the suit, the singlet, and what your gear is for | 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.