Running is the only sport where the venue is the city itself. Every week, in every major market, thousands of people meet on a corner at an agreed hour and run together — a format that grew faster than any organised league on earth and that no sportswear brand had properly claimed.

adidas had the product credibility and none of the cultural ownership. Its running work looked like footwear marketing: hero athlete, hero shoe, hero stat. The crews that actually drive participation saw nothing of themselves in it.

We started from the pavement. The three-stripe mark was redrawn as infrastructure — lane markings, crosswalk bars, the painted line at the end of a route. Applied at architectural scale it reads as wayfinding before it reads as branding, which is exactly the point: the system is meant to look like it belongs to the street rather than to a campaign.

The palette abandons the expected energy colours. Lucid blue and core black come from the hours when people actually run — the blue dark before work and after it — with acid lime reserved strictly for data: splits, distances, pace, elevation. Colour carries information rather than mood.

Typography is a single tightly-tracked condensed grotesque, set enormous, with technical numerals lifted from race bibs. The voice underneath it is written to be shouted in a group rather than read alone. Nothing in the system needs a photographer to work; it survives being painted, taped, printed on a bib or projected onto a wall.