Run with purpose
For years sports gear companies have been selling the idea to runners that faster is better, but there are signs the future may be more about connecting than competing, writes Gina Kolata
The athletes who have stopped chasing PBS
Taylor Little was 20 when she lined up for her first marathon. Because she has cerebral palsy, Little needed someone else’s legs and arms to help get her through it.
Peter Kline was a 60-year-old experienced distance runner looking for a new challenge when he lined up behind a large jogging wheelchair that day in 2012 to push Little through the 26.2 miles of the Las Vegas Marathon.
They made it across the finish line together in 5 hours 27 minutes, and Little still remembers her emotions from that day. “I felt like I could be like everyone else,” she says.
Little, now 25, has kept going, joined by her sister Erin, 20, who also has cerebral palsy. Since that first race in Las Vegas, their hometown, they have each done about three marathons a year.
That day also helped change Kline, who had regularly run marathons. He never returned to traditional racing, he says, and he founded Marathons With Meaning, an organisation that pairs runners and people with disabilities.
Marathons With Meaning was featured in a striking campaign released late last year by the apparel company Brooks Running, which is a sponsor of Kline’s group. The catalogue eschewed conventional models and Olympic contenders, leading off with photographs of runners from another organisation that Brooks supports: Black Girls Run!, which aims to encourage healthier lifestyles for all women, but especially African-americans.
The theme, said Melanie Allen, Brooks’ chief marketing officer, was “giving back,” and the catalogue aimed to show running as more than a solitary sport in which the quality of the experience is measured strictly by a clock.
The concept appears to be in step with a distinct trend in running, as well as an emerging one in marketing. The competitive running boom, which led to a glut of races with steep fees, has crested and started giving way to more social, and less exclusive, events like mud runs. The sport’s future may be more about connecting than competing.
For Toni Carey, 34, one of the founders of Black Girls Run!, the Brooks theme was “a breath of fresh air”.
African-americans are a rarity among recreational runners. They make up only five per cent of female runners, by Carey’s estimate, and the low numbers seem to have a selfperpetuating effect, discouraging some from even trying the sport. That is where Black Girls Run! comes in, offering support and camaraderie.
“If you don’t see yourself in a particular sport, you think it’s not for you,” Carey says.
At the same time, the advertising world in general has been taking baby steps away from the airbrushed idealism often used to sell products to women.
In 2004, Dove began a campaign called Real Beauty featuring women of various ages, races and sizes. The strategy brought Dove lasting fame, but over the years the company has also produced heavily criticised “before and after” ads that showed dark-skinned women morphing into white ones. Also, critics have noted that while Dove said it was changing the standards of beauty, the campaign implicitly told women to buy Dove products in order to be beautiful.
Nevertheless, the campaign increased sales, says Americus Reed II, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He says he had seen internal data from Dove.
For a company like Brooks, Reed says this sort of approach can be risky.
“Brand is a signal of identity,” he says, and traditional advertising for running gear plays on customers’ idealised view of themselves. A runner might know she is a novice, but when looking at a photograph of a perfectly toned athlete on a mountain road, she might imagine herself there, with a bit of effort.
Even if competitive athletes are moved by the images in the Brooks campaign, they may subliminally
Kline knew he needed a new approach. he was getting almost bored after competing in marathons for more than a decade
reject the product because they don’t recognise their idealised selves in it, Reed says.
Those competitive runners are often loyal evangelists for their brands, Reed says, while recreational runners tend to be less loyal and to stay with the sport for shorter times.
Companies, Reed adds, have to ask, “Is it worth it to dilute my target market at the expense of possibly diluting my brand?”
Brooks says its Christmas shoot had helped sales, but the company declined to provide figures. The company also says it plans to continue the theme in this month’s catalogue, conveying inspirational stories through real runners.
One is Gabriele Grunewald, a professional middle distance runner sponsored by Brooks who is being treated for a rare cancer, adenoid cystic carcinoma, but continues to compete. Another is Julie Lam, an Ironman triathlete who began running in her 40s after a sixmonth period in which her father and grandfather died and she got divorced.
Carey, a communications and marketing manager for a nonprofit organisation, says that members of her group were not paid in cash for appearing in the catalogue, but that they got to keep the clothes they wore. And they got to impart the mission of Black Girls Run! in a way they had not expected.
She and Kline have no doubt that Brooks was wise to focus on how running can build communities. “Oh my God, these brands are actually getting it,” Carey says.
Kline, an investment adviser for Merrill Lynch in Bellevue, Washington, says: “I think it’s genius. I have no financial interest in Brooks, but I hope they blow the doors off.”
Like Carey, he says that he and his group had not received compensation for appearing in the catalogue, and he adds that he would not have accepted cash if it had been offered.
Kline remembers being dismissed when he initially approached various philanthropic organisations about finding young people with disabilities that prevented them from pushing themselves through the typical wheelchair division of a marathon.
He says the charities “told me it was a dumb idea” and insisted that their clients would prefer visiting a theme park to being pushed through a marathon.
But Kline knew he needed a new approach to running. He was getting almost bored after competing in marathons for more than a decade. He had qualified for and run in the Boston Marathon, and he had done ultras. But the goals he had set for himself no longer seemed allconsuming.
So Kline persisted in seeking a rider-athlete – his preferred term for Marathons With Meaning partners – and found Taylor Little. Their time in that debut race in Las Vegas was more than an hour and a half slower than Kline’s best as a solo marathoner: 3:55 at the same event five years earlier.
But speed was beside the point. He had rediscovered his passion.
Little’s mother, Eden Capsouto, says she too felt the emotional tug of inclusion.
“I was waiting at the sideline as the mother of an athlete,” she says. “It was very cool.