the syndicate log

an ode to run clubs

the sport that makes you stay

one of my favorite parts of trail racing is the community, and near the top of the kreuzeck climb at the zugspitz ultratrail last weekend, a group of locals from garmisch-partenkirchen delivered it yet again. the zegapa cheering section is powered by the nomads, a local trail running crew who were there at my first zuggy in 2023 and have grown into one of the defining moments of the entire event. they named it zegapa after zegama-aizkorri, the legendary basque race famous for its walls of noise, and they've transplanted that energy to the bavarian alps and made it completely their own.

what makes zegapa hit the way it does is the timing. it comes on the heels of 30 switchbacks, a four-mile climb that gains over 5,000 feet. for every runner in the field, whether you're racing the 29K, the 45K, the 107K or beyond, it arrives in the back half of your race. you are already cooked. and then the noise finds you in the trees before the crowd does, and something shifts.

on friday during the 29K, i sent my in-laws up to experience it while they cheered on friends of mine who were racing. my mother-in-law cried. it brought that kind of emotion to a spectator who had never seen a trail race before. that's the feeling i get every time on that climb. the placement is the stuff that saves races with an almost insistence to every runner that you're going to make it. and when you're baking in the sun at over 90 degrees, every bit helps.

this year my 107K became a 75K when utmb officials modified the course, but even setting off at 5AM, zegapa was loud. the nomads had been up there since the middle of the night. that's real devotion. and it's an expression of something this sport does better than almost any other: the race inside their backyard belongs to everyone who shows up, not just the people who paid the entry fee.

two weeks before zugspitz, i was at a wedding in dc. the groom is someone i met for the first time at the boston marathon. we were strangers a day before the start. today he's one of my good friends. we're dropping this issue on the birthday of another one of those people, someone i met during a trail race in washington state, who is now a best friend in the way that only shared suffering can produce.

i'm not sure any other sport does this. golf gives you four hours of intermittent conversation and the social pressure to be impressive. cycling has a draft and a pace line where talking can get complicated. but running, especially long running, strips out the performance. you can't posture at mile twenty. you can't be cool on a trail climb. somewhere between an hour in and the finish line - in training and in racing - the conversation goes where it actually wants to go: family, strategy, fueling, work, politics, kids, whatever is real. you can't yell at someone in the middle of a hard effort, so you end up actually listening. the friendships that come out of that are a different category.

this is what makes the run club boom feel like something more than a fitness trend. strava reported a 59% increase in running club participation globally in 2024. by 2025 the platform had crossed one million total clubs, with new club creation nearly quadrupling year over year. 58% of users said they made new friends through a run club. these aren't just fitness numbers. these are people finding their people. the run club is becoming the thing it was always quietly capable of being: a place where you show up for the miles and stay for everything else.

if you want to understand what that looks like at its best, watch the nomads at zegapa. the reel from last weekend is worth two minutes of your time. watch it here.

botrc corner

the competition is the excuse. the people are the point.

most people aren't flying to germany for a trail race. and that's fine, because the zegapa energy isn't the point. the people are. the run club in your city, the group that does the tuesday track session, the five friends who somehow convinced each other to start logging vert every week, that's the same thing at a different altitude.

battle of the run clubs launches august 1. the one thing we're hoping it does is get someone to run with a new person, or run with a group for the first time this month. clubs of up to five members, scoring on total mileage and vertical. if you've been meaning to get in, now is the time.

that's it for this one. if you dig it, forward it to a running friend.

midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.

come run with us.

graham + mark

syndicate running

zugspitz ultra, three days out

the gear changed. the mountain didn't.

four years ago i ran the zugspitz ultratrail for the first time in just under 24 hours. hokas on my feet, patagonia half tights, an adidas shirt, a red arcteryx jacket. gear i could have bought at any REI in the country. it was a sufferfest for a variety of reasons. but my love affair with garmisch probably solidified that day.

my two zuggy's since have each been an adventure in their own way. and i'm back in three days aiming for sub-15 hours. the mountain is the same. the gear is not.

this year i'm in la sportiva prodigio pro on my feet, nnormal bottoms, saysky tops. none of it is available at your local running shop. most american runners haven't heard of any of it. and that distance between what's stocked at the nearest fleet feet and what runners are actually wearing is, in a very real way, why syndicate exists.

the prodigio pro deserves its own writeup and it's going to get one. the short version: after years of hokas and salomons, this is the best trail shoe i've been in. it's not even close.

the zugspitz ultratrail itself has become a useful lens for watching what happened to trail running after covid.

when i ran it the first time, you could decide on a tuesday that you were racing that friday. show up friday afternoon, register, line up that night. free european trail energy. plenty of spots.

the following year, registration filled in february.

in 2025 registration was open a few weeks before it was filled, and that was after zuggy introduced a 100-mile distance to meet demand.

for 2026, the race was acquired by UTMB. nearly all distances sold out in under ten minutes. i was up at 4am pacific time in washington state to register before spots disappeared. friends of ours in garmisch, who live ten minutes from the start line, didn't get in.

this isn't just a zugspitz theme. in 2024, global road race finishers grew 17% year over year. half-marathon finishers rose nearly 21%. run club participation on strava increased 59%. and UTMB index races surpassed 800,000 race starts in just the first six months of 2025, with 42% of those runners competing in their first-ever trail event. this isn't a bounce-back from covid lows. the sport found a new ceiling and keeps raising it.

and the brands making serious gear before any of this happened? they didn't pivot when running got popular. they were already there.

dynafit has been dressing alpinists and ski mountaineers in the bavarian alps since 1950. they didn't need the trail running boom to validate them. funny enough, dynafit sponsors a local trail race in leavenworth, washington, which makes a strange kind of sense when you realize that leavenworth is a bavarian-themed town sitting in the cascades and dynafit was founded in bavaria. the mountain culture travelled and so did the brand.

nnormal was built by kilian jornet to make gear that holds up at the sharp end of the sport. saysky started in copenhagen in 2013 with $30,000 and a design philosophy borrowed from surf and skate culture, not the running industry. none of these brands needed american runners to discover them. but american runners are discovering them anyway, because the sport outgrew its old supply chains.

when you show up to a european mountain race and look around at the start line, you're looking at a gear ecosystem that doesn't have a flagship store in the us, doesn't run tv ads, and doesn't particularly care what the big players think about it. that ecosystem is where syndicate lives. we didn't build a list of brands we thought would look good on a website. we ran the races, looked around at what serious people were wearing, and started writing about it.

botrc corner

3,898 miles. 220,736 feet. season 1 starts august 1.

battle of the run clubs keeps moving. 18 runners across 5 clubs have logged 3,898 preseason miles and 220,736 feet of vertical since we opened the doors. season 1 starts august 1, competing for most miles and most vert. if you've been meaning to connect your strava and get in, now's the time.

full race report will be up on strava. and while i'm rolling through 67 miles in the mountains, be sure to wish mark luck on his one mile road race back in indy.

midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.

come run with us.

graham + mark

syndicate running

hi, mark here. syndicate is two people -- graham and me -- and we hope you'll get to know us over the next few months. some of these logs will come from one of us, some from both. this one's mine.

the log

it's all black half tights.

i spent this past weekend spectating races across saturday and sunday, distances from 100k down to 5k. the overwhelming majority of finishers across every distance, every age group, every brand affiliation: black half tights.

i'm no different. race day, workout day, long run sunday -- i'm almost always reaching for black half tights. the variables are fabric, drawstring length (i hate a short drawstring that gets lost in the waistband), and pockets, and those matter a lot. i was part of puma's project three program this year and they shipped everyone the same half tights they give the pros. they look great. clean, minimal, fast. no pockets. and the vast majority of us are not racing marathons with bottle service. get on a trail, do anything longer than a 10k with real effort, and you need to carry stuff. storage matters. but still, black half tights.

and if you think about the color black and what you're told as a kid in the summer -- don't wear black, it absorbs sunlight, you'll overheat. so much of what we do from an athletic standpoint is about trying to stay cool. every brand is working on airflow, mesh, wicking fabrics, passive cooling headbands, ice vests. anything and everything to stay cool. but the go-to color on a performance day is black. absorb heat and core temp be damned.

but there's a reason black works and it's not just performance. everyone looks better in black. look good, feel good, run good. it's clean, it compresses, and for whatever reason it tricks the eye -- everything looks tighter, leaner, more intentional. and it's forgiving in a way other colors aren't. i'm not going to pretend i haven't spilled my water bottle on myself at mile 18 when my brain stopped completing simple motor tasks, or that sweat doesn't accumulate in unflattering places. black covers all of that. it's forgiving in the way that running, honestly, is not.

i've been following a lot of new brands lately and i noticed something while scrolling. i took a video of it just to have a record. almost every single brand -- no matter the positioning, trail or road, modern or heritage, bold or minimal -- their social media icons are black and white. the gear is black. the main exception is chicknlegs, who built a whole identity around bold prints and cartoony fits, but they still have black in the rotation. the colorful stuff is for group runs, a race day with friends and matching kits. the everyday reach is black.

what's on your upper half. what's on your head. what's on your feet. the singlet, the hat, the shoes. from waist to knee, it's already decided. black half tights.

so the rest of it, that's what we're here to help you figure out.

-- mark

what we're running in

the goodr astro-g.

graham's been rocking them through his entire boston build and reaching for them on every trail run since. shockingly, sunglasses have been needed near daily lately on the pnw trails.

dollar for dollar, goodr delivers. they're $45, they don't slip, and they actually look good. here's the honest take: you're going to lose at least one pair of sunglasses this year. you'd rather that be a $45 pair than a $300 pair. suns out.

on the journal this week

nightclubs.suck.

we just got our hands on some gear from nightclubs.suck and we're fans. full brand profile dropping this week on the journal. in the meantime, here's a look at what showed up.

battle of the run clubs

you're getting this before anyone else.

we've been building something on the side and it's ready enough to share. battle of the run clubs is a weekly strava-powered competition for run clubs. clubs of five. one challenge per week. top team score wins. season 1 kicks off august 1 with real prizes from our brand partners for top mileage and top vert.

we'd love to see a few of you build the first clubs before we open it up wider. think burrito league energy but different. connect strava, start your club, invite your crew. and remember it's in beta -- so be gentle with your feedback.

midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.

come run with us.

graham + mark

syndicate running

sabastian sawe ran 1:59:30 at london last month. first sub-two in a real race, not a paced exhibition. fastest legal marathon any human has ever run. and he did it in a plain singlet.

the suit

adidas had spent the better part of a decade building him something else. the techfit endurance suit. laser-cut TPU bands stitched into compression fabric across nine years of r&d, wind tunnel testing, energy-return modeling. claims of 1%+ running economy improvement, which at marathon pace is the difference between making history and almost making history. kejelcha wore it. ran 1:59:41. it works.

sawe took one look at it and left it in the bag.

according to the new york times piece that ran last week, the designer said athletes “burst out laughing” every time they saw the suit. not because it was bad. because it looked ridiculous. like a wetsuit. like something you’d wear to a triathlon in 1998. the fastest marathoner alive was handed a quantifiable performance advantage and chose to leave it on the bench because it didn’t look like him.

the singlet

it would be easy to call that a one-off. it isn’t.

scott fauble ran boston in 2019 in a lululemon singlet. before lululemon was anywhere near a real running brand. before anyone was paying him to wear it. seventh place. top american. an unsponsored athlete at the front of the most prestigious marathon in the world, wearing a yoga company’s top because he liked it and it fit. read that again. the seventh-place finisher at boston was making a kit decision based on the freedom of being unsponsored.

that was six years ago. nine years ago tommy rivs finished sixteenth overall at boston in a look unlike any of the typical elites of the nineties and aughts. a tattooed, bearded, midriff cut sporting pirate that looked like he wandered off a trail race and onto boylston street at 5:17 pace. or maybe it was ten years ago when noah droddy rode aviators, a backwards cap, and a sam elliott level ‘stache at the 2016 olympics track trials to a pro contract even though he finished last in the field of primarily boy scouts.

the version of the sport we live in now started years ago. more elites stopped letting the industry pick for them. fauble in lululemon. sawe leaving the suit in the bag. mantz running in a setup that looks more like a fashion brief than a sponsorship deal. the permission slip filtered down to the rest of us.

the tag

there’s a piece raziq rauf published a few days ago on running sucks. it’s a profile of ben morrow, who runs miler running out of new york city. miler makes premium running apparel and the tag says made in new york city, which, if you check your own running drawer right now, is not a thing you’ll find on almost anything else. raziq is sharp on this. the moat isn’t the fabric, even though the fabric is good. it’s geography. it’s narrative. it’s a deeply specific identity you can’t reverse-engineer because you’d have to actually be from new york to make the story work. morrow is paying more to manufacture in manhattan than he would basically anywhere else on earth. that cost is the product. that cost is the brand.

what your gear is for

different answer, same question. what is your gear for. for sawe it’s for not looking like a bobsledder at the start line of the london marathon because that’s not how his training crew outside of eldoret would dress. for fauble in 2019 it was for showing up to boston dressed like he meant to be there. for rivs and noah, it was that disruptor vibe that gave birth to so many of the current upstart brands. for the rest of us it’s for telling a story about where we’re from, who we run with, what we actually care about. that’s the thing. that’s what syndicate is here to write about.

the adidas suit is, in some ways, the perfect distillation of the old model. pure performance. zero soul. nine years of engineering and the fastest marathoner alive laughed at it. think about how much had to change about this sport for that to be the punchline.

sawe ran the fastest marathon in human history in a singlet. fauble ran boston in lululemon before they paid him a dime. ben morrow is sewing tees in manhattan because the tag matters as much as the fit. these are not three separate stories. they are one story, told three times, getting louder. it’s a story about power. the brands used to tell runners what mattered. now runners decide for themselves.

more like this

if you missed them, we’ve been writing about exactly this on the journal. after the swoosh on what comes after nike in american running, brand profiles on saysky and path projects, the case for half tights through a full boston build. these are the stories we keep finding ourselves telling.

midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.

come run with us.

graham + mark

syndicate running

ps. the new york times piece on the adidas techfit endurance suit ran may 21. raziq rauf’s profile of miler running is up on running sucks, first half is free. both worth your time.

last week was about collabs. three of them, happening right now. what we didn't say is that one of the most famous running brands on earth started as one.

1962, japan

phil knight was twenty-four. fresh out of stanford business school. he'd written a paper there about whether japanese running shoes could do to the american sneaker market what japanese cameras had done to germany's. when he presented his paper in class, nobody asked a single question.

he sold his car, took a loan from his dad, and flew to japan on what was supposed to be a side trip on his tour around the world. he wasn't sure he was going to even have a meeting until he was already on the train to kobe.

phil asked for a tour of the onitsuka tiger factory. he met the executives afterward. one of them asked what company he represented. knight, on the spot, reflected back to the wall of blue sports ribbons he'd been collecting since high school. blue ribbon sports of portland, oregon, he said. it was a company that did not exist.

the executives stood up and left the room. knight thought he'd blown it. they came back a few minutes later and offered him the american distribution rights for the onitsuka tiger. knight paid $50 for samples and went home to wait.

he formed blue ribbon sports two years later, in 1964, with $1,200 and a handshake with his old oregon track coach, bill bowerman. for the next seven years, they sold tigers out of the back of a green plymouth at track meets across the pacific northwest. knight had a day job as an accountant. he sold shoes nights and weekends. his mother bought a pair for $7 and wore them around the house to prove a point to phil's dad that this sneaker idea wasn't just jack ass-ing around.

the breakup

by 1971, blue ribbon was hitting $1.3 million in sales. they had stores, employees, a real business. and then knight found out, through a leak, that an onitsuka executive was quietly meeting with other american distributors. the same partner who'd shipped him samples nine years earlier was now planning to buy out blue ribbon at a 51% controlling split, or replace it entirely if knight didn't agree.

he could've taken the buyout. instead he started something new. in the winter of 1971, blue ribbon became nike.

the breakup almost killed them. cash was so tight they bounced paychecks. the bank cut them off entirely. at one point, the box company that made nike's shoe boxes essentially fronted them money to keep operating, because if nike went under, the box company went with it. a paper-goods supplier holding up a shoe company because nobody else would. that's the indie running ecosystem of 1971.

pre

most of us know pre, steve prefontaine grew up in coos bay, ran for bowerman at oregon, and as a nineteen-year-old freshman in 1970 was on the cover of sports illustrated as america's distance prodigy. in 1973, he signed with nike for $5,000 a year and became the company's first paid athlete.

what he did with the deal is the part most people skip. pre, on his own initiative, started mailing pairs of nikes with personalized notes to the best runners on earth. mary decker in san diego. john walker in new zealand. brendan foster in england. kip keino in kenya. in april of 1975, he sent a pair of '73 nike bostons to a then-unknown marathoner in boston named bill rodgers. a one-person sales operation, run by a twenty-four-year-old at the height of his powers, because he believed in the shoes.

a month after he mailed those bostons to bill rodgers, pre died in a car crash outside eugene. he was twenty-four. he was holding every american outdoor record from 2,000m to 10,000m.

knight wrote in shoe dog that pre's line, somebody may beat me, but they're going to have to bleed to do it, became his mindset for running nike. the athlete gave the founder his mantra.

why we're writing about this

the indie running industry, weirdly, still has the texture of the world that built nike. founders still answer their own emails. athletes still mail gear to other athletes because they believe in it. suppliers and partners still hold each other up the way blue ribbon's box guy held them up in 1971. we wrote a short piece on the journal this week giving nike its due and making the case for what comes next.

we'll leave you with this. knight told himself something on a morning in 1962, on his way to a meeting that would change his life and didn't know it yet:

something to lean into. wherever you're putting in the miles right now. just don't stop.

if you want to hear more of knight's story, check out his authoritative autobiography on the early days of nike: shoe dog.

if you've got a brand or a founder we should know selling gear out of their trunk, hit reply and tell us.

midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.

come run with us.

graham + mark

syndicate running