Matters, Myths and Miles

Hello! Welcome back to Footprint – and happy Friday.

🌎 What can, and should, runners do to help tackle the climate crisis? Top ultra athlete Jasmin Paris has some thoughts. I recently spoke to her about The Green Runners, a group launched to help mitigate the sport’s environmental impact.

Let me know what you think.

Casual runners should start thinking about replacing their running shoes after eight months, according to Nike. Training for a 5K? Maybe more like five months. The sportswear giant recommends those training for a half marathon swap out shoes every four to six months – and every two to three, if you’re training for a full.

Jasmin Paris takes a different view.

“A well-used pair of shoes is like an old friend,” she said in a recent interview. “If you’ve been using them for years, and they’ve got all these patches on them, little things like that in life – those little bits of satisfaction – is actually what makes life good, and makes you happy.”

Paris is one of the UK’s most successful ultramarathoners. She was the first woman to win the 268-mile Montane Spine Race in 2019, and to finish the grueling Barkley Marathons in 2024. Such feats built her a platform – whether she wanted it, or not.

“I never really set out to be famous, or to be a celebrity,” said Paris. But from 2019, “I started to have a platform I could use,” she recalled. “To some extent, for the first few years of that, I felt like my platform was slightly being manipulated by the clothing company that used to send me kit.”

Paris is part of a group of athletes who in 2022 co-founded The Green Runners, a community-led environmental organization focused on reducing the carbon footprint of the sport, and confronting the climate crisis. She dropped her brand partnerships, and instead started running for The Green Runners. 

“I wanted to dispel this myth that you need new kit, new colors, every season,” she said. “Whether you run well has nothing to do with that.”

The Green Runners encourages supporters in running to consider four key pillars: how they travel to races, and whether they really need to fly; how they kit up, and whether they actually need, or just want new gear; how they fuel, and ensure they leave no trace on trails; and how they speak out, and spread the word.

They launched a membership program, and started calling out events that they felt were falling short in the sport. After The Green Runners campaigned against UTMB Mont-Blanc’s partnership with the carmaker Dacia, branding it a “DUtMB idea,” its role was downgraded from title sponsor in 2024.

While some brands are on the lookout for prominent marketing spots in the sport, others set up shop at the heart of it. Shoe and apparel companies, for starters, heavily promote their products – from carbon-plated super shoes to shorts and shirts – in many of the spaces, both online and physical, that runners spend time.

“What we need is for the companies that make the shoes to be wanting to produce something that’s sustainable, and also that works – the super shoe equivalent, but sustainable, and lasts,” said Paris. “Obviously, the challenge is that shoe companies don’t want that, because they want you to keep buying new shoes all the time.”

It is a “terrible situation,” in her view. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

But this is where runners – these companies’ customers – have some power, according to Paris. “People that produce the stuff always respond to what the market wants. The market wants performance, 100%, and [is] always going to want performance,” she said. “The challenge is how to get across this idea that you also want sustainability.”

Stepping away from sponsorships that had required her to market such products was a “real relief” for Paris, she said. “If I have that platform, then why don’t I use it for something more positive, that might do some good? I don’t mind if I lose followers.”

“I am lucky, in a way – I have a full time job. I’m a specialist vet. I wasn’t financially dependent on a sponsor,” added Paris. “Other runners might do it as a full-time thing, and then they are dependent. I wasn’t in that situation.”

Athletes “can actually call the shots” when they start winning, she added, and brands come knocking. Such high profile figures are able to reset the dialog around what shoes and kit are needed for races, according to Paris, and even try to shift the sport towards a more climate-conscious place.

Paris herself said she “became much more aware” of climate issues in 2020, while pregnant with her second child. 

“It’s not that I’ve not been environmentally aware all my life, but it’s probably in the last five, six years, that I was really confronted by the urgency of the situation,” she said. “I think having children does that, to some extent. Your view of the future changes… You’re invested in it because of something you love more than yourself.”

Five pieces worth your time this weekend…

💬 How Courtney Dauwalter became one of the great ultrarunners with no training plan • Steve Friedman looks inside the candy-chomping, pain-fueled, infectiously cheerful world of the record-breaking athlete for Runner’s World

🌎 After 57 marathons in 50 states, these are my favorites • From Rocket City to TrackTown USA, Mike Knobler lists his picks for Outside

🧮 To get more from your run, try this training strategy • Amanda Loudin explores the case for getting comfortable without your watch for The New York Times

🇺🇸 Olympic hopefuls deliver at LA 2028 ‘dress rehearsal’ • My dispatch from last month’s USA Track & Field national outdoor championships for the Guardian

⏱ The making of Josh Kerr’s mile world record • The Briton does not so much race middle-distance events as play poker within them, Liam Tharme and George Edwards write in The Athletic, after he broke the record for the first time in 27 years