. And the gain lives almost entirely in that view.

Which means the gain is not really a mindset you adopt. It’s information you have to go get.

What I’d actually do with this

Keep receipts you didn’t write. I have a folder of screenshots and forwarded emails that I used to think was vanity. It isn’t. It’s the only record I have of what I looked like from outside my own head, and it’s the only thing that reliably works when the gap gets loud.

Put yourself around people who can see you. This is most of why The Huddle exists, and I’ll be honest that I didn’t understand that when we started it. Jason, Ross and I built it as a place for early-stage founders to get unstuck. What it mostly does in practice is help show and tell people what they’ve already built, because nobody in the room has the distortion that the founder has.

Look at your own log the way you’d look at someone else’s. Every endurance athlete reading this has a training log going back years. You know exactly what you ran last week, and you have no felt sense whatsoever of the difference between the person who started that log and the person reading this sentence. Open it from the beginning sometime. It’s a strange experience. Mine goes back to 2018 and it’s a really cool way to see progress.

One real caveat

I’m not going to pretend the gap is the enemy.

The gap is the engine. It’s why I’m building a 35-show podcast network instead of one show, why I’m still chasing partnerships I have no business chasing or that other shows my size would never consider, or why the calendar looks the way it does. If I fully moved into the gain I’d be a much calmer person running a much smaller company, and I don’t actually want that.

The goal isn’t to stop looking at the horizon. It’s to turn around once in a while and check how far the trailhead is behind you. Then turn back around and keep going.

I’ll be back in the gap tomorrow. That’s fine. That’s the job.

But for about ten minutes after that meeting, I got to stand somewhere I’d spent a decade walking toward, and I got to notice it. A friend had to point it out to me in a comment box, which I think is exactly how this works for almost everybody.

The full conversation with Christian Rawles on the fear of success, abundance, and why entrepreneurs need new heroes is on Long Run Labs. Listen on [Spotify] / [Apple] / [YouTube].

Question for you: what’s the last thing you accomplished that you moved past so fast you never actually registered it? I want to hear about it below!!

Leave a comment

Links & Credits

• The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan with Benjamin Hardy

• Christian Rawles on Long Run Labs: [episode link]

• Previous writeup on the Christian Rawles episode: [link]

This is the type of conversation I built this show for; the helpful behind the scenes stuff that we don’t often hear about. How the money actually gets allocated, which audience each piece of content is really for, and how a company with this many product categories decides where to point. He gave me all of it, including the detail that Osprey has never once put a podium incentive in an athlete contract.

Listen to the episode

🎧 Listen on Spotify · Listen on Apple Podcasts · Watch on YouTube

Guest snapshot

Who: Leland Kohere, marketing manager at Osprey Packs

Where: Durango, Colorado

Day job: Oversees the athlete and sports marketing program, field marketing and consumer events, and all content and social, working alongside an external agency Runner notes: Runner, skier, and surfer.

Who is Leland Kohere?

Leland has been at Osprey a little over five years. He came in as marketing coordinator, hired by Vince Mazuka, a friend from a previous life who told him years earlier that he wanted to hire him one day and eventually did. Vince has since moved to the product team overseeing the technical outdoor category.

Leland calls himself a generalist, and he meant it as a compliment, which is good because I feel the same way. The role covers athletes, events, content, and social, which gives him a working picture of how the whole company operates while still letting him go deep in a few places. He sits squarely on the brand side. A paid media agency handles performance, and he feeds both machines.

Here is what stuck with me.

A creator and an influencer are not the same hire

Leland does not treat these as interchangeable, and he was direct about why. An influencer campaign targets specific people with large followings and strong engagement, because the point is to borrow their audience. UGC is content Osprey brings back to its own channels to speak to the audience it already has.

Change the goal and you change the criteria. For UGC he is not buying reach, he is buying craft. The best creators often do have followings, but only because good work tends to find one, but it doesn’t need to be someone with a large audience. What he needs is someone who actually knows the outdoors, knows the product, and can shoot something that holds up on Osprey’s feed or gets handed to the paid team.

The economics follow the goal. Influencer rates run far higher because you are paying for the followers. With UGC you are paying for the creative and doing everything else yourself, including paid social or email.

One piece of content cannot carry the whole funnel

This is a drum I have been banging for a while, so it was satisfying to hear it from inside a brand. Leland measures UGC on impressions and engagement, on whether the content landed. He said plainly that he does not really care whether it made someone buy something, and that he would not necessarily expect it to.

If the paid team needs lower funnel D2C creative, a UGC creator can absolutely produce it, but the content will look completely different and get judged on completely different numbers.

Inside one seasonal campaign there is room for all of it. The UGC introduces the category. The email team sells the vest. Same campaign, different jobs, different scoreboards. Some brands try and stuff all parts of the funnel into one partnership. That is often a recipe for failure.

Why the athlete program has no podium bonuses

Osprey runs an athlete program, an ambassador program, and a creator program, and Leland keeps them separate on purpose (phew!). The athlete program exists to buy credibility in the categories Osprey competes in. It does not exist to buy results.

I asked about Grayson Murphy, who Osprey worked with before she went head to toe with Salomon. His answer had almost nothing to do with her world title. What drew the brand in was the group runs, the community engagement, the way she shows up at events, the fact that she is humble and people like her, which she makes it really easy to do, and that part seems to come naturally. If she had wanted to chase podiums, Osprey would have backed it. They just were not counting on it.

He traced it to the mission. Osprey builds gear to ease your journey and inspire your adventure, and that adventure might be a world championship or a 5K around the lake in your town. A brand that says that out loud cannot turn around and organize its roster around chasing podiums.

Showing up is the strategy

Leland is the customer. Runner, skier, surfer. His read is that people in this industry, whether they work in it or buy from it, see through fluff almost immediately, and that brands which stop showing up in person get quietly dismissed.

So Osprey builds an event calendar around the technical outdoor categories specifically, run and bike and climb and snow, and treats face to face conversation as the deliverable. He noted that fewer brands are doing this now. And that is part of the reason why it still works.

The category problem nobody has solved

I brought up the AI study I did with Michael Rueckert, where we ran 2,200 prompts across categories without naming a single brand. One of the clearest findings was that winning one category earns you nothing in the next one. Osprey came back sixth in hydration vests and packs, appearing in 46% of answers, and fifth in water bottles and soft flasks at 37%.

Leland called prioritization the hardest part of his job, and he deals with it every season. The go to market process decides which categories get the full treatment, and campaigns get ranked A, B, or C. An A campaign gets influencer, UGC, a homepage carousel, an email program, an event, the works. Run was that campaign in 2026, with the redesigned Duro and Dyna plus the new Pro Series behind it. He already knows run will not be the focus next year.

The timing was mostly luck. The vests were three or four years in development, so trail running’s growth arrived after the product decision, not before it. Once the company saw the wave, it pushed to get the packs finished in time to ride it. And the wave is just beginning to roll. I wrote more about why following a week out in Tahoe around Broken Arrow/TrailCon/Western States.

His candid read on brands running footwear, apparel, packs, and hard goods at once: he does not know how they stay relevant across all of it, and the only real answer is time.

PR is load bearing again

We landed in the same place here. One of the more interesting findings from the AI research is that earned media is quietly feeding how these models talk about brands, which means the work PR shops have been doing for 20 years suddenly matters twice. Gordon of Outside PR joked to me that he just had to stick around long enough.

Leland’s proof point is the Outdoor Market Alliance media show, where Osprey booked between 25 and 30 appointments in a day and a half. Every meeting is scheduled weeks out, so his team can research who is walking in and what they are working on. He opens each one by asking what the person actually wants to see, which is the whole difference from a trade show floor where half your conversations are strangers you could not plan for. I appreciated that one quite a lot, having just come off OMA where it was clear half the brands did no research at all.

A word on Popfly

Popfly sponsors this podcast, and I want to be transparent that Leland’s take on the platform was not something I set up (though perhaps I would have if he didn’t bring it up). Osprey is a customer, and I found out because I saw them post campaigns there and applied to (and participated in) a couple myself.

His version is worth hearing because it is operational. He got a demo from Taylor, their CEO, got set up quickly, and launched a UGC campaign for hiking products about three weeks later. Sourcing creators, contracting them, shipping product, and getting content back all fit inside that window. At the time of this recording, Osprey had run five campaigns across hiking, run, and travel.

The part he kept coming back to was creator quality. These were real outdoors people who knew the brand and understood the product, which is what makes the content usable rather than merely delivered. If you are running a creator program, Popfly is worth a look.

Takeaways

• Separate your creator budget from your influencer budget. They buy different things. One buys reach, the other buys craft, and paying influencer rates for UGC means overpaying for followers you are not using.

• Set the KPI before the campaign, not after. Awareness content judged on ROAS will always look like a failure. Impressions and engagement are the honest measure at the top of the funnel.

• Credibility is not the same as results. An athlete roster built around community presence outlasts one built around podium finishes, and it likely costs less to maintain.

• Category authority does not transfer. Being strong in packs earns you nothing in bottles. Every category has to be won on its own, and the only way through is sustained attention over years.

• Earned media is compounding again. PR work is now feeding what AI models say about your brand, which makes a well-run media appointment one of the better returns available.

Where to find Leland

Leland Kohere on LinkedIn. Osprey at osprey.com, and the redesigned Duro and Dyna Pro series is the product he and the athlete team spent years on.

New to For The Long Run and Long Run Labs? Start here.

For The Long Run is a weekly conversation about the why underneath the miles. I started it in 2019 to understand what actually keeps people running long, strong, and motivated, and it has since grown into the Long Run Labs Network. Long Run Labs is the show that grew out of it, focused on the people building the outdoor industry.

Start here: forthelong.run/start-here

A word on our partners

Halo. The hospitality platform built by runners for the way people actually travel to races. Branded home bases for brands, better rates and real community for event organizers, and a lot less hassle for everyone else. Reach out to their team and tell them you heard about Halo on Long Run Labs, or get in touch with me and I’ll make the intro. Hear more from their CEO/Founder in our episode.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Listen to the full conversation with Leland Kohere on Long Run Labs wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

Brands, some pre-launch, some well established, are hiring me to put a very specific group of people in a room and ask them questions. Not to reach them. To understand them. The reach is almost a byproduct.

I wrote a while back about seeding watches with Amazfit, and how a challenger brand could borrow community trust instead of buying mass attention. That piece was about one campaign, inspired by a project that from Amazfit asked if I’d be up for. This one is about what that campaign turned into: a service I now sell, and why it works.

The shift: from renting attention to brokering access

The old model is straightforward. A brand wants eyeballs, you have eyeballs, they pay for the placement. Everyone understands it because it’s just advertising with better targeting.

The new model is quieter and, I’d argue, more valuable. A brand often doesn’t need more eyeballs, it needs the right 40 people. Sponsored pros in Boulder. Amateurs training for a specific hundred miler. The crew and pacers of Western States. These are audiences a brand cannot easily assemble on its own, because assembling them takes years of real relationships, not a media budget.

That’s the part that surprised me. The valuable thing was never the size of the list. It was the ability to hand a brand exactly the cohort they asked for, and then run the research on top of it.

Four versions of the same idea

The clearest way to explain it is to walk through four engagements. Same underlying model, four very different reasons a brand wanted in.

An apparel brand: getting product designers in a room with amateur runners

Back in January, a large apparel brand wanted to talk to two kinds of people about what they need from their gear as it relates to running, weather, and everything in between: trail-curious runners just getting into it, and serious trail runners with strong opinions, 15 people total across the two groups. Evenly split male/female, and particular intention around feedback from mother runners.

We didn’t send a survey. We went for a run together, then sat down for a 2.5 hour private session inside a running store with each group. That location was intentional (thanks Runner’s Roost Boulder!). People could pull products off the shelf, point at seams and zippers and fabrics, and show the brand’s product and design team exactly what they meant in real time, instead of describing it in the abstract. The design team watched their future customers react to actual product, in the moment.

A few things landed hard around that table, mostly about weather and sizing. Most at the table hadn’t lived in both a dry climate and a humid climate, and weren’t aware of the penalty/lack of consequence for overdressing on a cold winter day. If you’ve run through the winter in the northeast, you know what I mean.

My job was to recruit every participant, organize and lead the run, and help facilitate the conversation. The brand walked away with insights they simply could not have gotten from a panel or a form, because the value was in the room: the right 15 people, the right setting, and a discussion loose enough to surface the things people don’t think to write down.

Amazfit: learning how to win customers off the legacy brands

Amazfit is the case I’ve written about before, now with a season of data behind it. The seeding was never really about free watches. It was about feedback their team could take back to leadership to keep refining the product and sharpening how they position against the incumbents.

The applicant pool alone told a story: the overwhelming majority were current Garmin and Coros users. That’s not a group posting for a free watch. That’s a group actively curious about a challenger, which is exactly the signal a brand fighting for share off legacy players wants to see. More than 70% went on to share organically, with no posting requirement attached.

The second campaign extended the same logic to a new cohort: the Cheetah Ultra 2, seeded to people pacing and crewing at Western States. If you want to understand how an ultra watch actually performs, you don’t survey road runners. You put it on the wrists of the people awake for 30 hours on the trails, and you ask them afterward.

Hytro: figuring out how a category thinks about recovery

Hytro makes a blood flow restriction wearable (shorts), a category most endurance athletes have only encountered in a clinical, clunky, kind of intimidating form. The research question wasn’t “do you like the shorts.” It was bigger: how do serious runners actually think about recovery, and how do you introduce a new category into a market where the existing reference point feels like a physical therapist’s office?

So we are seeding Boulder pros and influential locals, the people whose habits the rest of the community watches, with priority access to something that actually helps them. Then we listen. What you learn from that isn’t a product review. It’s the language a category should use to introduce itself, sourced from the exact people it needs to win first.

Foresthill Basecamp: designing an experience before a shovel hits dirt

This is my favorite, because there’s no product to seed at all. Foresthill Basecamp is an athlete-focused lodging project under development on 37 acres in Foresthill, California, right at mile 62 of the Western States Trail. Cold plunges, saunas, modern units, singletrack out the door, opening in 2027.

Which means every design decision is still on the table, and the founders are making them now. What amenities matter. What athletes would actually pay to travel for. What’s a nice-to-have versus a dealbreaker. The move is obvious once you say it out loud: ask the exact athletes the place is being built for, before it’s built.

So that’s what we’re doing. Pros, coaches, brands, and serious amateurs, with a real price-sensitivity model rather than a single “what would you pay” question. Four price questions instead of one, because the number people give you when you ask them directly is usually the least useful one.

The cohort included sponsored pros, coaches with rosters, and brand-side people. A panel can't assemble these people, and you can't reach them without a prior relationship.

The study is still in the field and the founders see it before anyone else, so I’m not going to publish findings here just yet. But I’ll say this much about the design, because it’s the part that transfers.

The instrument was built so it could tell the founders something they didn't want to hear. No comparable prices shown before the price questions. No adjectives like “luxury” in the description, because a single word moves the number. When they asked me to reference a well-known competitor for context, I pushed back and kept it out. The whole thing is worthless if the survey is built to agree with the model.

That sounds obvious. It is not how most pre-launch research gets done. Most of it is written, consciously or not, to produce the number already in the spreadsheet.

I also spent an hour on the phone with someone who’s known that area for decades. That conversation was worth more than any single block of the survey, and none of it would have surfaced in a panel.

The survey tells you what people would pay. The hour on the phone tells you what you didn’t know to ask.

If you’re a runner who’d consider a place like this, the survey is open through August 21 and your answer shapes what gets built. Feel free to fill it out here.

None of this replaced the media business

For The Long Run Podcast is still weekly (and nearly at episode 450), the network is still growing, and sponsorship is still the largest line. What changed is that it isn’t the only line.

That matters more than it sounds. For years I never needed any single sponsorship, and that was the whole secret. I could be patient, I could say no, I could return a check when a product didn’t sit right. The freedom to walk away was the source of the best work.

Going all in put that at risk. The fix wasn’t to sell harder. It was to build enough different kinds of revenue that no single deal has to close. Which means I get to be choosier about partners, not less choosy. Research work is part of what buys that.

Why this works, and why it’s hard to copy

The obvious play for any of these brands is to hire a market research firm or run a panel through a platform. It's the default, it's much more expensive, and it doesn't work: those panels give you strangers who match a demographic. What they can’t give you is the specific people in a running town whose opinion the whole community actually listens to, reachable because someone already spent years earning the right to text them, with the ability to give them access to something they probably want but might not know about or have access to yet.

One thing I want to say directly, because some of the people I’ve asked are likely to be reading this (hello!). None of this works if it’s extractive. Nobody gets volunteered into a brand’s research. People get asked, they get access to something before anyone else has it, and they get told what came of what they said. When I recruit a room, I’m spending trust I’d like to still have next year, which is the best possible reason to be careful with it.

That’s the moat, and it isn’t the survey. Anyone can write a survey. The thing that’s hard to replicate is the trust that makes a busy person actually show up for the run and the session, and the judgment to know which handful of people are the ones worth asking.

The research layer is where the newer capability comes in. I can design the instrument, run it, and turn a pile of open-ended responses into two or three things a founder can actually act on. A year ago I could deliver the access. Now I can deliver the access and the analysis, which is a different and more useful thing to sell.

Where this goes next

I just signed on as an advisor to Bluubird, so read what follows knowing I have equity in it.

Bluubird is a community-led commerce platform for athletic and outdoor gear. Athletes discover gear, buy it, use it, and review it in the context of actual training, and that structured experiential data goes back to brands as intelligence. Katie Begando is building it, her second company in this space.

The reason I said yes is that it’s the same thesis as everything above, built as infrastructure instead of as an engagement. And Katie is absolutely someone I want to bet on.

The room of 15 at Runner’s Roost is the highest-signal version of this work and the least scalable. It happens once. It takes weeks to assemble. When it’s over, the insight lives in a deck. Bluubird’s bet is that if you build the rails right, the signal can be continuous. Not 15 people for 2.5 hours in January, but thousands of athletes reporting on gear in the context they actually use it, year-round.

That doesn't replace the room. In person is where you find the question you didn't know to ask: the unplanned tangent, someone pulling a jacket off the shelf to show you what they mean. Then you need to know whether what you heard from 15 people holds up across a few thousand, over a season, in the field. That's the part Bluubird makes possible, which is why the two belong together, not in competition.

There’s a second reason I think this matters more now than it would have three years ago, and it comes from the AI study I ran with Michael Rueckert at Centium. We ran 2,200 unaided prompts across five models and twenty-two categories to see which brands AI actually recommends when nobody names one.

The finding I keep returning to wasn’t which brands won. It was where the models got their answers. Brand-owned websites accounted for under 5% of cited sources. The rest was other people. Media, forums, reviews, the accumulated record of humans saying what they thought about a product.

So the top of the funnel is becoming a machine, and the machine runs on human experience. Your marketing site is nearly invisible to it. What people actually said about your product is the input.

That’s the human side of that study, and I don’t think most brands get that yet. There are brands that do, and you won’t be surprised when I tell you that Skratch Labs is one of them, an early user of Bluubird.

The more discovery gets automated, the more valuable first-hand human experience becomes. It’s the raw material the whole system runs on. 15 people in a room is that. 10,000 structured reviews from people who actually raced in the thing is that too, at a different resolution.

Bluubird has soft launched and is building out a beta. If you’re a brand who’d rather have a standing read on what your athletes think than a study once a year, we’d like to get a few of the right ones in early. Shoot me a note or leave a comment if you’re interested.

What a year actually changed

When I left a decade in one job to do this, I thought the business was media. Shows, downloads, sponsorships. And a lot of it is.

But the highest-leverage thing I do now is something I couldn’t have described on day one: I sit between brands who need to understand a community and a community that trusts me enough to tell the truth. Sometimes that shows up as a sponsorship. Increasingly it shows up as paid research, seeding, and a readout call where a founder finally hears, unfiltered, what the people they’re building for actually think.

The show and the network aren’t the past tense of this business. They’re what makes the rest of it possible, and they’re where the people come from.

The reach was never the asset. It was the relationships all along. It just took a year of doing the work to see which one people were really paying for.

If you're a brand trying to understand a specific corner of the endurance world before you spend real money guessing, that's the work. And if the always-on version is more your speed, tell me and I'll get you in front of Bluubird.

Either way: jon@forthelong.run.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows.

What he and Kristina Cripe have put together between the RiNo 5K and Back on My Feet Denver went the other way, and it happened fast and organically. Free entries for every program member. Then Altra donating shoes to those members. Then prizes carved out for top fundraisers. Then, in a conversation from just a few weeks before we recorded, John hiring Back on My Feet members as paid race-day staff. None of that was in an agreement. All of it came out of two people who kept talking.

This is the episode for anyone who runs an event, works in brand partnerships, or has ever written “community impact” into a deck and then struggled to make it mean something. Similar to the conversation with Monica of rabbit and Hilary of Halo, this conversation is a demonstration of how 1+1 can = 3 in a strong partnership.

Listen to the episode

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Guest snapshot

Who: John Gonzalez, founder and race director of the RiNo 5K, and Kristina Cripe, program specialist at Back on My Feet Denver.

Where: Denver, Colorado.

Day job: John works full time in cybersecurity and runs the race on the side. Kristina runs the Denver chapter of a national organization operating in 14 cities.

Runner notes: John has run countless 5Ks, halfs, and marathons, and ran cross country in high school after his first 5K. Kristina is out with Back on My Feet members three mornings a week.

What’s the origin story of RiNo 5k?

He calls himself an average runner and a normal guy, which undersells it. The RiNo 5K started in 2017 as a passion project and he still does nearly all of it himself: permits, insurance, web updates, social, vendor scheduling, hiring. Race day brings help. The other 51 weeks are him.

The origin traces back to Austin, where he took an unpaid internship with the Austin Marathon while waiting tables at night. Six months of operations and marketing work, then race morning: showing up at 3 am, watching the infrastructure appear, watching runners arrive, watching people cry at the finish because they qualified for Boston or finished a first marathon or got engaged. That’s where he fell in love with the race organization side of the sport.

When he moved to Denver he noticed every local race ran in parks. He wanted the roads. He wanted the RiNo neighborhood, which happens to be full of breweries. And he wanted the event to do something socially useful in the city he had been biking through past the Denver Rescue Mission every day.

He went and volunteered in that kitchen first. Then he decided that rather than take a position on homelessness or addiction in Denver, he would find an organization already doing the work and support it.

What about Back on My Feet?

Back on My Feet uses running as the entry point. Members meet three times a week at 5:30 or 5:45 in the morning and run together. The early hour is the mechanism, not an inconvenience. Consistency builds routine, routine builds confidence, and the group builds relationships with people who believe in them.

From there the program moves into employment, housing, and whatever goals a member sets. Programs run about six months. In that window Kristina has watched members earn CNA licenses and CDLs, start a business, and go into peer recovery work to help people in the situation they were in a year earlier.

Some of them had never run a block before joining. A few have now finished half marathons.

“That confidence and knowing that you can do hard things and achieve things goes into every other aspect of your life.”

Kristina Cripe

What separates a partner from a line item

When I asked John where organizers go wrong with partnerships, he did not talk about contracts. He talked about selfishness, about people who take without looking to give.

The Topo Designs relationship is his longest and it works because it runs both directions. Topo customizes bags for the race. The race sends runners to the Topo flagship a few blocks from the start with a discount code. Neither side is doing the other a favor.

The Back on My Feet version escalated the same way. Kristina raised the idea of free entries for members, which John had not considered, and his answer was to bring all of them. Then Altra came in with shoes for program members. Then the top fundraiser prizes, which were never in the sponsorship agreement. Then the paid race-day roles, because John already had a budget to hire 5-10 people for setup and it made no sense to hire strangers.

That is three organizations winning off a set of conversations that started with one.

One plus one equals three

I love this equation, and both John and Kristina ran with it.

Kristina’s version is concrete. Back on My Feet gives gear and shoes to every member so cost is never the barrier to joining. Donations alone would not cover that. Brand partners close the gap, which means the mission does not happen without them. Two organizations together multiply the impact rather than adding to it.

John’s version is about method. He believes the common frameworks exist and are visible at bigger events, but the outcome depends on collaboration, on someone in the room throwing out an idea nobody had scoped. He credited Kristina directly for this, and the free entries are the proof.

The questions John asks before he takes anyone’s money

Some brands write in wanting a partnership when what they actually want is email addresses. Some are local, like the race, and are not counting anything. Both are fine. Confusing the two is what kills the relationship in year two.

So he asks up front:

How are you measuring this? If we fast forward to next year, how will you decide whether to come back? What does that decision process look like? Who are your stakeholders? Whose budget is this and who signs off? I ask these questions in sponsorship conversations too; understanding what helps someone else win is key.

He wants three-year deals across the board and rarely gets them. Contacts move. His Odell Brewing contact just left, so that relationship starts over with someone new. He begins planning in October for a race in September, and the brand conversations start there.

The $30 social bib

This was my favorite operational detail in the episode.

Full price for the RiNo 5K is $50, or $52 on race day. Most of that goes to closing roads, which is invisible to a runner deciding whether a 5K is worth it. So John built a second product. The social bib launched at $30 and now runs $35. No official time, no race photos. Everything else is identical: same course, same closed roads, same DJ, same beer.

His framing was implied value versus received value. Strip out the pieces that carry real cost and only matter to a subset of runners, and the price comes down enough to let in the person who was intimidated by the whole thing.

It also solves a marketing problem he created early on. He originally sold the race as fast and flat, and people wrote in asking whether they were allowed to run if they were slow. He had meant the course was flat, therefore you could run fast on it. He had to change the messaging entirely.

The gateway drug

John’s term for the 5K, and he means it in the best way. Nearly everyone who runs started with one.

Denver is a transplant city thick with run clubs, so people arrive, see everyone running, and start running if they weren’t already. The RiNo 5K catches them at that moment, which he treats as a responsibility: make it fun, safe, and welcoming enough that they go run BolderBOULDER, Boulderthon, or Colfax next, and eventually book a trip with run club friends to run something bigger.

The road format carries an accessibility benefit he pointed out that I had not considered. No curbs, no sidewalks, no singletrack. Someone in a wheelchair can show up without a conversation.

And the competitive field coexists with all of it. Winning times run in the high 14s for men and mid 16s for women. The Trail House guys will be racing it this year. About 50 teams register, some in costume, with a prize for the best one. Kristina made the point that her members land on both ends of that spectrum, some there for a first race ever and some who want to be pushed, and the event holds both.

Takeaways

• A donation is not a partnership. If the only thing moving between the two organizations is money, nobody is compounding anything. A partnership goes both ways.

• The best terms get invented after the deal is signed. Free entries, shoe donations, fundraiser prizes, and paid race-day jobs all came out of conversations, not the original agreement.

• Ask how they’ll measure it before you take the check. Metrics, stakeholders, budget owner, renewal criteria. Every brand is a unique situation and assuming otherwise costs you year two.

• Local beats national when you’re small. Topo, Odell, and Altra all came in through a local presence and a local staff who cared about Denver. Altra’s “own their backyard” framing did more work than a national pitch would have.

• Price tiers are an inclusion tool. The social bib strips out timing and photos, drops the price by $15 to $20, and lets in the runner who was never going to pay $50 to find out if they like racing.

• The 5K is the widest door in the sport. Cast the net there and take responsibility for where those people go next.

Where to find them

RiNo 5K: September 12, 8:30 am in Denver. There’s a 5K, the social bib option, and a mile after the 5K (you can do one or both). Grab an Odell beer, then post up at the finish and watch the mile. Register at rino5k.org and follow @rino5k on Instagram.

Back on My Feet: you can donate during RiNo 5K registration, or give directly through their standalone fundraising link. If you’re in Denver, you can run with them or volunteer. Everything’s at backonmyfeet.org, and Kristina and the team will be at the race.

New to For The Long Run and Long Run Labs? Start here.

For The Long Run has been exploring the why behind running since 2019: the reasons people keep showing up, and the people building the sport around them. Long Run Labs grew out of it and now covers the business of endurance, from sponsorship and media to the founders and operators making it work. If you’re new here, start here.

A word on our partners

Halo. The hospitality platform built by runners for the way people actually travel to races. Branded home bases for brands, better rates and real community for event organizers, and a lot less hassle for everyone else. Reach out to their team and tell them you heard about Halo on Long Run Labs, or get in touch with me and I’ll make the intro.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Listen to the full conversation with John Gonzalez and Kristina Cripe on Long Run Labs wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

So he and his co-founder built the product they had been trying to assemble by hand for two decades, and then spent 18 months selling it only into pro teams before letting a single consumer buy it.

We recorded this in Boulder this spring after BolderBOULDER weekend, four hours after we scheduled it. It’s a conversation about performance nutrition, but it’s really a conversation about how you build something when you already know exactly what problem you’re solving and the hard part is getting anyone to care about a boring answer.

Listen to the episode

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Guest snapshot

Who: Dr. Marc Bubbs, performance and clinical nutritionist, co-founder of ProBio

Where: Toronto and London, in Boulder for race weekend

Day job: Building ProBio with co-founder Paul Winsper, plus clinical consulting through doctorbubbs.com

Who is Dr. Marc Bubbs?

Marc started out as a strength coach in the late 90’s, back when nutrition wasn’t on anyone’s radar unless you were a dietitian. He could see the impact in real time as a trainer, and he could also see that the medical side wasn’t trained for it and mostly still isn’t.

Since then: Canada Basketball, US Soccer, Olympic programs, and a stretch with the NBA. He and I first crossed paths when he was with the Atlanta Hawks and InsideTracker was running performance labs for the team. He now co-founds ProBio with Paul Winsper, who put in thirty years in pro sport across the Premier League and MLS, ran a program at Nike, and led global performance at Under Armour for a decade.

His framing of what has changed over that career is the cleanest version I’ve heard. At the start, the problem was a complete lack of information. Now the problem is too much of it.

Here’s what stuck with me.

The product came out of the labs, not out of a brief

Marc spent his career chasing athletes around with pill packs. You find them stuffed between airplane seats. You find them in someone’s shoe. As a practitioner you know the guy is low in D and low in B, and you cannot get the intervention to survive contact with a travel schedule.

The category answer to that has always been the all in one, which practitioners have historically hated because those products were built for marketing claims rather than for purpose. So ProBio started from the other end. Rather than solving ten separate problems on a panel, raise the floor far enough that 80-85% of it is handled and only a couple of things are left to solve individually.

What they deliberately left out tells you as much as what’s in it. Creatine is out because the dose is personal, five grams for one person, ten for another, three for many women, and supplements don’t divide cleanly. Calcium and iron are out because both are often better absorbed from food. When Marc wanted to move iron in elite female athletes, he wasn’t reaching for a supplement first. He was doubling the red meat.

The orange color, for the record, was not a positioning decision. It comes from the lutein and the CoQ10. In his words, orange kind of picked them. It also took over a year to sweeten naturally, because amino acids are bitter and there are no artificial sweeteners in it.

Compliance is the only metric that survives contact with a real athlete

This is the part I’d send to anyone building a health product.

ProBio had longitudinal data from an NBA team, fifteen players. Marc could pick out the two who weren’t taking it. Vitamin D is fat soluble, so it sticks to you in a way the water soluble markers don’t, which makes it a clean proxy for whether a person is actually doing the thing. We used to see the same pattern at InsideTracker. Can you open your mouth, put this in it, and swallow, consistently, for months.

And the outcome he points to isn’t a marker at all. It’s missed training days. Big track and field groups came back to him this past year reporting the fewest missed days and the fewest illnesses they’d had in five or six years.

That’s the whole game. In the research you can separate international level athletes from national from regional partly on who showed up the most. Marc took it a step further: it isn’t only full illness that costs you. Upper respiratory symptoms, the scratchy throat and the dark circles without a diagnosis attached, predict worse performance on their own.

If you can keep someone healthy and training, you almost don’t need another form of validation.

The missed meal math

The best thirty seconds of the episode is Marc doing math on a snack.

You skip one small meal a week. Call it 500 calories. That’s 7,000 calories every couple of weeks, 14,000 a month, 170,000 calories a year that you are down. Then you sit across from someone complaining about low energy and achy joints and wondering which supplement will fix it.

He runs macros through what he calls the three Ts. Total for the day, timing through the day, and type. Complex carbohydrate away from training, faster carbohydrate around it. Same lens for protein. His two automatable levers are total protein intake and meal frequency, and he will tell you that experienced athletes visibly glaze over when he brings them up.

He has a good explanation for that. However systematic someone is in their actual job, and he works with surgeons, traders, and law firm partners, health decisions run through the emotional part of the brain. He uses the elephant and rider analogy: the rider is the thinking brain, the elephant is everything else, and if you’re counting on the little guy on top to steer, you have something coming. So the work is building an environment that nudges the elephant, not writing a better protocol for the rider.

The client model that came out of that is a martial arts belt system. You don’t advance until you’re actually executing the current thing. Hard sell for high achievers at first. Then they make one small change, feel a real difference, and the trust compounds, because most people are used to doing a lot and getting very little back.

Going elite first, and why he doesn’t think of it as a strategy

I’ve been seeing more of this go to market pattern lately. Put the product on the best bodies in the sport, let the validation trickle down, treat media as a way to elevate the athletes rather than the other way around. Cole and Ben at Kila are running a version of it with insoles. I’ve been giving Hytro similar advice on blood flow restriction shorts.

When I asked Marc why he chose that model, he pushed back on the premise. It wasn’t a model. It was just who they were. Twenty five years in team sport meant that when he brought a product to an athlete, nobody was scanning for an angle.

The order is inverted from how this normally goes. Usually you sell, hit a revenue number, and then buy athletes. They started with the athletes. Paris was the first real test, and it had to clear NSF certification before he could even hand it to anyone.

The constraint that comes with it is funny. Some of the biggest clubs and athletes in the world are using the product and ProBio can’t say so. You might recognize the color of the drink. You won’t see the label.

He named two levers for building trust in a market where everyone is being pitched constantly: authenticity and vulnerability. The authenticity is the 25 years. The vulnerability is admitting that the Olympian also struggles to eat the right breakfast.

The thing that didn’t work is worth hearing too, because founders rarely say it out loud. Early on they paid for reach. Someone with broad distribution who was not bought in. It did nothing, and Marc’s read is that they had drifted outside their own values to chase a shortcut. Their instinct from the start had been to double down on people who already had a relationship with them, because those people will go the extra bit for you when you’re small.

I released an episode with Des Linden the same week we recorded this, and she described her partnership framework in almost identical terms. She doesn’t work with brands that hand her a script, because if she’s partnering with you she already knows the product. On the creator side we talk about that constantly. Turning down a check costs you something in the short term and builds the thing that actually compounds. It’s useful to hear the same logic from the brand side of the table. Two of our network shows, Brady Holmer at Run Long, Run Healthy and Amanda Brooks, work with ProBio for exactly that reason. Brady had been using it long before there was a deal, and Amanda is always looking for tools to help her athletes and readers.

The network was the distribution, not just the capital

The initial money came from a small group of investors out of Marc and Paul’s world in sport. The early team took roles for a fraction of what they were worth elsewhere, which Marc treats as a litmus test for who actually cares. He’s clear that you can’t run on that for long, because people have to feed their families.

The part I keep thinking about is what he said about asking. A practitioner spends an entire career giving to patients, clients, and athletes without asking for much back. So the first time he called and asked someone to try the product or pass it along, it landed differently, particularly in pro sport where those people get asked for things constantly. Decades of giving, one ask.

Where it goes next is open. There are a few lanes, raise or bootstrap, and he expects clarity in the coming months. I’ve worked at a bootstrapped company and at VC backed ones and the day to day feel is wildly different, which is the part of that decision people underrate.

I wrote more about fundraising in the endurance space, in case you’re curious.

On taking the leap

I’m about a year into my own version of this, and at the time I was writing a reflection piece about it, so I asked how he decided.

He pointed to a friend in the UK, Andy Kane, whose company Zero works with people who are successful in their domain and not fulfilled by it. The nice house, the happy kids, the top of the bell curve, and no longer any reason to get up for it. Marc’s version of the itch was that 20 years of 1:1 clinical work is fulfilling and also tiring, because you carry other people’s problems.

His actual trigger was finding the right person to build with. He describes it as knowing it when you feel it, and once Paul brought him the idea, you light the match.

Two lines I wrote down. The first is that you’re either moving toward the mountain or away from it, so you don’t need to hit the goal every day. The second is about his three kids. He wants to walk them to school and pick them up, because that time is gone when it’s gone.

My version is simpler. Freedom is owning your schedule. Time is the only asset you can’t get more of.

A word from our partners

Halo is our newest partner at Long Run Labs, and if you’ve been listening you already heard the long version, because Hilary Fenet, Halo’s founder, and Monica Devreese from rabbit came on the show on July 28th and got into exactly this. That one is written up here.

Halo is a hospitality platform built by runners for the way people actually travel to races. They work with brands, event organizers, and leagues to fix one of the most operationally painful parts of any event, which is lodging.

There’s a real overlap with what Marc is talking about in this episode. Most of what gets built in this industry is sizzle attached to a trend rather than an answer to a problem someone deals with every single time. Race lodging is a problem every single time. Runners spend three or four days in a destination and almost none of that time has anything to do with the event.

If you’re a brand, Halo turns a hotel into your home base at a race. A branded clubhouse where your athletes and your community actually stay together, the experiential piece done right, without you managing hotel logistics from scratch, plus better rates for your customers. If you're an event organizer or a league, Halo houses your people, locks in better rates, and layers in real community and perks, so the lodging becomes part of the experience instead of a headache.

And if you’re just heading to a race yourself this year, it’s worth a look. Same platform, better rates, real community, and perks from their brand partners, with a lot less hassle.

If any of that sounds like you, reach out to their team and tell them you heard about Halo on Long Run Labs, or send me a note and I’ll connect you.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Takeaways

• Compliance is the product metric. Vitamin D worked as a proxy. If you’re building anything in health, find the marker that tells you whether people are actually doing it, not whether they say they are.

• Availability beats optimization. The research separates elite from very good partly on who showed up the most. Fewest missed training days is a better success measure than almost anything you can put on a claims panel.

• What you leave out is positioning. Creatine, calcium, and iron are out of the blend on purpose, because dosing is personal and food absorbs better. Saying no to ingredients is how you signal that a practitioner built it.

• Elite first only works if it’s already who you are. Twenty five years with athletes meant nobody was looking for the angle. That’s not a channel strategy other founders can copy without the history behind it.

• Paying for reach that isn’t bought in does nothing. Their one real miss was a paid partner with distribution and no belief. The people with a relationship to you will go further for you when you’re small.

Where to find Marc

• ProBio: probionutrition.com

• Consulting and clinical work: doctorbubbs.com

New to For The Long Run? Start here.

For The Long Run is a podcast about the why underneath the miles. Since 2019 I’ve been sitting down with athletes, coaches, founders, and industry people to talk about what actually drives them, and Long Run Labs, the show this episode lives on, grew out of those conversations into a look at the business side of the sport.

If you’re new, start here: forthelong.run/start-here

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Marc Bubbs on Long Run Labs wherever you get your podcasts.

We also published a panel from BolderBoulder that I hosted for ProBio that Dr. Marc was on, with Jason Fitzgerald and Charlie Sweeney.

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Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

Before you read

This is written for founders building in endurance and outdoor specifically. The category has its own math, its own customer behavior, and its own capital landscape. If you are building enterprise SaaS, climate hardware, or anything outside this space, the frames here will partially translate but the specifics will not.

If you are building a running brand, a coaching platform, a piece of endurance tech, a recovery product, or anything else aimed at the runner, climber, hiker, or cyclist who actually shows up for it, keep reading.

Quick disclosure before we start: this essay names companies and funds I have financial relationships with, including as an investor and as an advisor. It is my personal commentary, not investment, legal, or financial advice, and it is not an offer or solicitation of any kind. It is written for founders, not prospective investors. Full disclosures at the bottom.

The TL;DR

• The endurance category is in a once-in-a-generation growth moment. Capital is flowing in. Most of it is the wrong shape for most of the companies it is chasing.

• Before you ask how much to raise, figure out which of the seven categories of endurance business you are in. Apparel raises differently than software. Events raise differently than media. The mistake most founders make is treating the whole space as one fundraising market.

• The cost of raising before you fully believe in the business is dilution at a price that reflects the version of you sitting in the meeting, not the version of you who has spent ten years building the thing.

• The investors who matter most for most founders in this category are operator-investors with small checks and large networks, not institutional funds with large checks and limited time.

• The companies that win in this category are elephants, not unicorns.* They own their distribution because the founder built community before product. The moat is the relationship between the founder and the audience, and that relationship cannot be bought, only built. In the age of AI, it is the only moat that cannot be copied.

The rest of this is the long version. Emphasis on long. You may want to read this in the Substack app or online; it will get cut off via email.

Why this conversation is happening at all

Running is in the middle of a rare moment. Strava participation curves are still climbing post-pandemic. Run clubs have become the third places of a generation that has aged out of bars. Trail and ultra have gone from niche subculture to global series. The shoe category has produced more new credible brands in the last five years than the prior fifteen. Norda, Nnormal, Speedland, Mount to Coast. KUIU sold for $800M. Strava acquired Runna. VF owns The North Face, Altra, and several others. Consolidation is happening at the top of the market while the bottom keeps generating new founders every quarter.

Per the State of Trail Running Report, 66% of U.S. trail runners earn more than $100K a year, 25% earn more than $200K, and 7% earn more than $300K. Recently, I spent a week in Tahoe, across Broken Arrow, TrailCon, and Western States. The numbers presented there held up the story. Per the SFIA’s 2025 Topline Report, trail running grew at an 8% annual rate over the five years through 2024, against roughly 0.5% for running overall. There were 16.1 million U.S. trail runners in 2024, up 1.3 million in a single year. The sport is not just adding people, it is keeping them, and the ones it keeps are racing more often. Acquisition plus retention plus rising frequency is the signature of a category that compounds, not one having a momentary spike. I wrote more about this flywheel recently.

The customer is real. The category is real. The result is a wave of capital looking for somewhere to go and not yet sophisticated about where in the map the money belongs. My inbox right now is mostly apparel pitches and tech plays trying to capitalize on the growth, and most of them are pitching the wrong investors.

That is the moment you are raising into. The opportunity is real, but so is the mismatch.

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Which category are you actually in?

Seth LaReau writes , one of the sharpest newsletters on the business of trail running. The most useful frame he gave me is the map. The trail running economy breaks into seven categories: apparel, footwear, nutrition, events, media, coaching, and technology. Each category has a different shape. Each shape attracts different capital. Treating the whole space as one investment thesis is the mistake most outside capital is making right now.

Technology and software is the holy grail. Highest stickiness, highest differentiation, compounding revenue, the kind of category where the math actually supports a venture return. Race timing platforms with data moats. AI tools that get smarter every event they process. Coaching software with retention curves that look like SaaS. That is where venture money is not just viable, it is often the right answer. And the mismatch runs both directions. If you are building software in this category and you are trying to bootstrap it out of principle, you may be making the same category error as the apparel founder taking a Series A, just pointed the other way. Some businesses need the capital to work at all.

Apparel and footwear are different animals. Lower margins, inventory cycles, customers who come back twice a year, brand-building timelines measured in decades rather than quarters. The category is real. The math just does not produce venture-scale outcomes for most of the businesses inside it.

The opportunity is barbell-shaped. There is real money to be made in the high-margin, high-differentiation tech and software end. There is real money to be made in the high-trust, patient-built apparel and brand end. The dangerous middle is the founder who tries to leverage the wrong capital structure onto the wrong category. That is where most of the bad outcomes come from.

The first question is not how much to raise. The first question is which category you are in, and what shape of capital that category supports.

Should you raise at all?

The honest answer is sometimes no.

Cole Zucker built Kila Running, an insole company with roughly fifty of the best ultra runners in the world racing in its product, without raising a dime. Tom Evans won UTMB in them. Doug Waters founded Terlingua Threads, a hot weather apparel brand made in Portugal, the same way. Both founders considered venture seriously. Both passed.

Cole came at it from the math. His framing: venture returns depend on a small number of portfolio companies producing something like a 50x outcome, and most authentic brands in this space are never going to be one of them. Which means a fund writing a check into one of those brands is underwriting a different company than the one the founder set out to build. Cole’s argument, and I have watched it play out more than once, is that the pressure to grow into that math is what breaks most of the brands you and I love.

Doug came at it from the inside. He worked on the VC side before he started Terlingua Threads. He saw what venture does to a company when the alignment between the founder and the fund is off. He decided he did not want to build that company. The fund needs a specific outcome on a specific timeline. The founder may want a different outcome on a different timeline. If those two things are not the same thing on day one, they will not become the same thing in year three. The misalignment compounds.

Worth being fair to the fund side here, because the mismatch is not anyone behaving badly. A fund has obligations of its own. The money is not the partner’s, it belongs to LPs with their own timelines and their own people to answer to, and the return profile is a structural requirement rather than a preference. A partner who writes a check into a company that cannot clear that bar has not been generous, they have made a bad allocation with someone else’s money. The misalignment costs the fund too. Which is why the good ones are disciplined about what they pass on, and why a pass is often the most useful thing a founder gets all year.

The mechanics behind that, briefly, because most founders never see them. A fund raises money from LPs and typically has about ten years to return it. Returns are concentrated: a small number of investments produce nearly all of the gains, and the rest return little or nothing. So each check has to be underwritten as though it could be one of the few that carries the fund, because the partner cannot know in advance which one it will be. That is the arithmetic behind the number Cole quoted. It is not a preference, and it is why a fund cannot get excited about a business that will reliably be worth $50M in a decade, even though that is a genuinely good outcome for the founder. The fund owns a slice of that, not the whole thing, so a $50M exit might return a few million against a fund that needs to return all of itself several times over. Good outcome, wrong shape. This is standard fund structure and any VC reading will confirm it.

A third version of this ran on the show recently. Monica DeVreese has been building rabbit for ten years, self-funded apart from three early angels (disclosure: rabbit is a consulting client of mine), while running a retail shop with her husband. Not a decision to avoid venture so much as a decade of proof that the other path works. I wrote that conversation up here.

There is also a third door that almost nobody in this category talks about, which is debt. Not venture debt. Institutional lines from credit unions and CDFIs, inventory financing, revenue-based facilities. For a brand with real orders and unit economics that work, a credit line can solve the same problem an equity round would solve, and you keep the company. A VC friend made this point when he read this, and he is right that for a lot of businesses in this space it is just as smart a play as an angel check. It does not put a clock on you. Worth an afternoon of research before you assume equity is the only shape capital comes in.

If you are reading this and you are not actually sure why you are raising, that is the question to answer before the question of how much.

What does raising actually feel like?

Most founders are not Cole or Doug. Most founders raise something. The question becomes what kind, from whom, and at what cost.

Kyle Siegel founded Raide. $20K on day one with two press placements and no ad spend. He refuses to discount, and word of mouth is his number one acquisition channel. He also made a mistake raising: he took money at too low a valuation because he could not yet see the company Raide was going to become. The investors got a great deal. Kyle paid for it in dilution he cannot undo. His line: if you are not the one believing your business can be big, do not start it.

Ryan Hurley founded Lagoon, a sleep and fitness brand built around personalized pillows for athletes. He raised from friends and family. He lost some of their money in the first year. He went months without paying himself. He spent time trying to sell to everyone before realizing the wedge was specific: position as the pillow for runners, find the niche, win it before expanding. He has been honest publicly about the line between perseverance and stupidity, and about the cost of starting a business when you do not yet know what you do not know.

Kyle’s lesson is about confidence and dilution: raise before you believe, and you price the company at the version of you in the room, not the one who spent ten years building it. Ryan’s lesson is about the human cost. Friends-and-family rounds are not free capital. They are a debt to people who love you, and that debt feels different than institutional debt when the first year goes sideways.

There is a mirror image of Kyle’s mistake, and right now it is the more common one. Taking too much. A round bigger than the business can absorb sets a bar the company then has to clear, and clearing it sets a higher one after that. Founders take the number because it is offered and because it feels like validation. Then they spend three years growing into a valuation that was never a description of the business, only of the moment they raised in. Meanwhile a company doing $2-10M a year with real margins and no board is a genuinely good life, and nobody writes posts about it. But if you can achieve that… congrats, you’ve won!

For those that do end up raising, it often ends up being a cycle that does not stop. You finish one round and you are already onto the next. I have seen this time and time again, and it eats an enormous amount of founder time.

If you are about to raise, sit with both lessons before the meeting. Defend the valuation that reflects the business you actually intend to build. Take the money from people you can stand to face if the first year is rough.

One more voice worth noting on this. Ross Mackay has done the consumer build twice, with Daring Foods and now Cadence, with investors like Naomi Osaka and Stephen Bartlett on the cap table. The line from his episode I keep returning to is about discipline around saying no. Each no costs something in the short term and preserves something in the long term. The founder building their second company knows the difference. The founder building their first one usually does not. The shortcut is to act like a second-time founder on your first raise. Say no more than feels comfortable. Capital is downstream of clarity. The single most useful framing I have collected on the show came from Randi Zuckerberg. She has been investing in this space longer than most of the people pitching her now have been paying attention to it. She built the Facebook Live feature, and has some very well-informed opinions on tech, Silicon Valley, and investing. In the outdoor space, she was an early angel in Runna, the AI coaching app Strava acquired. She has invested in Laurel (disclosure: I am an investor and advisor).

When I asked her how she actually evaluates an opportunity, she did not talk about TAM, CAC payback, or the deck. She said this: “I never invest in a company. I only invest in an entrepreneur. Because every company I have ever invested in has changed from what they originally pitched me.”

The pitch is a snapshot, and the operator is the focus.

Salomon Aiach gave me the operational version of the same idea. Salomon runs his own fund. Twenty-two portfolio companies. He came to running late, ran a 5:17 New York City Marathon and came back the next year and ran a 3:59. He talks about designing for obsession rather than designing for reach. In startups, he said, aim for a hundred super-fans before a thousand casuals. Let your why do the heavy lifting. When purpose is clear, energy shows up.

Megan Lightcap runs the creator fund at Slow Ventures. She invests at the earliest stage there is, sometimes a founder and a pitch deck and nothing else, and the first principle she organizes around is blunt: people matter, brands don’t. We are in the era of the individual. The thing you are betting on is the person at the helm, not the logo, because the person is what survives every pivot the company makes between the pitch and whatever it eventually becomes. It is the same idea Randi named, said from an institutional seat instead of an angel’s.

The second thing Megan said reframes how you should think about your own audience before you ever walk into a raise. Short the mass market. Eyeballs are not worth much anymore. Followers are low signal. The cost of making content has gone to zero, so reach is cheap and reach is noise. What is expensive, and what actually predicts an outcome, is depth: the person who buys the product, knows the founder’s story, shows up to the event, brings a friend. Bigger is not better; a hundred people who would follow you anywhere is a stronger signal than a hundred thousand who clicked once and forgot you.

Randi, Salomon, and Megan are describing one bet from three angles: back an operator with conviction, building for an audience that genuinely cares, clear enough on their why to survive the years between the pitch and whatever the company becomes.

While the deck is the ticket and the price of admission, the conversation is about you, your discipline, your audience, and whether the company you are building is one that compounds the right way over the kind of timelines that actually produce great outcomes. So when you walk into the room, the number to bring is not your follower count. It is your evidence of obsession.

What kind of investor should you take?

The most important shift happening in this space is the rise of the operator-investor: the person who writes a small check, brings a large network, and opens doors the founder could not open alone.

The archetype is someone like Eric Hinman, co-founder of MASA Chips and an angel in a long list of endurance and consumer brands. What makes him effective is not the size of his check. He brings a syndicate of other angels who write alongside him, and he gets embedded in the businesses he backs, distributing, evangelizing, and pulling in his network on behalf of the founders he believes in. The capital is the smallest part of what he adds.

That is the model I try to run my own version of. My checks are small; what I offer is the audience, the network, and the willingness to work. When Hytro came into my inbox through a referral, I signed on as an advisor (disclosure: I hold an advisor option grant) because I could be more useful to them than my check size suggests.

If you are a founder raising in this space, the operator-investors belong in your first round of meetings, before the institutional money. The check is smaller, but the alignment is higher and the help is more relevant. A handful of right-shaped angels is worth more than one wrong-shaped fund, and the right one moves the needle in ways a fund partner with twelve other portfolio companies cannot.

There is a cost on the founder side of all this that rarely comes up in the meeting. Hilary Fenet ran the capital markets business at a large hedge fund before leaving to build Halo. She traded a senior seat in finance for two years of building something on her own, and the gap between those two lives is… wide. (Disclosure: Halo is now a paid sponsor of Long Run Labs.)

There is also a version of institutional money that fits this category, and it is worth understanding what shape it takes, because it tells you what those funds are actually looking for. When I asked Megan where she sees venture actually participating in the outdoor space, she did not point at a single brand. She pointed at the ecosystem. Any one niche outdoor sport may be too small for a financial investor to underwrite on its own. But an ecosystem of them, with enough shared infrastructure on the back end and enough cross-pollination of the same customer between them, can clear a bar that a single brand cannot. The fund is not betting on one shoe company. It is betting on a network of niche communities that share plumbing and share an audience.

The ecosystem bet is one shape institutional capital takes in this category. There is a second, which is the depth-first bet: back what gets proven with the most demanding users first, on the theory that it travels outward from there. The clearest version of this I have heard is the space analogy: build it for the most extreme environment there is, and the materials end up in your kitchen twenty years later. Oura is the obvious recent case. It got adopted by athletes and quantified-self people first, earned its credibility there, and only later became a mainstream health product. That path was venture-funded, heavily, and it is a fair example of what the capital actually buys when the category supports it: the ability to scale hardware and distribution fast enough to own a category before someone else does. No amount of patience (or bootstrapping) gets you there. NEXT Ventures, where I do project work, invests in companies addressing the root causes of poor and disparate health outcomes through whole-person care, and the athlete is where a lot of that gets validated before it reaches everyone else. I am compensated by NEXT, so weigh that accordingly, and this is a description of how they think rather than a suggestion that you go pitch them.

Knowing which of those shapes you fit is more sophisticated than what most founders bring to a raise. If you are a single brand, know that you may be too small for a fund, and that the operator-angels are the better room for you. If you are building something that sits across multiple niche communities, or that could become the shared infrastructure underneath them, you may be exactly the shape a patient fund is looking for. Know which one you are before you take the meeting.

What kind of company actually wins?

The frame that has been working for me here is one I borrowed from Erica Wenger, who runs Park Rangers Capital and published an essay called Elephants Not Unicorns that I keep coming back to. Erica invited me to join as an LP back in 2024. I wasn’t ready then, and the thesis has held up better than I expected.

The unicorn is the venture archetype. Rare. Mythical. Engineered for a single outsized outcome that justifies a fund’s entire portfolio. Erica’s argument is that the next generation of great companies, especially in consumer, will look more like elephants. Large, slow-moving, herd-driven, hard to kill once they reach size. Venture math is built to hunt unicorns. This category mostly grows elephants, which is exactly why so much of the capital chasing it right now is the wrong shape.

The three traits Erica names are the right ones:

• Social attraction, by which she means the company draws members and long-term evangelists rather than buying users.

• Mission first, by which she means the mission does the visibility and branding work that paid acquisition does for a unicorn.

• Building in public, by which she means earning trust through transparency and storytelling rather than through PR cycles and product launches.

The underlying mechanism is that an elephant company owns its own distribution because the customers feel like members rather than transactions.

The endurance brands still standing in ten years will be elephants, and the funds chasing unicorns will mostly miss them. Three founders make the case better than any definition can.

Sid Baptista at PYNRS (disclosure: I am an investor and hold an advisor option grant) is the clearest current example. He built Pioneers Run Crew before he ever sold a shirt. Years of group runs in Dorchester. Empowering leaders. Creating space for runners who did not see themselves in the existing brands. When PYNRS launched in 2020, the community already trusted him. He partnered with Brooks, took creative control of the commercial, and sold through. He removed Black-owned from his marketing because he did not want anyone asking permission to buy his shorts. That is an elephant founder. Identity, community dedication, distribution that compounds.

Rachel Friedline at Wilderdog is another one. Ten years of bootstrapping an outdoor dog gear brand. Over five hundred thousand dollars donated to shelters along the way. Turned down investors because she did not want to dilute the mission.

Kyle Siegel at Raide is the same pattern in a different category. The brand is the product is the founder, and customers feel like part of the project.

I watched this hold up in person. Word of mouth is the engine, and the athletes wearing the product are the proof. That is not a growth hack you can buy. It is the slow, compounding kind of trust that looks like nothing on a CAC spreadsheet and like everything when you are standing in the crowd watching who people actually believe.

What ties them together isn’t just that they own their distribution. It’s that a competitor couldn’t buy their way to the same place. Give a better-funded brand the same product spec and twice the budget, and it still wouldn’t have the community, the founder, or the years of earned trust that produce the social attraction Erica names. That is the real moat: everything on the spec sheet is copyable, and the relationship between founder and audience is the one thing that isn’t.

There is a reason this matters more now than it did even two years ago, and the reason is AI. Megan’s sharpest line on it is that AI accelerates the defensible creators and washes away the rest. When the cost of making a product, a piece of content, a landing page, an entire brand aesthetic drops to almost nothing, the things that are easy to copy stop being worth anything. AI doesn’t threaten the elephant so much as raise the cost of becoming one. When anyone can generate the product, the content, and the launch in an afternoon, the only scarce thing left is the community you spent years building, the one that trusts you by name. The flood of cheap, machine-made everything makes authentic human connection more valuable, not less. Everything else just got easy to copy. This didn’t.

Here is how underappreciated this still is. At the biggest gathering of brands and operators this sport has (TrailCon), the way AI is changing how customers find and research the products they buy was not on a single panel. The industry most exposed to this shift has not yet named it out loud, and that is the tell. It means the founders who understand it are early, not late. The buying journey increasingly starts with a question typed into a model, not a search bar, and what those models say about your brand is becoming as important as what your own website says. Most of the category does not yet know this race has started. But you do, since you read my Centium AI study, right?

If you are raising, ask yourself honestly. Are you building an elephant? Could a better-funded competitor replicate what you have if they had 18 months and $10M? If the answer is yes, you have a product, not a company. If the answer is no, and the reason is that you have spent years building a community that trusts you specifically, you have a company worth raising for.

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What I would tell you if you sat down across from me

If you are raising right now in this space, six things.

• Figure out which category you’re in. The seven-category map is the whole ballgame, and the space is not one fundraising market.

• Decide what you’re optimizing for before you take the meeting. If you want a category-defining brand built on patient compounding, don’t pitch a fund whose model needs an outcome your business was never built to produce. The mismatch won’t show up in the meeting. It shows up in year three.

• Don’t raise before you believe in the business. Kyle’s lesson. And if you’re raising from friends and family, take the money from people you can face if the first year goes sideways.

• Take the meeting with the operator-angels before the institutional money. Smaller check, higher alignment, more relevant help, and the right one often brings a syndicate that makes the effective check bigger than it looks.

• If venture is the fit, find the funds that have done this category and have the patience it demands. Not the ones marketing hardest, the ones with the relationships.

• Build the elephant before you take the capital. Community before product, founder-market fit before fundraise, distribution before scale. The raise accelerates what’s already true. It doesn’t create what isn’t. In a world where AI made everything else cheap to copy, the community is the one part a better-funded competitor can’t buy past.

The honest version

There is a story being told right now that endurance and outdoor is having a moment, that capital is flowing in, that the brands are about to scale, that the next Patagonia is being built. Some of that is true. A lot of it is the same story that gets told about every category right before a wave of bad capital washes through and leaves a trail of broken brands and disillusioned founders. This is the warning that Ian MacGregor (CEO of Skratch) flagged at TrailCon.

The brands that are still here in ten years are the ones that picked the right capital partners early, that knew what they were optimizing for, that believed in themselves enough to defend their own valuation, that owned their distribution because they earned it, and that did not let the model become more important than the customer.

If you are building one of those brands, the room you want to be in is smaller than you think, the capital you want to take is more patient than you think, and the operators you want to be sitting next to are the ones who have figured out what they actually want before the term sheet hits the table.

That is the room I am trying to be in. If you are building toward it too, here is the actual ask.

If you are raising right now, or about to, send me what you are working on. A sentence on what you are building, who it is for, and where you are in the process is enough to start. Founders have reached me both ways, through people I know and through cold emails from people who heard themselves in an episode. The cold email works more often than you would think.

One thing to know going in, because the whole point of this essay is that you should know what you are walking into before the meeting. I am an operator-investor, and I have an advisory relationship with a venture fund, disclosed below. I am not a broker. I do help companies I already advise or have invested in get in front of people I know, but I am not paid to do it. If I read what you send and think you would hit it off with someone in my network, I may offer to make an introduction. What you do from there is between you and them. I am not paid to send you anywhere, and any introduction I make is one I would make whether or not it went anywhere. I do not receive transaction-based compensation in connection with any investment or introduction. I do not negotiate terms, advise on deal structure or valuation, handle investor funds, or participate in any offering.

What did you learn? What did I miss? What else would you add?

Leave a comment

Reminder: nothing in this essay is investment advice or an offer or solicitation of any kind. See the full disclosures at the bottom.

Episodes referenced:

• Seth LaReau, Trailwaves, on the trail running investment thesis. Apple · Spotify

• Cole Zucker, Kila Running, on bootstrapping and venture math. Apple · Spotify

• Doug Waters, Terlingua Threads, on the alignment problem. Apple · Spotify

• Kyle Siegel, Raide, on the fundraising mistake that still stings. Apple · Spotify

• Ryan Hurley, Lagoon, on friends-and-family rounds and finding the niche. Apple · Spotify

• Ross Mackay, Cadence, on building a second brand and the discipline of no. Apple · Spotify

• Randi Zuckerberg on investing in the entrepreneur. Apple · Spotify

• Salomon Aiach on operational discipline and super-fans before casuals. Apple · Spotify

• Sid Baptista, PYNRS, on community before product. Apple · Spotify

• Rachel Friedline, Wilderdog, on bootstrapping for ten years. Apple · Spotify

• Megan Lightcap, SLOW Ventures, on why the creator is the company. Apple · Spotify

• Monica DeVreese (rabbit), Hilary Fenet (Halo), on community and travel. Apple · Spotify

*Recommended reading: Erica Wenger’s Elephants Not Unicorns at Park Rangers Capital.

Disclosures: This essay names companies and funds I have financial relationships with, and you should weigh what I say about them accordingly. I am an investor and advisor in Laurel and a new advisor in Hytro, where I hold an advisor option grant. I hold an advisor option grant in PYNRS and invested in their crowdfunding round. Halo is a paid sponsor of Long Run Labs. rabbit is a consulting client. I write checks personally, not as a fund. I advise NEXT Ventures on a paid project basis. I have no financial relationship with Park Rangers and am not an LP in the fund.

This essay is my personal commentary and opinion. It is for general information. It is not investment, legal, or financial advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or to invest in any company or fund. It is not an offer or solicitation of any kind. This is written for founders, not prospective investors. Do your own diligence and talk to your own advisors before making any investment decision.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

They are also, statistically, most of the sport. They buy the shorts, book the flights, pay the entries, and fund the brands that spend their marketing budgets on the front of the field. I sat down in Lake Tahoe with two founders who have built their entire businesses around that runner, and who have a partnership with each other because of it.

One disclosure before we get into it. This conversation was recorded a few weeks before there was any business between us. Since then Hilary and the team at Halo have come on as a partner of the show, and that happened because of conversations exactly like this one, not the other way around. You’ll hear a proper word from Halo starting next week. Today the conversation stands on its own. I’m also now working with rabbit on a separate project, which I’m sure I’ll write about in the future too!

Listen to the episode

🎧 Listen on Spotify · Listen on Apple Podcasts · Watch on YouTube

Guest snapshot

Who: Monica DeVreese, CEO and co-founder of rabbit

Where: Santa Barbara, CA

Day job: Running ten years of a self-funded apparel brand, plus Santa Barbara Running, the shop she and her husband own

Runner notes: Was in Tahoe to crew and pace her training partner at Western States

Who: Hilary Fenet, founder and CEO of Halo

Where: New York, NY

Day job: Building the booking and community layer for race travel, two years in, still not taking a salary

Runner notes: Picked up trail running in Cape Town in 2019, then spent years traveling to races out of a city with almost no trail scene

Who are Monica and Hilary?

Monica’s path is the one a lot of people in this industry recognize. Team sports, then running, then a career inside the brands, then a running shop with her husband. Standing in all three positions at once, as consumer, as brand operator, as retailer, is what surfaced the gaps. rabbit came out of those gaps, and the name is the thesis: in a race, the rabbit is the pace setter, the one who gives up their own result for the benefit of everyone behind them. Ten years in, the company is still self-funded apart from three early angels.

Hilary came at it from the other direction. She was an investor at a large hedge fund running the capital markets business, mostly consumer and tech, and she got into trail running while living in Cape Town. When she moved to New York she started traveling to races and kept hitting the same wall: a GPX file open next to Airbnb next to booking.com, trying to work out which side of a mountain to sleep on. Then she’d arrive to find every runner she wanted to meet scattered across a dozen different hotels. Over one Christmas holiday her sister asked why she didn’t just start a company. She took a sheet of yellow construction paper off her niece’s art table, disappeared for an afternoon, and wrote the plan.

Here’s what stuck with me.

The middle of the pack is not a segment, it’s the business

I asked Monica directly why so many brands miss that group when the group is the market. Her answer was that the mid-packer is not the shiny object. Attention goes where the screen goes, and the screen is full of elites and creators.

She was blunt about who rabbit actually sells to. The majority of their consumer is that person. The clubhouse concept exists for that person. And Hilary’s observation from the outside was that plenty of brands are running similar hospitality plays this year, they’re just running them for influencers and sponsored athletes.

There’s a version of this that reads as charity and a version that reads as math. This is the math version.

The hotel was sitting there the whole time

Halo’s insight is almost annoying in hindsight. A traveling runner spends three or four days in a destination. They spend a couple of hours at the expo, one hour at a shakeout, and the rest of the time in a hotel that has nothing to do with the race.

So Halo turns the hotel into the venue. Branded booking, then swag at check in, an early breakfast that exists before a 6am start, a mixer, a shakeout from the lobby, pre-race strategy calls so people know each other before they arrive. rabbit layers its own personality on top of that: hoppy hours, post-race stretching, poster stamping, a croissant making class at the Chamonix clubhouse (and perhaps something else I’ll be cohosting!), and in New York they’re working on bringing in an author to run a writing workshop for the weekend.

I asked Hilary why nobody had done this. Her answer was unglamorous and probably correct. The back end of hotel booking is antiquated, the logistics are miserable, and brands who try a version of it once usually decide never again. What you get instead is a “recommended hotel” link, which is proximity, not hospitality.

Monica’s framing of what Halo adds for a brand going somewhere new was the practical one. For UTMB, rabbit has never operated in Chamonix. Halo’s answer to “where should the clubhouse be” is worth more than the software.

The difference between activation and noise

I’ve said on the show before that you can walk down Newbury Street during Boston Marathon weekend, swap the logos between activations, and nothing changes. Everyone is running a shakeout. The Mount to Coast Double Boston worked because no other brand could have credibly done it.

Monica said this is a constant internal conversation at rabbit. Her answer for what makes it uniquely theirs isn’t a tactic, it’s a posture: we show up as your friend, we care about you, come in the door. The quirky stuff follows from that. Bracelet making isn’t novel anymore, but as she put it, ACG isn’t doing what rabbit is doing.

Hilary, who has no marketing background and says so, made the cleanest business case for it. She thinks about lifetime value. An in real life memory attached to a brand converts differently than an impression on a screen, and the example she reached for was ACG’s vertical kilometer at UTMB last year: race to the chapel, coffee at the top, demo their shoes, PR on the descent, friends everywhere. She still hasn’t bought anything. She still remembers all of it.

What a million dollars at Broken Arrow actually buys

I ran the math on ACG’s Broken Arrow weekend and landed somewhere near a million dollars. Staff, lodging, race sponsorship, the prize purse, the branding, the tram, buying out Coffee Bar and Slot Bar, the open bar.

Both of them thought it was good for the sport. Monica’s honest first reaction was competitive frustration, which she volunteered without being asked. Then she met Mark, the GM for North America, talked with him several times, and came away thinking he understands the responsibility of the position. I had the identical experience meeting him and came away surprised in the same direction. Hilary’s read was that the details were excellent, the elite experience was well funded, and the rest of us weren’t forgotten, and that the real effect is pressure on Hoka and On to raise their own game.

The harder question came from Ian at Skratch on a panel earlier in the week. Suppose a brand has allocated a few hundred million to trail and draws it down across races, athletes, and media. Suppose it runs out, or the experiment ends. Nike Trail has stepped in and stepped back out before. Does that capital raise the floor of the sport permanently, or does the floor fall out with it?

Neither of them had a clean answer, which felt like the honest response. Monica pushed back on the framing a little by pointing at the events with long tenured sponsors, Javelina among them, where rabbit has been the apparel sponsor for seven years and Hoka the footwear sponsor. And a stat that circulated at TrailCon, that the average US race has around 60 participants, got skeptical treatment from both of them. It seems like a long tail (median) being reported as an average.

Two founders, two answers on capital

Monica is a self-described spreadsheet person who lives and dies by cash flow. rabbit has never done a real raise. She’ll acknowledge the cost of that openly: they control their own destiny and grow at their own rate, and they may be leaving opportunities on the table. What she can’t do is run a six figure monthly burn. Her definition of success came out as three things, in this order: consumers who love the brand, a company that lasts a long time, and employees whose careers get better for having worked there.

Hilary is running a software business into a very large travel market, so the calculus differs. She bootstrapped first, still doesn’t pay herself, and raised from angels who are mostly trail running friends who have exited businesses. Her filter has a name: FLO, fucking legends only. I’m going to use that in the future. Be picky about the cap table.

Her best tactical advice for founders considering a fund was the one I hadn’t heard framed this way. Look at the fund’s portfolio and ask whether those companies could be your customers. If yes, you’re buying capital and distribution with the same check. Then call other portfolio CEOs before you sign, since the roster is usually published on the fund’s own site.

The mindset piece came from her advisor Courtney Dauwalter, who she says never talks business with her, only mindset. During a grinding seed process, the advice was to think in tiny grains of sand. Stack small things until they’re a mountain, rather than staring up at the mountain. And there’s the Mark Cuban line I brought up from Erica Wenger’s Trailblazers podcast: raising money is not a measure of success; it’s an obligation.

The financing conversation we don’t have enough

The part of this I want to flag for founders is that the whole discussion of “bootstrap or raise” skips most of the actual options. In about four minutes the three of us listed bank debt, convertible notes, pre-orders, and C2FO on the wholesale side, where you concede a point or two of discount to get paid early by a large retailer and close the inventory cash gap.

The reference points are worth chasing down. Shoe Dog is a bank debt story from before growth capital existed. Todd Graves at Raising Cane’s went a similar route and still owns most of it. And the Costco cash conversion cycle, which Acquired covers well, is a business where suppliers effectively float the company’s working capital.

Running is the wedge, travel is the market

Halo is already working in college sports and getting pulled toward golf. Hilary’s stated ambition is the booking.com and Expedia tier of the travel market, approached through sports, with running as the proof point.

Which brought us to a thread I keep pulling on. I have a network of 35 shows, and nobody travels more than runners. So why are airlines and hotels not in running media and running events? Hilary’s answer was market size, that running is still small next to what those advertisers usually buy. But London just announced 100,000 entrants, and as she pointed out, every one of those runners brings people. The traveling party is several times the field.

Takeaways

• The mid-packer is the P&L. rabbit’s majority customer is the runner nobody is marketing to. Brands chase the podium because the podium is what looks good on a screen.

• Lodging is unclaimed inventory. Runners spend three or four days in a destination and most of it in a hotel with no relationship to the event. That’s the largest block of unprogrammed attention at any race.

• Differentiation is a posture, not a tactic. Everyone can run a shakeout. Only rabbit can do the thing that reads as rabbit, which is why Monica frames it as showing up as your friend.

• Big brand capital is a real question, not a talking point. Ian at Skratch’s version is the right one to hold onto: does the money permanently raise the floor of the sport, or does the floor leave when the money does?

• Bootstrap first, then be ruthless about the cap table. FLO. And check whether a fund’s portfolio companies could become your customers before you take the check.

Where to find Monica and Hilary

• Monica on LinkedIn · rabbit at runinrabbit.com

• Hilary on LinkedIn · Halo at poweredbyhalo.com

• Clubhouses this season: Chamonix for UTMB, the Walker Hotel for New York, the Arlo for Chicago.

A word on our partners

The Huddle. Building a business is isolating. You’re making decisions daily that most people in your life don’t fully understand, and surface-level networking rarely helps. What my co-founders Jason Fitzgerald, Ross Yellin, and I built at The Huddle is different: a peer advisory community for early-stage founders who want real accountability and real conversation. Small cohorts, cross-industry, monthly sessions. Someone in the room will tell you the thing you actually need to hear. In-person in Boulder, virtual cohorts open anywhere. Go to findmyhuddle.com and fill out the application.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

Peaksware, the parent company of TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic, sits in Louisville, about fifteen minutes from my front door. So when Garmin announced today that it had acquired both platforms, the news landed close to home, pretty literally.

Most of the coverage is reading it the obvious way. Garmin consolidates the data, Garmin users get one ecosystem, everything syncs in one place. That’s real, and it’s also the least interesting thing about the deal.

The numbers are the easy part

You can find the scale in about ten seconds. Garmin runs a business north of $7 billion in revenue, with more than 23,000 employees across 100-plus offices and roughly 40 million people on Garmin Connect. I’ve spent a decade in meetings with their team and they’ve mostly been focused on selling hardware. They release 80+ new products per year. The questions to ask are what Garmin gets that it couldn’t build, and who benefits first.

Garmin was already building software

One narrative is worth tossing out up front. This is not a hardware company that has fully ignored software and suddenly discovered it. Garmin launched Connect+ in March 2025, its first paid subscription tier, built around the AI insights it calls Active Intelligence, and it has told investors that new advanced features will live behind that paywall. So the real story is acceleration. Garmin had already started building the software and subscription layer, and TrainingPeaks lets it skip the decade of trust the coaching world would otherwise make it earn from scratch, a brand as big as Garmin might earn that trust faster than most, but software has never been its strength, which is a big part of why buying the coaching standard beats building it.

And this is act two of a familiar playbook. Garmin acquired Firstbeat Analytics, the Finnish company whose algorithms turn raw heartbeats into Training Status, Body Battery, and VO2 max, back in 2020. That deal gave Garmin the engine behind the metrics on your watch. TrainingPeaks gives it the fuel: structured, human-graded training data that can make those metrics sharper and, before long, train a model on how real coaching is actually done.

The primary customer is the coach

TrainingPeaks’ primary customer has never been the athlete. It is the coach. Athletes come and go. The coach is the one paying, building a business, and staying for years.

What the acquisition hands those coaches is distribution. A coaching business on TrainingPeaks now sits one step away from an ecosystem of roughly 40 million Garmin Connect users, and it can reach them no matter what the athlete straps to their wrist. The coaches who lean into that, rather than brace against it, are the ones positioned to grow, and they can do it with clients on any brand of watch.

This isn’t only my read. The people I've talked to who are close to the deal land in the same place. My bet in endurance has always been that the durable value lives in the small, high-trust nodes and the infrastructure underneath them, well ahead of raw reach or another apparel logo. The coach is the highest-trust node in the sport. Garmin just bought the layer those relationships run on.

Why “device agnostic” is credible this time

Corrine Malcolm, a trail running coach and athlete who has been on TrainingPeaks for a decade, asked me this today, knowing I have a few friends and contacts at both organizations: “Have you heard anything on whether this changes anything for coaches using a platform that’s historically been hardware agnostic? Otherwise Final Surge is going to get a nice bump.” She figures that concern will be commonly felt, and I think she’s right that it’s the first thing most coaches will reach for.

Here is why I don’t think it comes to pass. The economics line up with staying open. TrainingPeaks has spent 26 years integrating with nearly every device on the market, and there is a hard financial reason to expect that to continue.

The logic is simple. The coach marketplace is only worth what Garmin paid if it stays large, and it only stays large if a coach can train a client on a Coros, a Wahoo, a Polar, or an Apple Watch without friction. Wall it off to Garmin devices and you shrink the thing you just bought. Open is the profitable choice here, which is a better guarantee than goodwill.

The item to watch is subtler than the open-versus-walled question. It is whether Garmin-device athletes slowly get features the rest do not, the way Connect+ already gates the good stuff. Alignment today does not guarantee alignment once someone inside the building models the subscription upside.

Not every coach will cheer

Not every coach is going to read this as good news, and it would be naive to pretend otherwise.

Troy Meadows, a coach who runs his business on TrainingPeaks, is taking a wait-and-see line, and his caution is about integration rather than devices. His question is whether TrainingPeaks stays “siloed and allowed to operate on their own” with Garmin’s operational and legal muscle folded in, or whether “Garmin is gonna gut the team in a year and run the show from corporate.” He has watched this play out before: what an acquirer promises at the table to get a deal signed, he notes, is usually not how things shake out for the acquired team a year or two later.

That is the real uncertainty, more than the device question. Deal-table language is cheap, and the truth tends to show up in year two, in whether Garmin treats TrainingPeaks as an asset to protect or a team to absorb. Depending on a single large owner is a genuine risk, and the honest version of this story holds both outcomes at once: more distribution and more dependence, arriving together.

The early signals point the gentler way. Garmin is keeping TrainingPeaks' president, Lee Gerakos, in charge of the platform, and co-founder Dirk Friel is staying on as a strategic adviser. History matches this trend too: the last time Garmin made an acquisition like this, it left the target largely intact, and Firstbeat still runs out of Finland, where Garmin later opened a dedicated lab for it. Both point toward the optimistic case. Keeping leadership in place on announcement day is standard, and a 120-person platform with a coaching community attached is a harder thing to leave alone than an analytics team. For a variety of reasons, I hope the optimistic case is reality; I have a lot of friends at TrainingPeaks and they’ve done a fair amount of business with the Long Run Labs Network too.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum

Garmin is not the only one consolidating. Across 2025, Strava bought its way into the same layer, acquiring the running app Runna in April and the cycling app The Breakaway in May, then bolting AI training plans onto their app, which has more than 150 million users.

The two plays point at different customers, which is what makes the contrast worth drawing. Strava’s bet is that a good-enough algorithm can stand in for a coach. TrainingPeaks is making the opposite bet, that the human coach is the product and the software’s job is to make them stronger. Same category, two very different theories of where the value lives.

There’s a data dimension underneath that split, and it’s the one that matters most. Garmin and Strava both hold activity files at a scale nobody else can match, but activity only tells you what an athlete did, never what they were told to do or by whom. TrainingPeaks has the missing half. For 26 years, across every brand of watch and head unit, it has logged what a qualified coach prescribed, whether the athlete actually completed the session, and what they did in the weeks that followed. As the5krunner argued in a sharp breakdown of the deal, that gap is the whole game: activity data alone can teach a model what athletes did, while the TrainingPeaks archive can teach it what a coach chose and whether the choice worked. It is also the raw material for fixing the training-status analytics Garmin users love to hate, the ones that hand you an “Unproductive” verdict with no explanation. Garmin could buy that capability once, from one company, and now it has. The real prize is the data set, not the model.

For everyone else, the ground just shifted. Hardware-and-software rivals like Coros and Wahoo now compete against a Garmin that owns the sport’s coaching standard. And the platform-neutral independents, the ones like TrainerRoad, Intervals.icu, and Final Surge, get more interesting, not less. Corrine’s instinct points right at it: if this changes for coaches, the neutral option is suddenly worth more, precisely because the giants are buying up everything around it.

Who the AI coach is really for

Here is the flip side of the distribution upside, and it’s the part coaches should sit with. That archive, the most valuable thing Garmin just bought, was built session by session by the coaches themselves. They are TrainingPeaks’ primary customer and, at the same time, the people generating the exact data Garmin would need to build coaching software of its own.

So an AI coach of some kind is a safe bet, trained on the accumulated judgment of human ones. The lazy version of this story ends with the machine replacing the humans, and I wouldn’t bet on that story. What an AI coach actually does is split the market. Athletes who were never going to hire a person, the self-coached and the never-coached, get a real option for the first time, which grows the top of the funnel more than it threatens anyone. And perhaps it’s even a pipeline from AI coach to human coach, for those who get a taste of coaching for the first time and want more. Athletes who want a human, for the accountability, the trust, and the read on a life that never shows up in the data, still choose one. The model reaches the unserved and the low end. The relationship at the core of good coaching it mostly leaves alone.

That is better news for coaches than the doom and gloom version, but it is not all good news. The tier most exposed is the entry-level human coach, whose offer sits closest to what a decent algorithm can now do cheaply, and the thing training that algorithm is the work those very coaches uploaded. How (and if) Garmin prices and positions an AI tier, whether it sits beneath the human coaches or leans on them, is what decides whether this grows the pie or squeezes the bottom of it.

There’s also a consent question hiding in here. That data was created inside coaching relationships, not as training fodder for a model, and whether anyone asks the coaches and athletes who made it is the sort of thing that has become a real fight in other creative fields. Endurance won’t be immune.

TrainingPeaks’ leadership would put all of this more warmly. In announcing the deal, co-founder Dirk Friel called it a doubling down on the company’s founding mission of empowering human coaches. I think that can be true and still incomplete, since the same data that helps a human coach can also train the tier that undercuts the cheapest of them. So if you coach for a living, the question isn’t whether the machine takes your job. It’s whether you’re doing the part of it a machine can’t. It’s the art side of the art and science of coaching.

The input Garmin still needs

Step back and look at what Garmin is assembling. Passive capture around the clock through Cirqa, the screen-free band it just launched this week to compete with Whoop and others. Structured prescription and analysis through TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. An AI insight layer through Connect+. Measure, prescribe, analyze, adapt. It is close to a closed loop, and the piece still missing is the why underneath the physiology. And I can’t wait for you to read the next few words and have an a-ha moment too.

That piece is blood. Here is the version I’ve wanted to see built for years. Imagine the platform watches your data over weeks, not days. Your sleep quality has been sliding, or your easy runs keep drifting harder with your heart rate creeping up at paces that used to feel simple, or you come apart every time you go train at altitude. Instead of leaving you to guess, the system says this might be worth a blood test. Then it lets you order one in a click and, the harder part, tells you what the results mean for your training.

The signals map onto real markers. Sliding sleep can trace back to something nutritional like low vitamin D or magnesium, or to load, stress, and under-fueling, and a panel that looks at cortisol, lipids, and hormones including testosterone can point toward which. Easy efforts turning heavy is a classic under-fueling or iron story. Coming apart at altitude sends you straight to iron and ferritin, the oxygen-carrying markers. None of this replaces a doctor, but as a directional nudge inside a training platform it is useful.

I pitched a version of this to TrainingPeaks years ago. The opportunity wasn’t there yet. It is now, or it’s close. And the part people underrate is what it does for coaches: a blood-driven prompt gives a coach one more reason their athletes live on the platform, and one more lever in the relationship. The ecosystem unlock runs both directions, more athletes discovering coaches, and more reasons for everyone to stay.

This isn’t a wild guess. WHOOP and Oura have already bolted consumer blood testing onto their ecosystems, both under $200, and Ultrahuman is doing the same. Garmin is the conspicuous holdout among the big wearable players. I wrote a whole piece on where this blood-and-wearables convergence is heading, in The New Blood Era; the short version is that testing is commoditizing and the value is moving to interpretation, which is exactly the layer Garmin would be buying.

So when I look at Garmin’s next move, I don’t see another sensor. The capture side is commoditizing fast, with Fitbit Air, Polar Loop, and Amazfit all crowding the screen-free category Cirqa just entered. Interpretation is where the value sits now, and it is still hard to do well. If Garmin keeps following the loop it is building, the blood-testing and interpretation layer is the category it reaches for next. I won’t name targets, and I don’t have to. Anyone who has looked at this space knows the short list.

What I’ll be watching

So no. This was never about consolidating your data into one tidy place, though I do appreciate when that happens. Garmin bought your coach’s distribution, a 26-year head start on trust it could not have manufactured, and the richest labeled training set in endurance sport. Whether that turns into something coaches love or something they tolerate depends on choices Garmin has not made public yet.

What do you think? I’m curious to hear what you agree or disagree with!

Leave a comment

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

Not of one show, but of the two I host. 439 episodes of For The Long Run, which I launched back in 2019, plus 61 episodes of Long Run Labs, which is just over a year old. Add them up and this conversation with Alex is number 500.

Alex is the kind of person this show exists for: someone who has quietly touched a lot of the endurance and outdoor world without ever being the loudest voice in the room, and who thinks in systems, communities, and the long game.

Listen to the episode

🎧 Listen on Spotify · Listen on Apple Podcasts · Watch on YouTube

Guest snapshot

Who: Alex Maier, President of Onwater

Where: The mouth of the Columbia River Gorge, southwest Washington

Day job: Building the operating system for water-based recreation, home to the Onwater Fish and Paddleways apps. Before this: nearly five years at Nike, regional work with Porsche and Audi, and a stint at onX. Thirteen years as a professional photographer before any of it.

Who is Alex Maier?

Alex is a self-described generalist, and he means it as a compliment. He grew up an only child in Corbett, Oregon, the kind of small town where the nearest neighbor was two miles away and his parents handed him a machete and some bailing twine at seven and said have fun. He spent 13 years as a professional photographer, learned to run a business and build his own websites along the way, and then strung together a career most people would do anything for one chapter of: nearly five years at Nike, regional work with Porsche and Audi, a stint at onX, and for the last three years, President of Onwater, the company building the operating system for water-based recreation, home to the Onwater Fish and Paddleways apps.

He’s a gear head, a curious dabbler, and a genuinely sharp operator. Here’s what stuck with me.

Generalists, specialists, and the AI unlock

Alex’s take on the generalist-versus-specialist debate is the best version I’ve heard: it isn’t about being a jack of all trades, it’s about curiosity over mastery. When something is new to him, he goes deep and becomes the temporary specialist, then moves on. He credited some of that wiring to neurodivergence, which landed for me. I have ADHD, and the way AI has let me build the infrastructure my brain can’t hold (the dashboards, the systems, the context it remembers so I don’t have to) has been one of the biggest professional unlocks of my career. Alex framed it perfectly: embrace how you’re wired, then use the tools to amplify it rather than fight it.

Product-led growth, explained without the jargon

Alex runs Onwater on a product-led growth thesis, and he broke it into two halves worth stealing:

• Internal: how the product itself, absent of any marketing, gets one user to bring in the next. Network effects and virality: you spot a fish, you drop a pin, you send it to your buddies, and now they’re downloading the app. Think onX in an elk camp, or Asana spreading through a company one team at a time.

• External: how using the product builds enough affinity that you’re compelled to tell someone about it. Jon, you have to use this water bottle.

His guidance to the founders he mentors: if you’ve truly built something innovative, invest in product-led growth and network effects before you reach for a big brand campaign. Marketing-led growth has its place. His example was Dude Wipes, an established product differentiated by persona and messaging. But the order matters.

Consumer insights as the soul of the business

If there was a thesis running underneath the whole conversation, it was this: the voice of the customer is the soul of everything a company does. And the most tactical thing Alex shared was how Onwater handles creators and beta testers.

Before anyone promotes their product, Alex brings them behind the curtain: product feedback first, promotion second. It sharpens the point of view, strips out internal bias, and gives the creator real buy-in. I’ve lived the flip side of this: I ran a seeding and product feedback campaign with Amazfit where two rounds of creator feedback came back nearly identical to what the product team had been telling leadership for months. They just finally had the data to back the opinion. Alex’s antidote to the loudest-voice-in-the-room problem is the best I’ve heard: when someone has conviction, don’t argue. Say “great, go test it, and bring the data back.” They either prove it, disprove it, or reveal they were full of hot air.

Gate-openers, not gatekeepers

This is where the conversation got bigger than business. Alex is passionate about the gatekeeping baked into outdoor sports: the fly shop that won’t give you the time of day if you don’t look the part, the whitewater crowd side-eyeing the wrong brand on your PFD. His point, borrowed from a mentor on the American Fly Fishing Trade Association board: every barrier to entry, whether physical, mental, racial, or socioeconomic, means fewer people falling in love with a place. And people who fall in love with a place are the ones who protect it. Fewer gate-openers means fewer stewards, less conservation, less access for the next person in.

We wandered into politics from there, and Alex’s framing on finding common ground across user groups and party lines was a masterclass in redirection: what must be true for both of us to be happy? Clean, accessible water, it turns out, is a pretty good place to start. Or as I put it, badly: bridges, not walls. Just no dams. The fish don’t like dams.

AI, data, and the return of earned media

We closed on AI, and Alex didn’t flinch from the tensions, including the ironic predicament of being a water recreation company in the age of water-hungry data centers (his reminder: check how many gallons go into a pair of jeans or a beef burger before you panic about your ChatGPT prompts). But the optimistic stuff was the good stuff. Onwater holds a patent on estimating a fish’s length, weight, and species from a photo, turning millions of anglers into a conservation data source that beats shocking rivers and floating fish to the surface. And their Angler and Paddler Intelligence features point you toward where to go and what to know without spot-burning the exact rock, fly, and time.

If you’ve followed the show, you know I’ve become slightly (ok, very) obsessed with what happens when you feed these models rich, personal context. I told Alex about handing Claude ten-plus years of my blood work, seven years of training logs, and my full Strava history, and the patterns it surfaced that I’d never seen. As Alex, and many others have put it, data is the new oil. The differentiator between models is collapsing toward the context and the data you bring to them. And for brands, that increasingly means earned media and PR are what shape how the models talk about you. (If you missed my episode with Michael from Centium AI on the 2,000-prompt outdoor study, go back and listen. It’s the perfect companion to this one.)

A word on Popfly

This episode of Long Run Labs is brought to you in partnership with Popfly, who have been supporting the show, and Second Nature, since earlier this year. So let me lead with that disclaimer, and then tell you why I actually care about them.

I met Maren at Outdoor Media Summit last fall (who else is headed to Asheville in September??) and Taylor, their CEO, at an event in Denver a few months later. Then I did the thing I always do before I’ll work with anyone: I got on the platform and used it myself, as a creator. I came away impressed with the infrastructure, and if you’ve listened to me for more than five minutes, you know infrastructure and measurement are the hill I’ll die on. Half the brand partnerships I see feel good but never get measured, and “the vibes are good” only carries a program so far. Popfly is one of the few tools I’ve found that’s actually built to set both sides up to succeed.

Alex put it better than I could, from the operator’s seat. Popfly, he said, “rooted it in authenticity” and picked its lane, becoming the specialists you actually want in your corner. What drew him in most: they don’t treat creators as a content factory or a time-bound transaction. They act as a matchmaker, and the goal is for a real relationship to blossom from there. Onwater brings Popfly creators into beta testing, into regional specialty-retail activations, into river cleanups and casting clinics, not just “here’s a couple hundred bucks, go post this.” With a roster of roughly 10,000 creators, it lets a small, scrappy marketing team punch far above its weight.

My own experience mirrors his: relationships that started as a transaction with a brand and a product I liked, then advanced off the platform into a direct relationship with the marketer. And one of them is joining me next week on Long Run Labs. That’s the whole point. Alex even caught the accidental tagline: Popfly building the thing right, for the long haul. For the long run. Couldn’t have said it better.

If you’re a brand or a creator in the outdoor and endurance space, check out Popfly.

Takeaways

• Curiosity beats mastery for generalists. Go deep on the new thing, become the temporary specialist, then move on. Pair yourself with people who think differently and let the tools amplify how you’re wired.

• Earn word of mouth before you buy awareness. If the product is actually innovative, build product-led growth and network effects first. Save the brand campaign for when the product and the network are already working.

• Consumer insight is the soul, not a step. Bring creators and testers behind the curtain for feedback before you ever ask them to promote. It removes your bias and buys you their buy-in.

• Beat the loudest voice with a test. Meet conviction with “great, go test it, and bring the data back.” Signal wins over volume.

• Open gates, don’t guard them. Every barrier to entry means one fewer person who falls in love with a place, and one fewer steward to protect it.

Where to find Alex

LinkedIn is the easiest place to connect with Alex directly. And if you spend time on the water, check out the apps: Onwater Fish for fishing and Paddleways for paddling, both live in the App Store.

New to For The Long Run? Start here.

If Long Run Labs is where I dig into the business of endurance, the founders, operators, and brand builders behind the sport, For The Long Run is the flagship it grew out of. It’s been running since 2019, and it’s about one thing: the why underneath the miles. Why we start, why we keep going, and why this sport pulls us in the way it does. Conversations with Olympians, ultrarunners, coaches, and everyday athletes about motivation, big scary goals, training, injury, and the life around the running.

If you’re not sure where to jump in, I put together a page of the episodes I’d hand a friend:

👉 forthelong.run/start-here

Thanks for being here for 500 of these. Whether you found the show yesterday or you’ve been riding along since 2019, I’m grateful. Here’s to the next 500.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

The setup: a study, a ranking, and a “so what”

Recently I ran a study with Michael Rueckert at Centium. We fed roughly 2,200 running questions into the major models and a sentiment platform to see what AI actually says when someone asks about shoes, nutrition, watches, training, all of it. We did not name brands. We wanted to know what the models believe, and which sources they lean on when they answer.

The media rankings that came back were not what I expected. Runner’s World first. Trail Runner Magazine second. Ultra Running Magazine third. iRunFar fourth. And fifth, ahead of Women’s Running, ahead of publications with staffs and budgets and decades of brand equity: Jason. One guy, one site, one podcast. His show ranked as the most-cited podcast in the entire category.

His reaction was not celebration (though that did happen later). It was a shrug and a question. What does that mean, and why should I care, if nobody clicks through to me?

That is the right question. It is also the question almost every creator is about to ask. So here is the answer, and the reason the answer is more reassuring than the panic suggests.

Why the old skills transfer: closed book, open book

The way it was explained to me is that a model answers like a student taking two exams at once. There is a closed-book exam, which is everything it already absorbed about a topic over years of training. And there is an open-book exam, which is what it can pull in fresh, weighted toward what sources have said recently.

On the closed-book side, the model already “knows” the safe answers in a category because people have repeated them for years. On the open-book side, it reaches for sources it has learned to trust and checks what they say right now.

Here is why that rewards a decade of SEO instead of erasing it. The behaviors that made a source rank in Google are the same behaviors that make a source legible to a model: publishing consistently, getting cited by outlets that already carry authority, saying things that line up with what trusted sources say. Jason’s back catalog is not dead weight, but rather it is the reason the model treats him as credible. A decade of showing up, in his words “massaging” the algorithm and writing for other people’s sites, built exactly the footprint the models now reward.

It is not only what he published on his own site, either. It is the hundreds of articles he published everywhere else. Each one was, at the time, a backlink. Each one is now a place where a trusted outlet is on record associating his name with a correct answer.

I bet the hundreds of articles I’ve published elsewhere is also helping. Backlinks became sentiment?

Jason Fitzgerald, Strength Running

That question is the right one, and the answer is close to yes. A backlink used to be a vote that a ranking algorithm counted. Now the same link is a place where a source the model already trusts has said something about you, in language the model reads. The link still matters. It used to carry authority; now it carries an opinion.

The one thing that is actually new: credibility is borrowed, not earned

So what changed? Not the work. The reader.

I asked Claude where a model’s sense of credibility comes from. The answer: it is borrowed, not earned directly. A model cannot verify whether a claim is true, so it substitutes proxies that correlate with credibility judgments humans already made somewhere else. You do not persuade the model. You change what it reads. A source reads as credible because an outlet the model already trusts has vouched for it.

That flips the whole strategy. The highest-leverage move is not optimizing your own site harder; it is transitive endorsement: getting your name and your take onto the surfaces the model already trusts. Jason spent two years as a monthly columnist at Trail Runner. He has been quoted in Runner’s World a bunch of times. That byline was worth far more than he realized at the time, because it seeded his name across every source that then quoted it. The move now is to get back into that cadence. A monthly column at a major running publication does more for his standing in the models than another year of posts on his own domain, because it is the trusted outlet vouching for him, not him vouching for himself.

The economics have flipped, too. He used to get paid a few hundred dollars an article to write those columns. Given what the placement is now worth to his own business, where the highest-leverage product is a training plan that sells with almost no marginal cost, the column is worth writing even if the check gets smaller. Possibly worth writing if there is no check at all, though don’t tell that to the publications!

And the surface area compounds. When Michael analyzed my own footprint, the thing he flagged was not any single piece of content. It was that I touch a lot of things in a lot of places. I write here, on my website, publish on YouTube, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The model needs many places to find you before it trusts you. YouTube, transcripts on, punches above its weight. Being a guest on other people’s shows still works, because the links and the mentions stack. The operator who has built trust across a dozen surfaces for years is holding the exact asset that matters, and most of them do not know it yet.

The part nobody has priced yet: the one-sentence mention

Here is where it gets interesting, and where I think a real market is about to appear.

If you are publishing on a trusted outlet on a regular cadence, you have editorial room to weave in the brands you actually use. Not a coupon code or a link to click. A single sentence in a roundup that mentions a product by name, in context, the way that happens in real editorial all the time.

We do not yet know what that sentence is worth. But run the math. If one editorial mention nudges a model toward recommending a brand, and that brand is doing nine figures a year, a single sentence could possibly be worth five figures in downstream sales to them. Nobody prices this yet. In a year, one of two things will be true: we will understand exactly what an editorialized mention is worth, or it will be so commoditized it stops mattering. Either way, the window to be early is now, and it is measured in months, not years, because the models’ recency bias favors fresh content and the field is still wide open.

It is worth saying the uncomfortable part more directly. Some of this reads as gaming a system. Content has been a game for at least five years. The difference is that now you know the rules, so you might as well play instead of watching other people play. (I said almost exactly this to Jason in our meeting).

Takeaways

• The skills transfer. A decade of SEO fundamentals (consistent publishing, earned links, saying what trusted sources say) is what makes a model treat you as credible. The panic is mostly people realizing they never built the footprint, not that the footprint stopped working.

• Credibility is borrowed. You do not persuade the model, you change what it reads. Get onto surfaces it already trusts through bylines, guest spots, and citations, rather than only optimizing your own site.

• Surface area is the asset. The model needs many places to find you before it trusts you. Expand the footprint: put video on YouTube with transcripts on, keep guesting, keep publishing in more places.

• Ranked lists are the unit of recommendation. “Best of” and “top” formats get pulled disproportionately. Build them, put the year in the title, and keep them fresh.

• The one-sentence mention is unpriced. A single editorial mention on a trusted outlet may be worth far more than it looks. Get in before the market figures out how to price it.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

Listen to the episode

🎧 Listen on Spotify · Listen on Apple Podcasts · Watch on YouTube

Guest snapshot

Who: Vivek Gowri, owner of San Francisco Running Company (SFRC)

Where: Mill Valley, California, right off the Marin Headlands trails

Day job: Two decades in the computer industry, currently full time at NVIDIA

Runner notes: Longtime trail runner. Fridays for Chai Miles in the Panhandle at 7am, Saturdays for the SFRC loop run.

From a Mill Valley shop to a place people fly in for

Vivek is opening up SFRC’s e-commerce so that nearly everything on the store’s shelves can be bought online, with order pickup and a genuinely seamless experience across in-person and online. He was clear about what this is not. He is not trying to become an online retailer. SFRC is first and foremost a running store off the trails of Mill Valley, and that is what defines it. The online piece just lets people outside the immediate geography buy in, whether that is someone who moved away or someone who has only ever run those trails once and felt the pull.

The store has always leaned into a tight, high-end selection, the limited and small-batch releases alongside its own branded hats and tees. The longer arc, though, is about being a destination. Vivek wants SFRC to be the kind of store where a runner visiting from the Alps thinks, I have heard of that place, I have to go. There are only a handful of shops in the world that carry that “if you know, you know” pull, and he wants SFRC to be one of them.

He is quick to credit the people who built the store into a pillar of West Coast trail running over almost fifteen years: Brett and Larissa, Jorge, Ted, and a long list beyond them. His framing of the job is refreshingly humble. Step one is do not break it. Then grow and elevate the community from there, and give people a reason to come over the bridge.

Taking a women’s trail race to North Face, with a childcare grant attached

SFRC has long partnered with local races on bib pickup and pre-race training runs. During the pandemic it took over a women’s half marathon in San Francisco with a lineage that runs from a Nike road half to a Salomon trail half. For a few years SFRC kept it going as a low-key neighborhood trail race. This year they just opened registration and are elevating it: a name-brand title sponsor in The North Face, a real prize purse, and the goal of building one of the premier short-distance and women’s-only trail races in the country.

What struck me is that he is doing two things at once that look opposite. A large prize purse for the sharp end of the field, and a stack of support for everyone else: a childcare grant to take that barrier off the table, and a free twelve-week training program led by a professional coach so a first-timer, including someone running their first race postpartum, can show up at the store and train with a group.

Having more gender equality on trails, equal participation, equal prize money. Without even getting into the math behind it, it is just the right thing to do.

Vivek Gowri

Doing the right thing as the long game

This is the throughline of everything Vivek does. His starting point is that if you do the right things for the right reasons, the business tends to take care of itself over a long enough horizon. He knows how idealistic that sounds. He believes it anyway.

The nuance he added is key. The commercial argument, that more women on trail means a bigger market to sell shoes and nutrition to, is real, but he treats it as the answer to how you fund the work, not why you do it. The why is that it is right. The funding case is how you get brands to pay for it. Aligning the incentives with the end zone you are actually trying to reach is the good stuff.

If you do the right things for the right end zones, everything else will take care of itself.

Vivek Gowri

Getting brands to fund the work: green flags and the pipeline pitch

Because a lot of you reading this are race directors and community builders, we spent real time here. His conversation with The North Face conversation went smoothly because leadership got the vision immediately, and once a brand gets it, the rest is logistics: contract length, activation budget versus product in kind. The green flag is simple. When someone gets your vision, you can feel it, and you stop selling and start building together.

When they do not get it, you have two moves. You reframe to something cheaper and specific: maybe they cannot fund the whole race, but they can fund a summit for BIPOC community leaders, or a women’s trail night, or a grassroots regional activation that never needs to go up to a big exec level. And you push the time horizon. You are not buying one community engagement, you are building a customer pipeline over six months, twelve months, five years. Most brand marketers are planning to the edge of their fiscal year, so part of the job is selling them on the pipeline their budget cycle cannot see.

Making the pie bigger

Coming out of TrailCon, a lot of the conversation, prodded by Ian at Skratch, was about how the industry keeps fighting over slices instead of growing the pie. Vivek is squarely on the grow-the-pie side. He wants more women and more people of color on trail, and he is honest that it does not happen on its own. It takes intention and money pointed in the right direction.

He pointed to Broken Arrow as the most diverse trail race he has been to, and gave real credit to Brendan and that team for putting money where their mouth is, seeding bibs and building a program that has since taken on a life of its own as friends bring friends. He also talked about his own role, texting friends to just show up at SFRC because he is there now, and how quickly that changes who you see in the photos and on the start line.

We got personal here too. I told him about a conversation with Tommie at TrailCon, who said so much of why he is there is to show other people they can be there too. I did not fully understand that until I felt it myself as a Jewish person, the specific relief of another person who just gets where your head is. Vivek described the same thing: wanting to see more of his people on trail, the cultural continuity, and the safety and energy that comes with not being the only one in the room.

The outdoors are really open to all of us. I want to keep making that more visible and more normalized.

Vivek Gowri

Why trail is having its moment

We could not not talk about the boom. Vivek’s read: trail is built on genuinely compelling feats of human endurance, and the storytelling around them has finally broken into the mainstream, look at the coverage after Rachel and Cocodona. Add road runners discovering they actually like the dirt, plus a strange new overlap with high fashion, trail brands showing up at Paris Fashion Week, the real one and not an offshoot, and you get an industry-wide swell.

I wrote more about this after Tahoe, of course.

He is not naive about the downside. He is wary of the clout-chasing and the influencer wave, and would rather see people run the races that actually interest them. On the majors putting influencers on start lines, his read was blunt: more eyeballs, more they can charge sponsors. He does not think trail is there yet, and we both hope it holds onto the thing that makes a trail start line feel like nobody is checking whether you belong. Everyone is too busy suffering up the same hill.

The rest of what he is building

A few more threads worth flagging. SFRC just went through a rebrand, a cleaner logo system built around the layers in the name, and a palette of bright yellow and dark green that anyone who knows Vivek can feel his fingerprints on. A store remodel is coming to open the space up and keep it a community hangout. And he has been angel investing at the intersection of tech and running, including Laurel on race timing (which he’s using for his races) and a connected shoe (Avelo Running*) he is truly excited about. He keeps the store and the investing mentally separate, even as the use cases keep bumping into each other.

On motivation, his answer was the most Vivek thing possible. He chases what he is into, all the way down. A friend once told him, when you are into something, you are really into it. He has been into computers since he was a kid and into running shoes for about as long, and at some point the question stops being what motivates you and becomes just doing the stuff that interests you until it turns into something other people find valuable.

Takeaways

• Right thing, long game. For The Long Run, indeed. Doing the right thing and building a good business are not in tension over a long enough horizon. The commercial case is how you fund the work, not why you do it.

• Sell the pipeline, not the activation. Brands plan to the edge of their fiscal year. Your job is to show them the six-month, twelve-month, five-year customer pipeline their budget cycle cannot see.

• Green flag: they get it. When a partner gets your vision, you can feel it, and the conversation shifts from convincing to building. When they do not, reframe to something cheaper and specific.

• Access is a design choice. A prize purse for the front and a childcare grant plus a free training plan for everyone else is how you make a race matter at both ends of the field.

• Growth does not come for free. More women and more people of color on trail takes intention and funding pointed the right way. It does not happen organically without the push.

Listen & follow

Vivek and SFRC: sfrun.co (formerly sfrco.com) · Vivek on Instagram Long Run Labs: Instagram · X · YouTube · Threads

See you out there.

PS: registration is open

SFRC just opened registration for their women’s trail race in the Marin Headlands, now with North Face as title sponsor, a real prize purse, a childcare grant, and a free 12-week training program in the lead-up. If you have a first-timer or a postpartum runner in your life, this is the one to point them toward. Registration link

A word on our partners

The Huddle. Building a business is isolating. You’re making decisions daily that most people in your life don’t fully understand, and surface-level networking rarely helps. What my co-founders Jason Fitzgerald, Ross Yellin, and I built at The Huddle is different: a peer advisory community for early-stage founders who want real accountability and real conversation. Small cohorts, cross-industry, monthly sessions. Someone in the room will tell you the thing you actually need to hear. In-person in Boulder, virtual cohorts open anywhere. Go to findmyhuddle.com and fill out the application.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

*Disclaimer: I am also personally involved in both of these brands

Earlier this week I published the largest study anyone has run on how AI recommends running brands. 2,200 unaided prompts, 2,052 brands, one clear conclusion: if you want to show up in an AI answer, you get into the “best of” roundups the models already trust.

A lot of people nodded at that line. Then they emailed me some version of the same question: okay, how? Most brands have never run a real PR program. “Get into the roundups” is true and completely useless if you have no idea what to do with it on Monday morning.

So this is that. The how.

I left it out of the study on purpose, because the study’s job was to prove the thing with numbers, not to sell you a playbook. But the playbook is the part you can actually act on, and it is more specific than “hire a PR firm.” (Though if you want to do that, I certainly do have recommendations.)

In case you missed the first piece, here it is:

If you want to listen to us talk through it, here’s the Apple Podcasts link and here’s Spotify. You can also watch on YouTube!

And now onto what to do…

It was never only PR (but PR is the hero)

The last piece framed all of this as PR, and PR is the hero of this story. But a few sharp people wrote back to say the frame was bigger than the tactics, and they were right. So before the playbook, the more accurate version of what is happening.

Matt Sklar at Verde put it better than I could. The old PR model rested on media owning two things at once. It owned the validation (the journalist’s credibility, the publication’s reputation) and it owned the distribution (the audience, the readership, the reach). When you earned a placement, you got both in the same package.

AI is pulling those two apart. The distribution is moving. Google, social platforms, AI search, and retail audiences are the distribution networks now, and the gatekeepers there are algorithms, not editors. What those algorithms reward is validation: the weight of third-party voices saying the same true thing about a brand, from multiple directions, over time.

So the job is not “get press;” the job is to create validated content that feeds every distribution network that matters. PR is the single most powerful way to create that validated content, which is exactly why it is the hero of this piece. But validation now gets created and read across a whole mesh of surfaces, and if you only work the PR surface you are leaving most of the map blank. So here is the PR core first, then the rest of it.

PR just stopped being the unmeasurable line item

For a decade, PR sat next to performance marketing like the artsy sibling next to the one with a more mathematical role. Performance had clean numbers. Spend this, get that, here is your ROAS. PR had vibes and a clipping folder. Everyone knew it mattered and nobody could tell you what it returned. And it is usually the first line item to go when budgets get tightened.

The study flips that. The exact same pitch that lands your brand in a Runner’s World “best of” is now the pitch that lands you in thousands of AI answers. And because Centium can measure your presence inside the models, the thing PR could never prove is suddenly a number on a dashboard. Earned media didn’t just get more important. It got measurable.

Now the tactics.

Time everything to the refresh cycle

The models crave and depend on recency. In the study, the median cited source was 4.1 months old once you weight by use, 48 percent of everything cited was published in the last six months, and 39 percent in the last three. Old content gets ignored no matter how good it is.

Which means the single most important thing about a press trip, a product launch, or a seeding push is when it lands. You want your moment to hit right before an editor drafts the next annual or quarterly list, not three weeks after it publishes. The PR calendar is now downstream of the roundup calendar. Figure out when “best trail shoes 2027” actually gets written, and work backward from there. Timing was always part of PR. Now it is more important than ever.

Seed the specialist, not the biggest name

The most hopeful finding in the study was that authority does not transfer. Winning “best running shoe” does nothing for “best running headphones,” because for every category the model goes to that category’s specialists. rtings.com showed up in 81 percent of headphone answers. iRunFar owns trail. RunRepeat, Treeline Review, OutdoorGearLab, and Wirecutter each own their corners.

So the worst thing you can do is go super wide and without focus. A gel brand buying attention from a shoe-review site is money lit on fire. Step one is boring and it is the most important thing: map your category to the three or four outlets the models actually read for it, and concentrate everything there. You do not need to be everywhere. You need to be in the four places that matter for your one category.

Sean Van Horn at Backbone Media pushed on this from the agency side, and it is worth reading twice, because it is the exact mistake he watches brands make. There is a constant pull toward the big mainstream names, Forbes, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, because the raw traffic dwarfs the endemic outlets. Forbes has something like seven times the monthly uniques of Runner’s World and roughly fourteen times iRunFar, so a PR agency that specializes in landing that coverage is an easy sell: bigger top of funnel, new audiences who would never open the endemic press. I’ve seen this play out in organizations I’ve been in. There is real validity to that for plain brand awareness, however.

But here is the question Sean keeps asking, and it lands even harder now. Even before AEO, in a normal Google search, who actually goes to Forbes to find the best running shoe, even when it ranks? AEO pushes that logic further still. Look at the outlets the models actually cite in the study: iRunFar, RunRepeat, Treeline, OutdoorGearLab, rtings, Wirecutter. They are endemic specialists, nearly to a fault. The big general-interest names that brands spend real money chasing barely appear (Wirecutter is the mainstream exception the models do lean on). And this is not only review sites. Endemic podcasts feed the corpus too, through their transcripts, which is one reason a category-specific show can punch well above its weight. (Where have you heard that before!? → “small shows hit different”)

So the traffic number is the trap. Uniques tell you about reach. They tell you almost nothing about whether you will be in the answer. The move is to double down on the endemic outlets, hire PR people who actually understand that space, and stop paying a premium for logo coverage the model never reads.

Pitch the list itself, and get ready for pay-to-play

Here is the unglamorous move most brands skip. Roundups were 53 percent of every citation in the study. The ranked list is the unit of recommendation. So the pitch is not “please write a feature about us.” The pitch is “please consider us for the ranked list.” Those are different asks, and the second one is the one that compounds.

And read where this is going. Right now inclusion is mostly editorial. It may not stay that way. The likely future could be a paid, vetted, application-based process, “apply to be considered for best gravel shoes of 2027,” the way plenty of awards already work. If that is where roundups land, the brands that already have relationships with those editors win, and the ones who waited pay a premium to catch up. Get good at this before it has a price tag.

Give the model a story it can repeat

Models do not repeat spec sheets. They repeat narratives. Boulder won “best running destination” at 55 percent, not because it is objectively the best place to run, but because the same story (hundreds of miles of dirt roads and trails, a real running culture) shows up in every source the model reads. Take that, Flagstaff! Momentous rode the Huberman association into supplement answers the same way. The sentiment attached to a person and a story, not a feature list.

So build the thing the model can quote. A founder narrative, an athlete, a single repeated claim that is easy to lift and hard to forget. If ten outlets tell the same story about you, the model will tell it too.

A press trip is a multiplier, then a habit

Start with the single highest-leverage move in PR, because it is the one most brands underrate: the press trip. Done well, one trip is not one placement. It is a dozen.

I went on a trip with Salomon via OutsidePR and I can tell you what it produced. Three podcast episodes (Grayson Murphy and Dan Green on For The Long Run, Erin Cooper on Long Run Labs). The conversation with Grayson was extremely timely, as it was right before the Emma Bates/UCAN breakup went public, and it led to some very favorable writing about Salomon due to how they are working with Grayson in one of my most popular Substack pieces yet. Mentions in at least three other Substacks. Writeups on my own site. And now here too. And I was one of a half dozen media folks in attendance. Seth from had quite a few Salomon mentions over the next few weeks and months too. From one trip, all with no specific obligation to write anything.

That is not luck, it is the mechanic of this entire study working in your favor. A single well-run trip seeds fresh content across a spread of trusted, independent sources all at once, which is exactly the shape the models go hunting for. Surface area, freshness, and category-specific outlets, all bought with one plane ticket.

And notice who ran that trip. Salomon leads trail shoes, leads gravel, and owns hydration vests at 87 percent in the study. That is not an accident either. This is one of the mechanisms that built those positions. The category winners are, over and over, the brands that get real people into real places and let the coverage fan out.

Now the honest part, because I do not want to oversell it. The models chase what is new, so that coverage has a half-life. The Salomon trip is working for me today, but it will fade soon (it was in March), and the freshness bias means fading is the default. (Hello brands. Who wants to hang in Chamonix?)

So the trip isn’t a trophy you win once; it’s a habit you run on a cadence. Which leads to the surface that keeps you fresh between the trips.

Ambassadors are the freshness engine

If a press trip is the spike, a standing ambassador roster is the thing that keeps you inside that 3-to-6-month freshness window all year instead of spiking and fading.

Look at Nuun, tied at the top of electrolytes at 74 percent, sitting on a decade-plus of ambassadors quietly writing and posting every single year. Skratch is up there too, out-earning its size in the one category it cares about. People love Skratch. They love the products, they love the people at the brand, and those things find their way into writing. Those positions were compounded, story after story, by real humans with a reason to keep talking.

That is the part most brands miss when they think about ambassadors as a logo-on-a-singlet deal. The singlet isn’t the value; it’s the steady drip of fresh, independent, category-specific content that a roster produces without you having to run a campaign every month. Build the team, give them something real to say, and let the consistency do the work.

Reddit and the forums are the surface you are (most likely to be) ignoring

Here is a surface almost no brand plans for, and it is one of the most heavily weighted the models read: community discussion. Reddit and the sport’s forums are where people say the true, unprompted thing about your product, and running has some of the most active communities anywhere (r/AdvancedRunning, r/RunningShoeGeeks, r/trailrunning).

This is the Skratch mechanism again, just filed under its real name. “People love Skratch” is not a PR placement; it’s community, and community is earned the same way PR is: by being good enough that people bring you up on their own.

One warning, because this is the surface where brands do the dumbest possible thing. Do not fake it. Fake posts and planted praise get sniffed out fast, they torch the trust you were trying to borrow, and they can poison the exact signal you were trying to build. The play is to earn the conversation, show up honestly when you are already being discussed, and make a product worth talking about. Check your own category in these communities before you do anything else. You will usually learn what the models already think of you.

Publish your own research and become the source

Every tactic so far is about getting other people to cite you. There is a higher-leverage version: be the thing everyone else cites.

I am the case study for this one. I published a 2,200-prompt study nobody else had, and it is now getting quoted and crawled precisely because it is primary data. That flips your position entirely. You stop being a brand the models talk about and start being a source the models quote from. Original research does not decay the way a press trip does, and you own the asset outright.

I tested the smaller version of this too. On a Sunday I put up one ranked “best running podcasts of 2026” page. By Thursday it was the most-visited page on my whole site, beating things that had been there for months. The models are out there hunting for exactly that format, and when you hand it to them, you show up. It is now my most visited page, by both human visitors and AI crawlers.

You do not need my sample size. A brand sitting on its own usage data, testing results, or category survey has citation bait most of its competitors will never bother to produce.

Build your site like a citable source, not a brochure

Living on your own website is not a strategy, at least not the way most brands do it. Brand-owned sites were under 5 percent of all citations in the study. There was exactly one real exception, and it is instructive: Runna, the most-cited brand-owned site in the entire dataset, because it publishes its own ranked guides instead of product pages. It behaves like a publication, so the models treat it like one.

So the rule is not “your site does not matter.” The rule is “your site earns citations when it is built like something worth citing.” In practice that means ranked guides over product pages, question-shaped headers, clean FAQ blocks, a consistent one-line description of who you are on every page, and structure a model can actually read. Behave like media and you get read like media.

Two adjacent moves the data backs. Contribute to Wikipedia, ethically and factually, because it is ChatGPT’s single most-cited source across everything Centium has ever measured, and make sure your basic entity facts (Wikidata, consistent naming, no confusion with a similarly named brand) are clean so the model knows exactly who you are. And do YouTube right: the models index the transcript, not the video, so actually talk through your picks out loud so it can be transcribed and read via captions.

Do not forget retail and the aggregators

One more distribution network feeding the models: retail and review aggregators. Review volume and, just as importantly, review recency on the big retail surfaces are signals the category sites and the models both lean on. A wall of recent, real reviews is its own form of validation, and sites like RunRepeat plus review-heavy blogs like Runtothefinish are partly reading exactly that. It is less glamorous than a press trip and it compounds quietly in the background. And sites like those are leading to a lot of shoe sales via e-comm channels. Trust me on that.

Manage what the corpus already says about you

Everything above is additive: put more good validation into the world. But there is a defensive half most brands never think about. The models are already saying something about you, and it might be wrong, stale, or built on a story you have since moved past.

This is where measurement stops being a scoreboard and becomes a diagnostic. Before you spend a dollar adding new signal, find out what the corpus currently believes, where it got that idea, and which of those sources are due for a refresh. Sometimes the highest-leverage move is not a new trip. It is correcting the one outdated claim that ten other sources keep repeating about you.

The loop nobody is closing

Now the part that actually matters, and the reason I wanted to write this at all.

The study raised an uncomfortable tension and left it open. If AI strip-mines the publications for their rankings, and runners get the answer without ever clicking through, what happens to the outlets producing the rankings in the first place? Michael told the editors at a major magazine that AI was leaning on them constantly and expected them to be thrilled. They were not stoked. The models take the work, the publisher sees none of the traffic.

I floated a couple of possible fixes in that piece. Here is the real one, and it was sitting in this playbook the whole time.

Go back to Matt’s frame. Media used to own validation and distribution together. AI took the distribution and left the outlets holding just the validation, which is the part that no longer pays the bills on its own. Press trips, product seeding, sponsored reviews, launch events. Those are brand-to-publisher deliverables that already exist and always have. And as AI drains the traffic revenue those outlets used to live on, that brand-side spend becomes a bigger and bigger share of what keeps them solvent. Which means the exact same dollar you spend to get into the roundup is also part of what keeps the roundup alive. (Yes, I host a podcast network and obviously want this to be true. The math works anyway.)

One more time. The PR budget you deploy to win AI visibility is quietly propping up the content economy that AI is eroding. The lever that gets you into the answer is the same lever that funds the source of the answer. Brands that understand this are not just buying visibility; they are buying the survival of the machine they need in order to stay visible inside of it.

That is not charity; it’s the most aligned that brand spend and media health have been in years, and almost nobody is naming it.

And coincidentally, it is some of my favorite work I have been doing lately.

What this means if you are a...

Brand. Map your category to its outlets, concentrate there, and start now, because the clock is longer than you think.

Small brand. This is your door. You do not need Nike’s budget. You need to own one category’s roundups, one active ambassador roster, and one honest forum presence, and that is a fight you can actually win.

Agency. You are holding the keys, and for the first time you can prove a return you could never prove before. Sell that. And measure it.

Creator or media. You are the trusted source the models read now. Publish ranked lists on a cadence, and please protect that trust like the asset it is, now that it is more important and valuable than ever before.

The bottom line

PR went from the line item you couldn’t measure to the most direct, trackable lever on the channel that is becoming the top of the funnel. It is earned, it is won category by category, and because the models chase what is new, it is a habit you keep rather than a trophy you win once. And it is the hero of a bigger cast: ambassadors, forums, your own research, your own site, retail, and the story the corpus already tells about you.

And the kicker: the money you spend getting into the answer is helping keep the answer worth trusting. The shops that internalize both halves of that win the next two years.

FAQ

How do I time PR to AI visibility? Work backward from the roundups. The models lean on fresh sources (median cited source 4.1 months old, weighted), so you want coverage landing right before an outlet drafts its next annual or quarterly “best of,” not after. The roundup calendar sets your PR calendar.

Which outlets should my brand pitch? The specialist for your category, not the biggest name in the sport. Authority does not transfer, so map your one category to the three or four sources the models actually read for it (rtings for headphones, iRunFar for trail, RunRepeat, Treeline, OutdoorGearLab, Wirecutter) and concentrate there.

Is this only PR? No. PR is the highest-leverage way to create validated content, but the models read a whole mesh of surfaces: ambassadors publishing on a cadence, community discussion on Reddit and the forums, your own research and ranked guides, retail review signals, and your basic entity facts. PR is the hero, not the whole cast.

Do forums like Reddit really matter? Yes, community discussion is one of the more heavily weighted sources the models read, and running has unusually active communities. Earn it honestly and never fake it, because fake praise gets caught and poisons the signal you were trying to build.

Does my own website matter for AI recommendations? Barely, on its own. Brand-owned sites were under 5 percent of all citations. The exception is publishing like a publication: Runna gets cited because it puts out its own ranked guides, not product pages. Your site earns citations when it behaves like media, with ranked guides, question-shaped headers, and clean structure a model can read.

How long before PR shows up in AI answers? Longer than you want. AI visibility is a trailing indicator, so a deal or push today may not surface for months (see PUMA sitting behind Nike in Hyrox despite the title sponsorship). Start now, measure patiently, and treat it as a compounding habit rather than a campaign.

This is a companion to the full Centium AI study and my conversation with Michael Rueckert on Long Run Labs. If you want the broader practical arc, this is the fourth part of my multi-part AI-for-marketers series. Want to see how your own brand shows up inside the models? Centium has tools for exactly that.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle.

This is the follow-up, with receipts.

Working with Michael Rueckert of Centium AI, we ran the largest study Centium has done (as of June 2026, we will do this semi-annually!): 22 categories, 20 prompts each, across the five biggest models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok), for 2,200 total responses. Every prompt was unaided. We asked the category question (”what are the best running shoes,” “best electrolyte mix,” “best running town”) and never seeded a brand name. We ran them through the API, with no chat history and no location, so the model had nothing to anchor to. Whatever it recommended, it recommended on its own.

• 2,200 responses

• 22 categories

• 2,052 brands and entities

• 16,990 citations

• 2,558 domains

The headline is not what small brands would be excited to hear: AI is not the level playing field the technology is assumed to produce. It has favorites, it formed them in public, and for the first time you can see exactly how.

This write-up is a companion piece to a 90 minute podcast with Michael Rueckert, Founder of Centium AI. The full episode can be found on the Long Run Labs Podcast on Apple and Spotify, and you can watch it on YouTube too!

Key findings (the short version)

• Nine brands account for 22 percent of all AI mentions in running, while 56 percent of the brands that surfaced appeared exactly once and never again.

• Authority does not transfer across categories. Winning “best running shoe” does not win “best running headphones.” You earn each category separately.

• AI rewards fresh sources. The median cited source is 4.1 months old once weighted by use, and 48 percent of everything cited was published in the last six months.

• “Best of” and “top” roundups are 53 percent of all citations. The ranked list is the unit of recommendation.

• The average AI answer names just 6.5 brands. You are one of about six names, or you are invisible.

What is inside

• I tested this on myself first

• How AI actually decides what to recommend

• Nine brands own the conversation

• Winning one category does not win the next

• Where the recommendations actually come from

• What this means for you

• The uncomfortable part

• The bottom line

• FAQ

I tested this on myself first

Before I trust a finding, I like to break it. So on a Sunday, I built one page on my site: a ranked “best running and endurance podcasts of 2026.” Nothing fancy. A list with commentary, aligned with the insights from the research on how my own podcast is showing up in the “eyes” of the LLMs.

By Thursday it was the single most-visited page on my entire site all time, not counting pages linked from the header. It ran about 2x my homepage in the week. A page four days old beat everything I had published in months. It is still the most popular page, and growing fast.

That is the whole study in one example. The models are out there searching, they are hunting for a very specific kind of content, and when you hand it to them, you show up. Everything below explains why that worked, and shows you exactly who is winning what.

How AI actually decides what to recommend

Michael uses a useful framework for this. Picture the model taking an exam.

The closed-book part is its training data, the instinct in its head. It has read enormous amounts about Nike, HOKA, and Adidas, so when you ask a running question, those names surface first by reflex. That is why the biggest incumbents own the broad questions.

The open-book part is what happens next. The model goes and searches the live web, a behavior that only really switched on across these tools in early 2025. It breaks your question into its own micro-searches, a process called query fan-out, and pulls in what it finds. Here is the key: because the models were trained on the old internet, when they reach for the live web they are not looking for what they already know. They are looking for what is new.

You can measure that bias precisely. We indexed the publish date of the top 250 sources by citation volume and recovered dates for 219 of them. The median cited source is 6.5 months old, and once you weight by how often each source actually gets used, that drops to 4.1 months. Nearly half of everything cited, 48 percent, was published in the last six months. 39 percent came out in the last three. The sources the models lean on hardest are the freshest ones.

And you can see what they search for. Across 8,799 follow-up searches, the behavior is pure informed shopper:

What the models put in their own searches (share of searches)

• Include a year (19% say 2026, 18% say 2025): 40%

• Include “best”: 37%

• Ask for a “review”: 24%

• Include “top”: 12%

• Qualify for a person or use case (for women, for beginners, for flat feet): ~5%

• Direct “X versus Y” comparison: 2.3%

Put the format words together and roughly three-quarters of the models’ own searches are hunting for a best, a top, or a review. They search “best X 2026,” they find a ranked list, and they recommend whoever is on it. That is why my Sunday page worked. I had written the exact artifact the machines were out looking for.

And you can watch them do it. I pulled my crawler logs, which are just the record of every automated bot that visits a site, and across my whole site, AI crawlers now account for roughly half of all bot traffic. The most active crawler on my entire site is not Google, it is Meta’s AI agent, with ByteDance’s right behind it, and Anthropic’s ClaudeBot, OpenAI’s GPTBot, and OpenAI’s search bot all working the site constantly. These are the exact systems this study measured, and I can watch them reading.

You can even see both halves of the “exam” in the log. The training crawlers are quietly building the closed-book instinct for the next generation of models. The retrieval bots, the ones that fetch a page at answer-time, are the open-book fan-out happening live. Both are on my site right now, and I am blocking none of them (some people do this because they want the site traffic over AI crawlers). That is the point. If invisible to AI means invisible, the last thing you do is close the door.

(If you want the genuinely good, no-math version of how these models work under the hood, Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT is the one to watch. Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and led AI at Tesla, and he is the rare researcher who can explain next-token prediction to a normal human.)

Nine brands own the conversation

Now the concentration, and it is steep. Of the 2,052 brands and entities that surfaced, only nine were named in at least 10 percent of all prompts, and just 126 cleared even 1 percent. At the other end, 1,149 of them, 56 percent of everything that came up, appeared exactly once across all 2,200 responses and never again.

The top nine brands account for 22 percent of all mentions. The top 25 for 35 percent. The top 100 for 61 percent. And the average answer named just 6.5 brands while citing 7.7 webpages. There is no page two in an AI answer. You are one of about six names, or you are invisible.

Here is the overall board, every category blended together (mention rate):

All prompts (overall)

1. Nike (23%)

2. Brooks (20%)

3. HOKA (19%)

4. Adidas (16%)

5. Saucony (16%)

6. Salomon (15%)

7. New Balance (15%)

8. ASICS (14%)

9. On (10%)

10. Altra (8%)

11. Garmin (8%)

12. lululemon (8%)

13. PUMA (7%)

14. Nathan (7%)

15. Patagonia (6%)

If you are a smaller brand, this reads like a rich-get-richer machine, and at the broad level it partly is. The model’s instinct was built on a decade of the internet talking about the giants. You cannot out-instinct that overnight. But the broad question is not where most runners actually shop, and the moment you go category by category, the whole picture cracks open.

Winning one category does not win the next

This is the most important finding in the study, and the most hopeful one. Ask any model for “the best running brand” and the same incumbents return (mention rate):

Running brands (the broad question)

1. ASICS (88%)

2. HOKA (88%)

3. Nike (87%)

4. Brooks (85%)

5. Saucony (82%)

6. Adidas (79%)

7. New Balance (75%)

8. On (62%)

9. Mizuno (44%)

10. Altra (37%)

Now watch that grip dissolve. Move category by category and a different brand leads almost every one. Several brands dominate a niche yet score a flat zero in the broad question: Beats (67 percent of headphones) and Bose (58 percent), zero in “best running brand.” Science in Sport (66 percent of gels), zero. TriggerPoint (26 percent of recovery), zero. Authority does not transfer. Owning “best running shoe” and owning “best running headphones” are two unrelated wins, and you earn each one separately.

The reason is mechanical. The model cannot try on the shoes, taste the gels, or feel the watch, so for each category it goes to that category’s specialists. Ask about headphones and it does not lean on Runner’s World, it goes to tech and ratings sites (per Centium’s dashboard, rtings.com was cited in 81 percent of headphone answers). Ask about gels and it goes somewhere else entirely.

The takeaway for any brand that is not Nike: you do not have to beat Nike. You have to own your category. Here is the full board, category by category.

Shoes

Road running shoes

1. Brooks (69%)

2. ASICS (68%)

3. HOKA (68%)

4. Nike (62%)

5. New Balance (57%)

6. Saucony (56%)

7. Adidas (45%)

8. Mizuno (25%)

9. PUMA (25%)

10. On (23%)

Carbon plate racing

1. Nike (79%)

2. Adidas (78%)

3. ASICS (74%)

4. PUMA (61%)

5. New Balance (59%)

6. Saucony (57%)

7. HOKA (54%)

8. Brooks (30%)

9. On (20%)

10. Mizuno (19%)

Trail running shoes

1. HOKA (73%)

2. La Sportiva (67%)

3. Salomon (66%)

4. Saucony (61%)

5. Altra (57%)

6. Brooks (47%)

7. Adidas (35%)

8. Nike (30%)

9. New Balance (29%)

10. Topo Athletic (25%)

Gravel running

1. HOKA (66%)

2. Salomon (62%)

3. Altra (53%)

4. Nike (51%)

5. Brooks (50%)

6. Saucony (43%)

7. Craft (31%)

8. New Balance (27%)

9. Merrell (22%)

10. On (22%)

Note how completely the leaderboard reshuffles, and who benefits. HOKA is the standout, leading three of the four shoe categories (trail, gravel, and a three-way tie at the top of road) while sitting only third in the broad question. Brooks tops road outright. The trail and gravel categories belong to the specialists: La Sportiva is second in trail and absent from road entirely, the purest “own your niche” result in the study. Salomon is everywhere it should be, second in gravel and third in trail, and as you will see it owns the hydration categories too, making it arguably the most complete trail-and-mountain brand in the data. Altra has quietly built real cross-category presence, fifth in trail and third in gravel, and is one of only ten brands to crack the broad top ten. And Mount to Coast, a genuinely young brand, has already broken into a category (twelfth in gravel at 17 percent), which is exactly the playbook this whole piece argues for: pick one lane and claim it. Kiprun shows up only in road (fourteenth, 3 percent). Picking your category is the whole strategy.

Watches, apparel, and bras

Running watches and GPS

1. COROS (91%)

2. Garmin (91%)

3. Apple (65%)

4. Suunto (65%)

5. Polar (53%)

6. Amazfit (30%)

7. Google Fit (5%)

8. Huawei (4%)

Running apparel

1. Nike (60%)

2. Patagonia (57%)

3. Brooks (55%)

4. lululemon (53%)

5. Tracksmith (53%)

6. Adidas (52%)

7. Janji (41%)

8. On (35%)

Sports bras

1. Brooks (70%)

2. lululemon (69%)

3. Nike (46%)

4. Janji (39%)

5. Panache (39%)

6. Shefit (37%)

7. Oiselle (36%)

8. rabbit (29%)

Watches is the most top-heavy category in the entire study: Garmin and COROS are tied at 91 percent, and the next brand (Apple) is a cliff away at 65 percent. If you are not one of those two, you are barely in the conversation.

Two things worth pulling out of the apparel and bra boards. Brooks shows up again, third in apparel and first in sports bras at 70 percent, which makes it one of the genuinely rare multi-category winners in the whole study: number one in road shoes, number one in sports bras, top three in apparel. Most brands own one lane. Brooks owns three. And On is the interesting counter-pattern. It does not lead a single category here, but it appears across road, gravel, and apparel and is one of only nine brands to clear 10 percent overall. That is a different and real kind of strength, broad familiarity rather than category ownership, and it is the inverse of the specialist’s path.

Hydration and carry

Hydration vests and packs

1. Salomon (87%)

2. Nathan (82%)

3. Ultimate Direction (77%)

4. UltrAspire (56%)

5. CamelBak (52%)

6. Osprey (46%)

7. The North Face (38%)

8. Patagonia (36%)

Water bottles and soft flasks

1. HydraPak (71%)

2. Nathan (59%)

3. Salomon (49%)

4. CamelBak (46%)

5. Osprey (37%)

6. Amphipod (28%)

7. Ultimate Direction (24%)

8. Hydro Flask (17%)

HydraPak topping water bottles is a lesson on specificity. We split bottles out as their own category on purpose. Before that, the brand was an OEM footnote inside the hydration vest answers. Carve out the category and a new leader appeared, which is a reminder that AI models have different favorites for every segment of the industry.

Salomon deserves its own line here. It does not just win trail and gravel shoes, it leads hydration vests at 87 percent and sits third in bottles (and those bottles are usually made by HydraPak!), the kind of stacked, adjacent ownership that is hard to dislodge once the models have it. That is what owning a set of related categories looks like in practice.

Fuel

Energy gels and chews

1. Science in Sport (66%)

2. Maurten (61%)

3. GU (60%)

4. Honey Stinger (57%)

5. Hüma (46%)

6. Precision Fuel & Hydration (35%)

7. Clif (32%)

8. TORQ (28%)

Electrolyte and hydration mixes

1. Nuun (74%)

2. Skratch Labs (74%)

3. LMNT (66%)

4. Tailwind (57%)

5. Liquid I.V. (50%)

6. Gatorade (31%)

7. Maurten (30%)

8. Ultima (29%)

Supplements and creatine

1. Thorne (55%)

2. Optimum Nutrition (34%)

3. Momentous (31%)

4. Transparent Labs (24%)

5. Legion (17%)

6. GU (15%)

7. Klean Athlete (15%)

8. Maurten (15%)

Watch the cross-category leakage, or lack of it. Maurten is strong in both gels (second) and electrolytes (seventh). Science in Sport owns gels and barely registers in electrolytes (fourteenth, 11 percent). Precision Fuel & Hydration sits sixth in gels and twelfth in electrolytes (21 percent) despite “hydration” being in the name, because the models are not matching keywords, they are reading roundups. And Skratch Labs is the clean win here, tied with Nuun at the very top of electrolytes at 74 percent, a smaller brand that has clearly out-earned its size in the one category it cares most about. That is exactly what strong, sustained PR in a category looks like once the models start reading. Think about Nuun and how many ambassadors they have. They have had dozens (hundreds?) of people posting and writing about their products, every year for over a decade.

Tech and recovery

Running headphones

1. Shokz (83%)

2. Beats (67%)

3. Bose (58%)

4. Apple (51%)

5. JBL (36%)

6. Soundcore (36%)

7. JLab (34%)

8. Jabra (30%)

Recovery devices and tools

1. Hyperice (72%)

2. Therabody (71%)

3. TriggerPoint (26%)

4. Ekrin Athletics (25%)

5. Roll Recovery (16%)

6. Bob and Brad (15%)

7. HOKA (13%)

8. Air Relax (12%)

Training apps and coaching

1. Strava (67%)

2. Nike Run Club (63%)

3. Runna (59%)

4. Garmin (51%)

5. Runkeeper (49%)

6. MapMyRun (23%)

7. TrainingPeaks (20%)

8. Adidas Running (19%)

Strava beating every dedicated coaching platform is one of the more telling outliers. The models reach for the app people actually talk about, not the one with the most specialized feature set. And Runna at third is the exception that proves the PR rule: it is the most-cited brand-owned site in the whole study, because it publishes its own “best of” guides instead of just product pages.

The running experience

Races and events

1. Chicago Marathon (16%)

2. UTMB (15%)

3. Abbott World Marathon Majors (13%)

4. Berlin Marathon (11%)

5. Boston Marathon (11%)

6. Hardrock 100 (10%)

7. New York City Marathon (10%)

8. Western States 100 (10%)

9. Honolulu Marathon (9%)

10. Leadville Trail 100 (9%)

Running destinations and towns

1. Boulder, CO (55%)

2. Boston, MA (43%)

3. San Francisco, CA (41%)

4. New York City (40%)

5. Flagstaff, AZ (35%)

6. Chicago, IL (30%)

7. Portland, OR (29%)

8. San Diego, CA (28%)

9. London, UK (27%)

10. Chamonix, France (26%)

Races is the most wide-open category in the entire study. The leader sits at just 16 percent and 165 different events surfaced. Nobody owns “best races,” which is rare white space. Destinations is the opposite story: Boulder ran away with it at 55 percent, off a specific repeated narrative the models latched onto (200 miles of trails, live-high-train-low altitude, a genuine running culture, sourced largely from a Runner’s World “best cities” list and an Outside “best trail towns” list).

Runner-friendly hotels and travel

1. Westin (46%)

2. Hilton (41%)

3. Marriott (38%)

4. Hyatt (37%)

5. IHG (35%)

6. Fairmont (32%)

7. The Ritz-Carlton (26%)

8. Four Seasons (25%)

Running specialty retailers

1. Road Runner Sports (68%)

2. Fleet Feet (61%)

3. Running Warehouse (50%)

4. REI Co-op (37%)

5. DICK’S (34%)

6. Amazon (22%)

7. Zappos (19%)

8. Nike (18%)

Westin owning hotels at 46 percent is a clinic in claiming open space cheaply. It built a running concierge that knows the local routes, put it on its site, and the models latched on. No other chain was really trying to own “runner-friendly,” so Westin won it. And note that retailers surface most when the question carries buying intent (”where can I buy”) rather than research intent (”what’s best”), with REI showing up as the aggregator the models trust even at the research stage.

Crossover and media

Hyrox and functional fitness

1. Nike (69%)

2. Reebok (50%)

3. Adidas (34%)

4. PUMA (33%)

5. NOBULL (30%)

6. Under Armour (30%)

7. lululemon (25%)

8. On (24%)

Running media

1. Runner’s World (50%)

2. Trail Runner Magazine (29%)

3. UltraRunning Magazine (28%)

4. iRunFar (26%)

5. Strength Running (25%) - part of the Long Run Labs Podcast Network!

6. Women’s Running (20%)

7. Marathon Training Academy (19%)

8. Trail Runner Nation (19%)

The Hyrox board is a sponsorship cautionary tale. PUMA is the official title sponsor and sits fourth, while Nike, a non-sponsor, leads at 69 percent. The reason is timing: the models lag real-world reality by months because a recent deal has not yet saturated the training data or the live web. AI visibility is a trailing indicator of your marketing, not always a real-time one.

A real-world gut-check. Right as we were finishing this, journalist and Hurdle podcast host Emily Abbate posted from her first Hyrox event, and her on-the-ground read was the exact opposite of the model’s. She said PUMA totally owns this category, with athletes repping it everywhere, and even flagged LSKD as surging in popularity, a brand that does not appear in the model’s Hyrox top eight at all. That gap is the whole point. Emily is the leading indicator, reporting what is true today. The models are the lagging one, still describing the recent past until the roundups and coverage catch up. It is the cleanest illustration in this piece that owning a category in real life is not the same as owning it in AI. PUMA bought the sponsorship and the physical dominance. To win the AI answer too, the earned media has to say so first. When we re-run this study, PUMA should climb as the coverage saturates. Emily’s story today is the prediction. The next study is the proof.

Where the recommendations actually come from

When the models reach for a source at the category level, they reach for media, not brands. Runner’s World alone was cited in 40.5 percent of all 2,200 answers. Behind it sits a short, stable list (cited in this percentage of all prompts):

1. Runner’s World: 40.5%

2. iRunFar: 27.5%

3. OutdoorGearLab: 18.6%

4. RunRepeat: 14.7%

5. Treeline Review: 12.4%

6. REI: 12.1%

7. Outside: 12.1%

8. YouTube: 9.2%

The top ten domains account for a quarter of all 16,990 citations. Meanwhile every brand’s own website combined is under 5 percent of citations. Living on your own site is not a strategy. The models are reading a dozen magazines, and if you are not in those magazines, you are not in the answer.

They also go looking for those magazines by name. 7.5 percent of all AI fan-out searches named a specific publication:

• Runner’s World: 400 searches (4.5%)

• Wirecutter: 151 searches (1.7%)

• Outside: 107 searches (1.2%)

• OutdoorGearLab, RunRepeat, iRunFar: about 15 searches each (0.2%)

And there is a single dominant format. The “best of” list is the unit of recommendation (share of all citations):

• “Best of” and “top” roundups: 53%

• Reviews: 4%

• Guides: 3%

• News: 1.6%

• Reddit: 1.3%

• Wikipedia: 0.8%

The roundup is the currency, dwarfing everything else. Which means visibility in AI is won the way earned media has always been won: get into the roundups the models already trust, keep your story current because the models punish staleness, and publish your own educational content when you do publish. One underrated move: Wikipedia is ChatGPT’s single most-cited source across everything Centium has ever measured. You can contribute ethically (factually, no promotion), and at the research stage the models often read it more than your own site.

There is a quiet but strong winner in all of this: the earned-media shops (PR companies!). If the path into AI runs through the roundups, then the PR agencies that already live inside those publications just became a lot more valuable. For a decade, PR was the soft, hard-to-measure line item next to performance marketing’s clean ROAS. This data flips that. The pitch that lands your brand in a Runner’s World “best of” is now also the pitch that lands you in ten thousand AI answers. Earned media is becoming the most direct lever you have on AI visibility, and the people who are good at it are suddenly holding the keys.

What this means if you are a...

• Brand. Pick your category, get into the roundups, stay fresh, and know that it takes more content than you realize to move AI models meaningfully.

• Retailer. Intent flips the answer. “Best running shoes” surfaces media; “where can I buy” surfaces retailers, led by Road Runner Sports at 68 percent. Know which question you are trying to win.

• Race or event. This is real white space. The leader sits at 16 percent and 165 events surfaced. Nobody owns it yet.

• Tourism board. Perception is the product. Boulder won on a specific, repeated story, not on being objectively “best.” Pitch the activity-specific outlets (Runner’s World, Outside), not just the legacy travel press.

• Creator or media. Surface area is everything, because the model needs many places to find you before it trusts you. YouTube punches above its weight (the models index the transcript, not the video, so talk through your picks), and the format that travels is the ranked list. Quarterly “best of” pieces get picked up. Long narrative essays mostly do not.

The uncomfortable part

There is a real problem hiding inside all of this, and a recent guest, Christian Rawles, put it sharply: if the models strip-mine the content sites for their rankings, and runners get the answer without ever clicking through, what happens to the ad-supported publications producing the rankings in the first place?

It is not hypothetical. Michael described telling the editors at a major outdoor magazine that AI was leaning on them constantly, expecting them to be thrilled. Their response was closer to grief: the models are taking our work, and we see none of the traffic. Some sites are already blocking AI crawlers, which Michael thinks is a losing move, because invisible to AI increasingly means invisible, period.

Nobody has the answer yet. Maybe the roundups become a paid, vetted process, an application to be considered for “best gravel shoes of 2027,” the way other awards already work. Maybe the model makers eventually pay the publishers. What is clear is that today’s engine depends on a content economy whose business model AI is quietly eroding. That tension is the story to watch over the next two years.

The bottom line

AI did not hand running a level playing field. It built strong instincts about the giants, refreshes those instincts constantly from a small set of trusted publications, and rewards whoever shows up in the current, ranked, best-of content it goes hunting for.

But the door is wide open if you stop trying to win the whole sport and start trying to own your corner of it. Authority is earned category by category. The path in runs through earned media, not your homepage. And because the models chase what is new, this is not a trophy you win once. It is a habit you keep.

One thing this piece deliberately does not do is tell you how to actually get into those roundups. That is its own playbook, and it is what I am publishing next: Earned Media Is the New Performance Marketing, a tactical guide to winning AI visibility category by category. Subscribe and it will land in your inbox the day it goes live.

We are going to keep measuring this. The plan with Centium is to re-run the study every 6-12 months and track what moves, who climbs, and how the sourcing shifts. Consider this the baseline.

A quick note on For The Long Run

Yes, we checked how AI found my main/larger podcast, and it was a clean lesson in surface area. For The Long Run surfaced in five distinct prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, landing mid-pack at roughly 10 percent on the podcast question. The shows the models reach for most: Strength Running (63 percent), Marathon Training Academy (63 percent), Rich Roll (57 percent), Ali on the Run (50 percent), Trail Runner Nation (43 percent), Run to the Top (40 percent), and the morning shakeout (27 percent).

The interesting part was the mechanism. ChatGPT did not start with us. It researched the bigger shows first, found us listed in Apple’s “you might also like” panel next to Strength Running, Ali on the Run, and Trail Running Women, then ran its own searches on the show and confirmed us on our own site. We rode in on Apple’s “listeners also subscribed” graph. Two tells: ChatGPT’s write-up (”interviews exploring the why behind running”) is lifted almost verbatim from our Apple title, and on Feedspot’s “top running podcasts” list, which the models treat as close to ground truth, we sit at number 49. The fix is the same one the data prescribes for everyone: more surface area, a tighter and more consistent description everywhere the model might look, and a climb up the editorial roundups and aggregators.

FAQ

Does AI favor big running brands like Nike and HOKA?

On the broad question, yes. Ask a model for “the best running brand” and the incumbents return by reflex, because their instinct was built on a decade of the internet talking about the giants. Nine brands account for 22 percent of all mentions. But that grip is specific to the broad question. Go category by category and a different brand leads almost every one.

How do I get my brand recommended by ChatGPT and other AI models?

Get into the “best of” roundups the models already trust, own one category rather than the whole sport, and keep your coverage current, because the models reward freshness and punish staleness. Living on your own website is not enough. Brand-owned sites are under 5 percent of all citations.

Which sources do AI models trust most for running recommendations?

Media roundups, not brands. Runner’s World was cited in 40.5 percent of all answers, followed by iRunFar, OutdoorGearLab, and RunRepeat. The top ten domains account for a quarter of all 16,990 citations.

Why does winning one category not help in another?

The model cannot try on the shoes, taste the gels, or feel the watch, so for each category it goes to that category’s specialist sources. Authority does not transfer. Owning “best running shoe” and owning “best running headphones” are two unrelated wins.

Which AI models were tested, and how?

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, across 22 categories at 20 unaided prompts each, for 2,200 total responses. Every prompt asked the category question and never named a brand, so the results measure organic visibility.

How often is the study updated?

The plan with Centium is to re-run it every 6-12 months. This is the June 2026 baseline.

Methodology

22 categories at 20 unaided prompts each, run across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, for 2,200 total responses. 2,052 brands and entities surfaced, with 16,990 citations across 2,558 domains. Every prompt asks about the category and never names a brand, so the figures measure organic visibility. Results are aggregated across the five models (per-model counts are excluded because each runs under different output limits, making them non-comparable). Page-type classification is keyword-based, and the media-outlet share within fan-out counts a fixed list of named publications, so it is a floor, not a ceiling.

Source run: June 3, 2026. Study by Centium AI.

This piece is built from the full Centium AI study and my conversation with Michael Rueckert on Long Run Labs. Listen to the episode here (Apple) or here (Spotify).

If you want the practical, how-to companion, I wrote a three-part series on using AI as a marketer, founder, and operator, beginning here.

Want to know how your own brand shows up inside the models? Michael and the team at Centium AI measure exactly that, and there are free tools on their site to start.

A follow up to this piece can be found here:

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

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Guest snapshot

Sara Hendershot is a 2012 Olympian in the women’s pair and a two-time World Championship gold medalist who rowed at Princeton, where she studied psychology. She moved from agency-side sports PR at SMACK! Media into brand building as the third employee at Momentous, where she ran athlete partnerships from 2018 through the company’s acquisition. After a stint consulting and time at Harvard, she joined Loonen as employee number four. She lives outside Boston with her husband and two sons.

Athletes make unfair operators

I’ve said on this show more than once: athletes are some of the best people you can put into the business world, especially in early-stage company building. Sara agrees, and she is specific about why. Resilience is the obvious one, the ability to get knocked down on a schedule and treat it as information rather than an ending. But the part she keeps coming back to is the team mentality, and the willingness to bring empathy into a culture that is built around performance.

She also names something most people skip past. Two Olympic cycles taught her two completely different skill sets. The first was inside a structured national team system she had to follow. The second she designed herself, assembling her own coach, nutritionist, physiologist, and strength coach. That second version, the one where she had full agency and had to build the system from nothing, is the one that maps cleanly onto startup life.

The values were just goals in disguise

The transition out of sport is where a lot of this gets real. Sara’s first instinct after retiring was to take the tangible feedback loop of rowing, the meters and the lifts and the splits, and bolt it onto business. Productivity became the new finish line. She filled every minute and counted a day a success if she ran herself into the ground. That lasted about six months.

What changed it was nine years of work with a therapist, and a hard look at what she was actually optimizing for. When she first wrote out her values, she realized they were all outcome-based. They were not values at all.

The deeper unlock was emotional intelligence, the kind that high performance can quietly reward you for never developing. She tells a story about an early therapy session where she could not understand why anyone would need to be validated. Why tell someone you hear them if you are not also solving the problem? Learning to sit in that, to be empathetic and to see the humanness inside a performance problem, is what she credits for making her better across every brand she has touched since.

From testimonial to storyteller to creator

Sara joined Momentous in 2018 and helped build its athlete team through 2021, right on the inflection point I lived through at InsideTracker. The old model was a name and a quote on a roster. What replaced it was storytelling, peeling back the layers on what makes a person relatable, and then the full shift to athletes as creators. The expectation now, if you want to turn being an athlete into a career, is increasingly to create.

She points to the WNBA and to athletes like Ilona Maher as the blueprint, people who were building an audience before anyone was paying attention and then capitalized when the moment came. She is candid that this was once anti-rowing culture, where any energy spent creating was read as proof you were not a serious athlete. That has loosened, and she is excited to watch athletes find the path on the way to LA.

Inside Loonen, and the problem hiding in plain sight

Loonen started with a personal story. Co-founder Clara, a longtime venture partner, went through IVF and did the self-audit a lot of people do when trying to get pregnant. Food, makeup, cleaning supplies, every category had a clean, better-for-you option. Water did not. She called David, a co-founder who had been employee number two at Spindrift and ran operations there for a decade, and asked why no one had built a truly transparent, high-quality water. The answer was that it is operationally hard, expensive, and not required by the FDA, so most brands simply do not.

The product itself is the answer to that gap. Loonen combines the highest-quality source with a high-quality filtration system, then rebalances the water with minerals to match the composition of a perfect spring. It goes only into glass, gets tested for more than 350 contaminants, and ships with a QR code on every bottle that links to the batch’s full results. They are NSF certified and non-detect across the contaminants that matter. As Sara puts it, the bar is not staying under some regulatory limit.

Selling clean without selling fear

This is the part of the conversation Jon pushed hardest on, because it is the trap every health brand falls into. To win, Loonen has to educate people that a problem exists. Do that wrong and you become one more voice telling consumers everything they touch is killing them. Sara is purposeful about avoiding it, and you can see it in the branding. The label is cheery and bright and pops on a shelf full of dusty green bottles, which is a deliberate refusal to be a fear-mongering brand.

The framing she uses instead is positional. Loonen is not the whole answer.

We don’t view ourselves as being the solution. We view ourselves as being part of the solution.

Sara Hendershot

The problem becomes obvious, she argues, the moment people register that water is the single thing they consume the most of, the number one ingredient in their kitchen, and that their bodies are mostly water. Once that lands, caring about water quality the way you already care about food and supplements stops feeling optional. It is the same playbook she ran at Momentous, where the job was teaching people why third-party NSF certification mattered in an unregulated supplement market.

Community and distribution are the moat

Jon’s thesis on this show is that in a sea of noise, community and distribution are the most valuable assets a brand can hold, and Sara is living it. Loonen is going national in Sprouts, its first national retailer, and is also on Amazon, though she is honest that glass is heavy and the better experience is buying it off a local shelf.

The community work is relentless and in person. She has not stopped traveling in months, showing up where water naturally belongs and where the right people already gather. The Rec Room pop-up on Newbury Street during Boston Marathon weekend, a Nike and Skims training event, a live Rich Roll and Stacey Sims recording. The advantage she leans on is that her competitors are faceless conglomerates. Loonen has real people who will walk into a favorite LA cafe and ask how the bottle placements and the bakery sales are going.

Leadership as coaching

When Jon asked about building a high-performance culture, Sara reached for rowing again, and for Drew Ginn’s line, “will it make the boat go faster.” Her core model for managing people is coaching. The best coaches do not run one system for everyone. They read the person in front of them and help them become their own best version.

The best coaches adapt to the athletes in front of them.

Sara Hendershot

The other half is vulnerability. She intentionally tells her co-founders what she does not know or what is scaring her, because that is how the walls come down and risk-taking and failure become safe. None of it replaces the standard. The Loonen team is eight people who have all signed up to grind, and she only brings on people who get that combination innately.

What success actually means

Loonen’s bigger ambition is not just to build a strong CPG business, though Sara believes the opportunity is there. It is to set a standard that forces other brands to rise to it, on the theory that consumers hold the real power through where they choose to spend. For Sara personally, the definition is quieter. Success is showing up every day proud of the work and without changing who she is to do it. Right now, she said, she is getting all of it.

Takeaways

• The agency you build designing your own system, in sport or anywhere, transfers further than the system itself.

• Values written as outcomes are just goals. The real ones describe how you show up, not what you hit.

• The athlete-to-creator shift is now the expectation, not the edge. Building an audience before anyone is watching is the move.

• You can educate a market into a new category without fear-mongering. Lead with what you do, not with what everyone else is doing wrong.

• Distribution plus genuine, in-person community is the moat for a CPG brand competing against faceless giants.

• Manage like a coach. Read the individual, lead with vulnerability, and never lower the standard.

Listen and follow

Find Sara on Instagram at @sarahendershot, find at loonen.com and at @loonenwater, and pick up a bottle at your local Sprouts.

A word from our partners

The Huddle. Building a business is isolating. You’re making decisions daily that most people in your life don’t fully understand, and surface-level networking rarely helps. What my co-founders Jason Fitzgerald, Ross Yellin, and I built at The Huddle is different: a peer advisory community for early-stage founders who want real accountability and real conversation. Small cohorts, cross-industry, monthly sessions. Someone in the room will tell you the thing you actually need to hear. In-person in Boulder, virtual cohorts open anywhere. Go to findmyhuddle.com and fill out the application.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here. We connected SO many brands to Popfly in Olympic Valley; it was a really fun full circle moment of digital world → real world!

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

Let me try to explain the mechanism, because the mechanism is the part that makes me think this is durable and not a bubble.

First, the growth is real

I am wary of hype, so let me start with the numbers. Trail running is growing at roughly 8% on a five year average annual basis. Running overall is around 1%. Hiking is around 2%. Trail is expanding several times faster than the activities sitting right next to it. Participation is up roughly 280% since 2008, which is a decade-long climb, not a spike.

Two numbers matter more than the headline growth, though. The sport is not losing the people it gains, and the people who join are racing more often. Acquisition plus retention plus rising frequency is the signature of something that compounds.

It is the difference between a fad and a foundation.

The flywheel

Here is the part I keep thinking about. The growth is not coming from one lever. It is coming from several pieces that build on each other, where one plus one somehow equals three. My favorite equation!

Shorter race distances lowered the barrier to entry. It used to be 50 miles or 100k+ or bust, and that is a terrifying front door. Sub-ultra racing is becoming more and more popular, and offers a distance that does not require you to reorganize your life in order to finish the thing. So newcomers arrive. And when they arrive, they meet a community that is unusually, almost suspiciously warm. I’ve watched runners who had never met cheer each other through the dark. I watched the crowd treat a back of the pack finisher and a podium athlete with the same volume of love. That warmth is not a nice-to-have. It is the retention engine. People stay because of how it feels to be there. Meanwhile, stars from road, track, skiing, and triathlon are wandering over to trail, and they are bringing their audiences with them. And they’re often happily surprised at how welcome they feel, and how much fun they’re having.

The broadcast layer is finally catching up to carry all of it, and it is good now. Really good. A backyard ultra a couple weeks ago pulled around 60K concurrent viewers on a livestream (I noticed about 40K at Western States’ peak!). The production has gotten cinematic: drone lines over the ridges, live aid station cut-ins, commentary that actually knows the athletes and the stakes. The ability to follow racers in or out of aid stations via drone is super cool. Races that used to live in a single canyon on a single day are now something you can watch from your couch three time zones away and feel your own (and DBo’s) heart rate climb. That is new, and it is a bigger deal than most people realize.

So: easier entry brings newcomers, warmth keeps them, crossover stars import new eyes, broadcast turns the sport into something you can watch, and all of that brings in more newcomers. Each piece makes the next one stronger. That is the flywheel, and once you see it spinning you cannot unsee it.

Growing at both ends

The fun, counterintuitive part is that trail is stretching in two directions at once. At one end, the extremes are redefining what the sport even is: last person standing formats, 200 milers, women pushing into the longest and hardest distances in numbers we have never seen. At the other end, the accessible on-ramp keeps widening. The traditional middle is no longer the whole story. The sport is getting more hardcore and more welcoming at the same time, and somehow both are true.

But a flywheel spins around some gaps

Honestly, the part I keep turning over is not the growth. It is the stuff that is not quite there yet.

The sport still mostly tells its stories from the front of the pack, and statistically, the bulk of this community finishes in the middle, and there are a whole lot of underrepresented people in the back of the pack (and other parts). They are the ones who make the finish line loud at midnight, and I would love to see the storytelling catch up to where the people actually are. That gap is sharpest for the people the camera reaches for least. Women's fields are producing the most compelling racing in the sport right now and still get a fraction of the coverage, and runners of color remain underrepresented on the start line, in the sponsorship, who is speaking on panels and making choices at brands, and in whose story gets told at all. Raz at Running Sucks wrote the version of this I keep coming back to, and it is worth your time.

And here is a gap that sits right on top of how much I love the coverage. Even with all of it, we often cannot tell where the racers actually are. The footage looks incredible, but the positional layer, who is leading, by how much, who is closing, drops out for long stretches. Part of that is the terrain. Trackers lag, fail, or go dark the moment the course climbs into the places that make trail trail. Part of it is that the broadcast has not solved how to show it yet. For a sport that is suddenly watchable, the next unlock is making it followable, knowing what you are watching while you watch it. The day I can pull up a race and see the gaps tightening in real time is the day trail coverage goes from thrilling to unmissable.

As I’ve written about, a solve already exists for this. (Disclaimer: my conviction is so strong here that I’m both an investor and advisor in the company that can solve for this)

And here is the one that surprised me most: at the biggest gathering of brands and operators this sport has, I did not hear a single real panel conversation about how AI is changing the way runners find the products they buy. The buying journey increasingly starts with a question typed into a model, not a search bar, and the industry most exposed to that shift has not started talking about it yet. That felt like a miss. It is also exactly the kind of gap that becomes an opportunity for whoever sees it first.

The honest part

Growth has a cost, and I would not be telling the truth if I skipped it. Trailheads are more crowded. The best races are harder to get into. The culture is going mainstream, and some of the rough, improvised magic gets sanded down as the money arrives. The smartest people I sat with all week were asking the same hard question out loud: can this sport grow without losing the soul that made us fall in love with it?

I am optimistic, and here is why. A lot of the people now stewarding trail came from bike, ski, surf, and triathlon. They have already lived through a boom and the bust that followed it. They have seen what happens when a sport gets mined for a quick cycle of attention, and many of them are here, specifically, because they want to help trail avoid that fate. That instinct, growing something on purpose instead of cashing it in; that is the thing that makes me believe.

Why I am still all in

I bet my career on this sport because I believe small, high-trust communities are where the most interesting things happen, and trail is the clearest example of that I have ever found. A week on the ground did not make me nervous about the bet. It made me want to double down.

The growth is exciting. But the gaps are what keep me up at night in the good way, the things not yet built, the people not yet served, the version of this sport that is still coming. It is a good time to be in trail. It is an even better time to help build it the right way.

I will be here doing exactly that.

One more thing, since the AI gap is on my mind. Next week on Long Run Labs I go deep on exactly this with Michael from Centium AI, on how AI is becoming the new front door to brand discovery and what that means for the brands we love.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

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Guest snapshot

Who: Megan Lightcap, partner at Slow Ventures, where she runs the firm’s creator fund.

Where: San Francisco, by way of New York.

Day job: Backing creators and niche founders at the earliest stage, sometimes a founder and a pitch deck and nothing else, at prices cheap enough to reflect how early she is willing to go.

People matter, brands don’t: the era of the individual

The first line of Megan’s deck is blunt, and she means it literally. We are in the era of the individual. Trust in faceless institutions cracked somewhere around 2020, and what replaced it was trust in people. Her examples were Elon and Sam Altman, founders who are the bet, where the company is almost a vehicle for the person at the helm.

Running figured this out years ago. Nobody falls in love with a shoe company the way they fall in love with the person who hosts the run club, reviews the shoes, or shows up in their ears three times a week. The trust does not live in the brand. It lives in a person, and the brand is borrowing it.

“People identify with the human condition and the human story way more than they do a faceless brand.” -Megan Lightcap

Own the niche, not the category: riches in niches, for real this time

Riches in niches is an old line. Megan’s point is that it is truer now than ever, because the internet stripped the friction out of finding your tribe. The person obsessed with one specific thing used to find maybe fifteen others down at the local legion. Now they find a million in two seconds. The niche was never small. The world is just enormous, and the obsessed corner of it finally got to assemble.

This is running’s native state. There is no single running audience. There is couch to 5K and there is the sub-elite chasing a Trials standard, road and trail, the shoe nerd and the longevity crowd and the run-club-as-social-life crowd. Every one of those is deep enough to build inside. Go so narrow you become the person for a thing, and the narrowness is what produces the loyalty.

Build worlds, not products: give people doors to open

A product with no story and no trust behind it is just inventory. The people who win, Megan said, give their audience a world to explore rather than a thing to buy. Lots of doors. The video, the dinner, the newsletter, the product, the strange late-night posts. Every door is another way in, and the more doors there are, the harder the person is to leave.

Running creators have these doors natively, and one of them is a door consumer companies would kill for: the in-person run club. You cannot replicate that stickiness with a paid ad. The host who can fill a room every Tuesday has a relationship that does not show up on a spreadsheet. The podcast is a door. The race is a door. The training plan, the merch drop, the local meetup, all doors. The audience does not follow a product. They move into a world and start paying rent in attention.

Short the mass market: why eyeballs got cheap

One of Megan’s bluntest slides: we are in a post-attention economy, and eyeballs are not worth much anymore. When the cost of making content is zero, reach is cheap and reach is noise. Followers are low signal. What is actually expensive, and what actually predicts anything, is depth. The person who buys the thing, knows the story, shows up, and brings a friend.

Running is the proof. Think about who can fill a room in our world. Ali Feller pulling hundreds into a New Balance facility. A comedian with a couple hundred thousand followers selling out a trivia night at a major marathon. These hosts can ask a room to do almost anything and the room does it. That is not an audience. That is a congregation, and the metric that matters is not how many follow but how many show up.

“Bigger isn’t always better in this world. Measuring engagement and loyalty in other ways is way more telling.” -Megan Lightcap

AI accelerates the defensible and washes away the rest

This was the part I have not stopped thinking about. Megan’s line, written back in December, is that AI accelerates the defensible creators and washes away the rest. The algorithm has gotten so good at serving content to the right people that if you cannot break through, it is usually because you do not have an angle, a message, or a niche anyone actually wants. AI makes creation easier and retention harder. The flood of cheap, machine-made everything makes authentic human connection more valuable by contrast, not less.

In practice, the product stopped being the moat. Slow flew thirty creators to San Francisco for a two-day hackathon and taught them to ship real software in the terminal. One creator had just replaced a contractor because he built the tool himself. Whatever was easy to copy got easier to copy, which means it is worth less. The scarce thing left is the community and the trust underneath it. Running creators already had the hard part. AI just handed them the tools for everything else.

“The scarce thing is actually the community and the trust and the cult that the creator has.” -Megan Lightcap

Where the outdoor money actually fits

I asked Megan where she sees venture actually participating in the outdoor boom, and she did not point at a single brand. She pointed at the ecosystem. Any one niche outdoor sport may be too small for a fund to underwrite on its own. But an ecosystem of them, with enough shared infrastructure on the back end and enough cross-pollination of the same customer, can clear a bar that a single brand cannot.

We also got into the pattern that keeps repeating in consumer: the thing starts on the fringe, in a small culty group, then makes its way to the mainstream where the big dollars are, and by the time it gets there the original crowd has moved on. Salomon going from trail-only to the cool shoe on city streets is the version everyone in our world has watched in real time. If you are building, the question is which side of that wave you are on, and whether you own a community deep enough to ride it instead of getting flattened by it.

Megan’s read on the outdoor money is one piece of a much bigger picture I have been assembling. I’m working on deeper guide to raising in this space and it is coming soon: which of the seven categories of endurance business you are in, what shape of capital each one supports, who to take money from, and who to walk away from. It pulls from the last six months of these conversations and the deals landing in my inbox.

Subscribe and you will get it the day it drops.

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Takeaways

• People over brands. In the era of the individual, audiences trust a person, not a logo. The trust is the asset, and the brand is borrowing it.

• Niche is the moat. The internet made it frictionless to find your tribe. Go so narrow you become the person for a thing, because narrowness is what produces loyalty.

• Build a world, not a product. Give your audience multiple doors to walk through. Running’s killer door, the in-person run club, is one consumer companies cannot fake.

• Depth beats reach. Followers are low signal. The real metric is who buys, who shows up, and who brings a friend.

• AI raises the price of the moat. When building gets commoditized, the only defensible thing left is the community and trust you spent years earning.

• Obsession is the bar. The reason to build cannot be the money or the title. There are easier ways to make a dollar. It has to be something you cannot stop thinking about, and running is full of exactly those people.

Listen & follow

Find Megan at creatorfund.co, and on LinkedIn and X

Long Run Labs is on Instagram, X, YouTube, and Threads.

See you out there.

At TrailCon this week

If you are at TrailCon, come find me. I will be at the Second Nature meetup on Wednesday at 9am in the Alpenglow room, and I am hosting a group run with Amazfit. Register for the run here: movemint.cc/events/ftlramazfit.

A word on our partners

The Huddle. Building a business is isolating. You’re making decisions daily that most people in your life don’t fully understand, and surface-level networking rarely helps. What my co-founders Jason Fitzgerald, Ross Yellin, and I built at The Huddle is different: a peer advisory community for early-stage founders who want real accountability and real conversation. Small cohorts, cross-industry, monthly sessions. Someone in the room will tell you the thing you actually need to hear. In-person in Boulder, virtual cohorts open anywhere. Go to findmyhuddle.com and fill out the application.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here. And if you’re in Olympic Valley this week and curious about Popfly, I’ll connect you with their team who is here too!

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

Listen

• Listen on Spotify

• Listen on Apple Podcasts

Watch on YouTube

Guest snapshot

Who: Jason Daniel, founder of LSKD, father of three, motocross racer turned brand builder

Where: Brand born in Logan, Australia; joined the show from Austin, Texas; thirty-plus stores across Australia and New Zealand with a US build underway

Day job: Building LSKD, a functional fitness apparel brand on track for a projected two hundred million this year with a team of over seven hundred

A kid from Logan: the nickname that became a brand

Jason Daniel was thirteen, riding BMX with a pack of eighteen-year-olds, when he came up short on a jump that looked enormous at the time. The older guys razzed him. “You’re a loose kid,” they said, because he was the youngest one there. The nickname stuck. A few years later it became a brand. A couple of decades after that, it became LSKD.

He joined me on Long Run Labs from Austin, a long way from Logan, the Australian town he keeps coming back to in the story. What I loved about this one is that none of it was a straight line, and Jason is the first to tell you so.

Before there was a brand, there was a teenager who wanted to be a professional motocross athlete and slowly figured out he wasn’t going to get paid for it. So he chased a trade instead. He lasted three months as an electrician and hated it. He ran a bricklaying yard and learned logistics. Then he called up a carpenter and offered to work for free, every Tuesday, for three months, before he was given an apprenticeship. He took a pay cut to two hundred and forty dollars a week to do it. He was eighteen.

The brand, meanwhile, just kept tugging at his sleeve. People at the motocross track kept asking when the next shirts were dropping. It wasn’t him spotting a gap in the market, he told me. People kept asking for product. That is the part I find most honest. He didn’t run a SWOT analysis. He made stuff for the people around him because they wanted it, and the thing grew out of genuine curiosity rather than a spreadsheet.

Stuck at three million: when the win wasn’t a win

Here is the part founders need to hear. For five years the business sat at $3M a year with a team of twelve, and Jason assumed that meant he had arrived. He hadn’t. It wasn’t profitable. It was stressful. Retailers cancelled orders weeks out from shipping. He couldn’t always pay himself.

“It was actually really stressful. I couldn’t pay myself. The model wasn’t working.”

The turn came from two places. In 2015 he did the Landmark Forum, a three-day personal development course, with his wife Allie and his mom, and it cracked open a willingness to learn he admits he didn’t have before. Then in 2018 he met Matt Gellner, who came on as a part-time CFO one day a week on a government grant, did a stretch of it pro bono, and taught Jason how to actually read a P&L. Jason calls it the art and the science. He had the art. Matt brought the science.

In September of 2018 they renamed the company LSKD and rebuilt it around a purpose: inspire the community to be one percent better every day. Develop product for the people who wear it, not for the wholesale buyer. The first goal wasn’t a moonshot. It was $10M in five years, profitable and sustainable. They ten-x’d it.

The number was never the point

I brought up Andrew Wilkinson’s book Never Enough, and that nagging hedonic treadmill where the next number is always the one that will finally make you happy. Jason’s answer was better than the book. The $3M that looked like a win from the outside was actually the most stressful chapter. The growth came when he stopped white-knuckling the number and went back to fundamentals: great product, real community, a clear why.

I know this feeling from the other side of my life. I spent years squeezing the sub-three-hour marathon so tight I couldn’t breathe, and I only ran 2:59:40 once I loosened my grip and just put in the miles. Jason and I basically ran the same time, give or take, and we got there the same way. You stop obsessing over the outcome, you fall in love with the work, and the outcome shows up when it’s ready.

Building running slowly: trust as a five-year project

LSKD got into running the way Jason gets into everything, which is to say organically and with no real idea what he was doing. His first half marathon in 2019 was roughly an hour twenty-eight at a heart rate around one ninety, and he was sick for the rest of the day. He took a year off during COVID to chase a 200kg deadlift. He ran his first marathon in 2021 without knowing what cadence meant. He races in Vaporflies now and trains in everything.

“I’d do it anyway, because I love it.”

On the business side, he refused to rush it. The running pillar was a 5-10 year build. The clearest example is an event that started by accident. On the first of January in 2021, a few of them ran a half marathon instead of drinking the night before. They did it again the next year, and the next, and it grew. Now it’s a global thing: twenty-six kilometers for 2026, adding one kilometer a year toward a full marathon in 2042, with 5k, 10k, and 15k options so beginners can jump in. The Gold Coast meetup alone drew over five hundred people.

The one thing no other brand can copy

That New Year’s run is exactly what I was writing about in my Mount to Coast piece from Boston. There is so much noise in brand marketing now that most activations could swap one logo for another and nothing would change. The question I keep coming back to is this: what is the one thing your brand can do that no one else can replicate? For LSKD, it’s a run on the first of January that is baked into the DNA of the company. You can’t copy that, because it grew out of who they actually are.

Values before followers

When it comes to athletes and partnerships, Jason leads with values alignment and a real relationship, not follower count. He’d rather build a friendship and a long-term win-win than rent an audience. He pointed to Brie Masters, an Olympic sprinter who works on the LSKD team four days a week and helps look after their running athletes, as the kind of relationship he’s proud of. He counts gym owners and trainers as athletes too, because they’ve done the hard work of building a community.

This is the whole thesis behind the network I’ve built, and the “Small Shows Hit Different” piece I wrote. One impression is not equal to one impression. A show with 500 deeply engaged listeners can move more than a huge audience with no real overlap. Jason gets it instinctively, because he’s been building trust one community member at a time for twenty years.

Landmark, books, and the voice in your head

We both did the Landmark Forum, so I wanted to dig into it. Jason went in skeptical, struggled through the first day, and fell in love with it on the second. What stuck with him was integrity, keeping your word, and the idea that the voice in your head isn’t real, that your past doesn’t have to run your present. It sent him to Toastmasters and then to books, and eventually his own team started asking to do the course too. He says LSKD wouldn’t be here without it.

We also touched on Nike at Boston, where Jason, a devoted Shoe Dog reader, mostly felt for them and named his own biggest fear out loud: building a global brand and losing the essence that made it worth building in the first place. And we got into AI, where his take is refreshingly grounded. Use it to learn faster and write a strategy quickly, sure. But you don’t build community from a spreadsheet.

“You don’t get that from a spreadsheet. You’ve got to be out in the community.”

What I keep coming back to

I asked Jason the same question I once asked about fifty people while I was working up the nerve to bet on myself: what did it take for you to bet on you? His answer wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was a kid who kept showing up, kept making product for his friends, and kept choosing the longer road, the trade, the free Tuesdays, the slow build, until one day the thing he’d been carrying around for twenty years turned into something real.

My friend Phil put it well recently. Successful people are often just the ones who last the longest. Not the best idea on day one, the most surface area over time. Jason is proof. So is every good marathon. So is every brand worth trusting.

Takeaways

• Build for the people in front of you. LSKD grew because Jason made product his friends actually wanted, not because he spotted a market gap.

• The visible win can be the wrong one. $3M a year looked like success and was the least profitable, most stressful chapter of the whole thing.

• Loosen the grip on the number. Growth came when Jason went back to fundamentals, the same way a marathon PR shows up when you stop white-knuckling the time.

• Make something only you can make. The first-of-January run is uncopyable because it grew out of who LSKD already is.

• Values before followers. Alignment and trust beat raw reach, in athlete partnerships and in podcast sponsorships alike.

Catch me at TrailCon

A few places to find me and the crew at TrailCon this week:

• Popfly is hosting a marketer meetup. If you’re a brand or marketer who wants in, reach out for more info.

• I’ll be at the Second Nature meetup at 9am Wednesday morning.

• And at 7:30am on Thursday, come find me for a group run at Coffeebar with Amazfit, where we’ll also have Precision Fuel & Hydration’s new watermelon chews on hand, and showing off the mapping features; key for any pacer who will be out on course at Western States!

A word on our partners

The Huddle. Building a business is isolating. You’re making decisions daily that most people in your life don’t fully understand, and surface-level networking rarely helps. What my co-founders Jason Fitzgerald, Ross Yellin, and I built at The Huddle is different: a peer advisory community for early-stage founders who want real accountability and real conversation. Small cohorts, cross-industry, monthly sessions. Someone in the room will tell you the thing you actually need to hear. In-person in Boulder, virtual cohorts open anywhere. Go to findmyhuddle.com and fill out the application.

Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

One last quick note: I spent some time this weekend updating my website over at forthelong.run. I’d love your thoughts if you have a chance to check it out. If you haven’t listened to For The Long Run, a podcast all about exploring the why of what keeps runners running long, strong, and motivated, start here (on this new page)!

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

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