The Speed Project Is Eating Itself

Me eating nuts because I'm bad at metaphors

What started as a middle finger to the running establishment has become exactly what it claimed to oppose: exclusionary, unverifiable, sponsor-saturated and increasingly hollow. Here's why it matters.

I want to be clear upfront: the instinct behind The Speed Project was a good one. Running was getting boring; the major marathon circuit had become a corporate parade, ultras were turning into bucket-list tourism and the sport had lost its edge. A scrappy and unsanctioned relay from the Santa Monica Pier to the Las Vegas sign, run on open roads with no entry fee, no permits, and no official sanction? That sounded like exactly what the culture needed. A reset. A provocation. Something real.

The problem is that somewhere between that first edition in 2013 and now, The Speed Project stopped being a provocation and started being a brand. Not an honest brand, either. One that still performs rebellion while charging the price of admission in social capital, clout, and sponsor alignment. Thirteen years of contradictions have compounded to the point where they can no longer be ignored, and I'm not the only person who notices them.

What follows is a thorough case for the prosecution. I’ve tried to represent the counterarguments fairly, because some of them are reasonable. But I don’t think any of them hold up. Here’s why.

01 The Establishment It Became

The Speed Project launched with a specific mythology. Nils Arend, a German event organiser with a background in Hamburg’s underground nightlife scene, resented what running had become. He hated corrals. He hated corporate race expos. He wanted to go on his own adventure, and in 2013, he convinced five friends to run more than 41 hours from the Santa Monica Pier to the Las Vegas sign: no rules, no spectators, no designated route. The following year, he invited a few more teams, and before long, the annual gathering had turned into a pilgrimage for everyone in his orbit.

Look at it now! In 2025 alone, over 150 teams and solo runners converged on LA (roughly 1500 people total). The event has spawned satellite editions in the Atacama Desert and a Chamonix-to-Marseille European leg. The photography is immaculate. The brand collaborations are substantial. The participant list reads like a who ’s-who of running influencer culture. The very people who built their identities around rejecting the establishment have become the establishment, just with better lighting, a more curated aesthetic, and a considerably stronger Instagram presence.

This is not a unique story; counterculture movements almost always get absorbed eventually, but The Speed Project is peculiar because it refuses to acknowledge the transformation. It still performs grit while delivering content. It still talks about community while operating a velvet rope. It still positions itself as an antidote to commercialised running while serving as a marketing activation vehicle for the sport’s biggest brands. That gap between the myth and the reality is where the real critique lives.

The counterargument: Every movement evolves. Growth is healthy, and the spirit of the original event can survive scaling.

The rebuttal: There’s a version of this that’s true in principle. But the spirit of The Speed Project’s original event was specifically anti-scale: no website, no official entry form, no media, no sponsors. Arend has said on record that he actively tried to prevent video footage from leaking because the underground lore was the point. You cannot grow to 500+ teams while maintaining the integrity of an event whose entire identity was rooted in smallness, secrecy, and refusal of the mainstream. The event didn’t evolve. It inverted.

02 The Illusion of Openness

The irony of The Speed Project’s barrier to entry is that there is no formal one. No registration portal. No qualifying standard. No lottery. In theory, anyone can turn up and run to Las Vegas. In practice, that’s fantasy.

Access is determined almost entirely by social networks. You need to know Nils. Or you need to know someone who knows Nils? The entry process is a WhatsApp message and an interview form with one question: 'what motivates you?' Which means the actual barrier is not money or fitness, but cultural proximity to a very specific, very online, very aesthetically curated subset of the running world. That’s not radical openness. That’s a different kind of exclusion and one that’s harder to name precisely because it refuses to acknowledge itself.

The sport of running has a long history of informal networks that reproduce existing hierarchies under the language of community. The Speed Project has perfected this. It feels open because it has no formal gate. But the gate is there. It’s just operated by people who get to feel good about themselves while operating it, and unfortunately, yes, yet again in our running community, the gate is being operated by someone who is both white and male. Shock.

Compare that to Hood to Coast relay (which I will use in comparison throughout due to it being another West Coast relay and in some ways the antithesis of TSP - sanctioned, verifiable and largely transparent), it has operated a genuine public lottery since the late 1990s. In 2025, over 12,000 runners from more than 40 countries participated across 1,000+ teams. It was founded in 1982 by Bob Foote, a club runner and ultramarathon enthusiast who simply wanted a bigger challenge. No curated invite list. No WhatsApp filter. Over the past eleven years, Hood to Coast teams have raised nearly $7.5 million for the Providence Cancer Institute, making it the second-largest road race for cancer fundraising in the United States. No race is perfect, but some do the fundamentals better than others.

When a journalist once told Arend that The Speed Project sounded similar to Hood to Coast, he looked at them with what was described as mild contempt and replied, “Not really. This is more rebel-style.” The rebel, it turns out, is the one with the lottery.

The counterargument: The event has grown to 150+ teams. If it were truly inaccessible, that scale of participation wouldn’t be possible.

The rebuttal: Scale and access are not the same thing. The event has grown, but it remains invite-only by design. The growth reflects the expanding social network of its curators, not a democratisation of entry. A bigger velvet rope line is not an open door. And a larger event with the same structural opacity creates more problems, not fewer, ie more people navigating an opaque invite system, more brand influence concentrated in fewer gatekeepers, and a louder megaphone for a mythology that doesn’t bear close examination.

03 The Honesty Problem Nobody Talks About

Here is a logistical reality that almost never gets said plainly: The Speed Project is structurally unverifiable. It runs on open public roads across a route that varies from roughly 280 to 350 miles, depending on which account you read, with no chip timing, no course marshals, no fixed route, no neutral observers, and no standardised GPS protocol. Teams self-report. Route adherence is taken almost entirely on trust.

The distance ambiguity alone is telling. Sources citing official documentation place the route anywhere between 280 and 350 miles. That discrepancy isn’t a rounding error. It exists because there is no fixed course. Every team plots their own path. Which means “winning” The Speed Project doesn’t mean covering the same distance as anyone else. It means getting to Vegas faster than other teams, who may or may not have taken longer or shorter lines through the desert - that makes performance at TSP in large part a logistical competition rather than a pure athletic endeavor. This sounds appealing but the ability to solve logistical problems normally comes down who has the deepest pockets - who can spend the most on crew vehicles, nutrition, recovery equipment, crew, off road vehicles, mapping data and so on.

And this isn’t merely hypothetical; a documented incident from a previous edition saw one team use ATVs to bypass arterial road sections, gaining a significant time advantage. Nobody was penalised. Nobody could be penalised, because there are no rules. The team that finished first was celebrated accordingly.

I’m not saying the majority of teams are cheating. Most probably aren’t. But the conditions for it are structurally perfect, and because there is no formal record-keeping body, no auditable results database, and no accountability mechanism, “winning” The Speed Project means almost nothing as a verifiable athletic achievement. It’s a vibe, not a result.

The counterargument: The whole point is that it’s not about winning. It’s about personal achievement and collective suffering. Demanding verification misses the point.

The rebuttal: This argument would be coherent if The Speed Project didn’t celebrate winners, track approximate times, generate media narratives around competitive outcomes, and allow brands to build performance marketing campaigns around their teams’ results. But it does all of those things. You can’t have it both ways: either it’s a race with outcomes worth caring about, in which case verification matters, or it’s a personal journey - in which case stop publicising your time and stop letting brands launch apparel lines off the back of your “course record". The Speed Project wants the cultural weight of competition without the inconvenience of accountability.

04 Where Are the Fast People?

If The Speed Project is about speed (it’s in the name), where are the genuinely fast athletes? Not fast-for-content. Fast-fast. Sub-2:20 marathon men. Sub-2:30 women. Athletes whose names appear on Diamond League startlists or Olympic rosters?

They are almost entirely absent, and the reasons are telling. Serious elite runners operate within coaching structures, sponsor obligations, injury risk protocols, and training cycles that make a multi-day unsanctioned desert relay an unacceptable proposition. Their performance metrics are tracked, their contracts have clauses, and their seasons are planned years in advance. The Speed Project, despite its name, is not actually optimised around elite speed. It is optimised around spectacle, content output, aesthetic coherence, and brand alignment.

The sub-elite athletes who do participate, many of them genuinely accomplished runners capable of 2:20-2:30 marathons would not compete with a mid-tier Japanese university ekiden squad on even terms. That’s not an insult (TBH that includes me as an athlete). It’s a clarification of what the event actually is versus what the mythology around it implies.

The counterargument: The absence of elites is a feature, not a bug. TSP celebrates the amateur superstar and democratises extraordinary athletic achievement.

The rebuttal: This would be a fair point if the event were actually accessible to amateurs broadly, but it isn’t. The “amateur superstars” it celebrates are a very specific demographic: aesthetically aligned, socially connected, brand-legible runners. Compare that to the Hakone Ekiden, where university students run legs at sub-59-minute half-marathon pace on mountainous terrain, through a qualification system open to any university team, with 56 million people watching. The Speed Project celebrates a narrow slice of amateur running while using the language of democratic access.

05 What Real Relay Racing Looks Like

The Hakone Ekiden is a 217km ten-stage relay run every January between Tokyo and the mountain town of Hakone. It has operated continuously since 1920. Its runners carry a tasuki sash as a baton. The 2026 edition drew an audience of over 56 million viewers across two days, with an average TV rating of nearly 30% (comparable to the Super Bowl’s domestic share) in a country of 124 million people. The race’s viewership has peaked at 35%.

The athletes run legs at sub-59-minute half-marathon pace on sometimes mountainous terrain. The event is sanctioned, timed, verified, governed, and deeply embedded in national culture. It produces Olympic marathon runners. Multiple members of Japan’s Olympic marathon team have come directly through the ekiden system. The Hakone Ekiden is the second-most-watched television event of the year in Japan, beaten only by a New Year’s Eve music programme. It captivates a nation across two seven-hour broadcasts in an era when brevity is supposedly essential.

The Speed Project generates Instagram content. The comparison is not meant to diminish the physical feat of running to Las Vegas (it is genuinely brutal) but to clarify what The Speed Project actually is relative to what it positions itself as. The Bath Road Relay, the National Road Relays in the UK, the Penn Relays (running since 1895), the Bolzano Ekiden in Italy: these events have histories, communities, records that endure, and results that mean something next year and in twenty years. They are the tradition that The Speed Project claims to rebel against while actually just ignoring the parts of it that require hard work and accountability.

06 Whose Rebellion Is This, Exactly?

Satisfy Running. Tracksmith. Norda. The Speed Project’s commercial relationships are at this point, indistinguishable from any major sanctioned race’s partner roster. And the way those relationships function is worth examining closely. Competing at TSP comes with significant financial barriers, and brands have stepped in to fill that gap, without their support, the event simply couldn't function as it does. Teams rely on that funding, and that's a reasonable arrangement (that's what marketing budgets are for). What's harder to reconcile is why TSP continues to push a narrative that suggests otherwise.

Tracksmith’s involvement is particularly illustrative. They originally intended to use The Speed Project as a setting for a summer catalogue shoot. The brand ended up in a documented race-within-a-race for a course record, which generated enough narrative drama to support a full gallery exhibition in New York - titled “Heaven or Las Vegas” - that doubled as an apparel launch party for a line wear-tested on the course. This is not incidental brand participation. This is a brand building a commercial campaign around an event’s athletic credibility, with the event’s full cooperation.

Some coverage describes The Speed Project as having “intentionally remained free from commercialisation, sponsorship, and corporate interests.” This is either genuinely believed or deliberately misleading. The documented reality is multiple full brand activations, apparel launches, catalogue shoots, and gallery exhibitions built directly on TSP’s cultural equity. The brand money is real, AND that's fine. The “no corporate interests” framing is not.

The counterargument: Brands supporting running are how the sport grows. If major brands want to participate, that’s a net positive for the ecosystem.

The rebuttal: Brand support for running is not inherently problematic. The problem is the dishonesty. Claiming freedom from commercialisation while simultaneously serving as the primary content engine for multiple major brand campaigns is a straightforward contradiction. Hood to Coast has a title sponsor and charity partners and makes no bones about it. The Speed Project wants the credibility of anti-commercialism while collecting the benefits of being a commercial platform. That’s not a sustainable identity, and it’s not an honest one.

07 The Environmental Cost Nobody’s Calculating

Here is something that almost never comes up in coverage of The Speed Project, and it should: the environmental footprint of this event is substantial, largely untracked, and completely at odds with the direction the sport and the world need to be heading.

Consider what it takes to run a relay team from LA to Vegas. An RV (often a large diesel motorhome) travelling 340 miles of desert highway over three to four days, idling at exchange points, running air conditioning through desert heat. Support vans in addition to that. Crew members flying in from across the world: the 2025 edition drew participants from over 30 countries. Private travel for teams, their gear, their photographers, their content producers. None of this is offset, measured, or acknowledged by the event’s organisers in any meaningful public way. The refusal to engage with permitting means there's no accountability for the damage done to the environmanet, parks and trails etc that partipants run on.

The global expansion compounds this significantly. The Atacama edition requires intercontinental flights for most participants into one of the world’s most remote deserts. The Chamonix-to-Marseille European leg adds another fleet of support vehicles and another round of international travel. Each new edition grows the event’s cultural footprint and, proportionally, its physical one - while the conversation about the latter remains almost entirely absent from the event’s considerable media output.

The running world has been having a long-overdue conversation about sustainability. Major city marathons have made public commitments to emissions reduction and sustainable operations. The Green Runners and similar organisations are building real infrastructure around an environmentally conscious running culture. Parkrun’s carbon footprint per participant is negligible. The Speed Project, which positions itself as a values-led movement rooted in authenticity and community, has contributed almost nothing to this conversation - despite having the brand relationships, the media reach, and the cultural influence to make a real difference.

This is not just a personal lifestyle critique. When an event generates the kind of aspirational pull that The Speed Project does, when hundreds of teams globally want to replicate the experience, the choices made about how that event operates become cultural signals. Right now, the signal being sent is: fly anywhere, drive everything, burn it all, post the photos. In 2026, that’s not rebellion. It’s irresponsibility dressed up as freedom.

The counterargument: Individual events can’t solve systemic environmental problems. Holding a running race responsible for global emissions is disproportionate.

The rebuttal: Nobody is asking The Speed Project to solve climate change. But an event that has aggressively positioned itself as values-led and culturally important has an obligation to account for its impact honestly. The issue isn’t the carbon footprint in isolation; it’s the gap between what the event claims to stand for and what it actually does. If you market yourself as a rebellion against the hollow excess of mainstream running culture, you don’t get to run one of the most logistically extravagant events in the sport without scrutiny. Measure it. Offset it. Talk about it. The silence is telling.

08 Running as Soley Content Production

The most uncomfortable critique of The Speed Project is also the most visible: it is, at its core, a content production event. The running is the vehicle, and the output is a very specific kind of visual storytelling that serves individual athletes’ social platforms, their agents’ pitching decks, and their sponsors’ marketing calendars.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with beautiful running content; I'm a sucker for it. But when the format of an event is engineered around aesthetics rather than athletic outcome, i.e., when the suffering is curated for the camera, teams are assembled partly for visual coherence, and the most important product of the week is the photography portfolio rather than the result, something is being obscured. It’s performance in the theatrical sense, not the athletic one.

This matters because performative running doesn’t just sit alongside genuine athletic culture. It actively displaces it. Attention is finite. Brand money is finite. Media coverage is finite. Every column inch The Speed Project generates is attention not given to a community relay, a high school track programme, a youth running club, or the quiet, unglamorous, deeply important work of building running culture from the ground up.

09 Safety: The Part Nobody Names Until Someone Gets Hurt

Running on open roads through the Mojave Desert, with trucks doing 70mph overnight, in an unsanctioned event with no road permits, no medical infrastructure, no formal safety protocols, and no emergency response coordination carries real risk. Participants have encountered aggressive drivers and wild dogs. Solo runners have been found in states of advanced heat exhaustion hundreds of miles from support. Support vans have been stopped by law enforcement and released not because the event is legal, but because police couldn’t find an applicable citation in time.

Sanctioned events manage these risks through permitting, insurance, medical cover, and course marshalling. The Speed Project’s “unsanctioned” identity means it accepts none of those obligations. An event that takes all of the cultural value of being a race while accepting none of the structural responsibilities of being one is not freedom. It is freeloading on the safety infrastructure that sanctioned events have spent decades building.

The counterargument: Adults can make informed choices about risk. Personal responsibility should be sufficient.

The rebuttal: Personal responsibility is a reasonable principle for activities that affect only the individual. Running at night on active highways does not fall into that category. It affects truck drivers who don’t know runners are there. It affects emergency services, which respond when things go wrong with no advance warning and no coordination. The Speed Project gets to claim the romance of the unsanctioned while outsourcing the cost of its safety failures to everyone else.

10 The Social Value Question

Running, at its best, is one of the most socially valuable things a community can organise around. Parkrun - free, weekly, open to absolutely everyone- has generated enormous public health benefits and community cohesion worldwide. The London Marathon raises hundreds of millions for charity across its history. Local club relays sustain the competitive infrastructure that produces the next generation of elite athletes.

What social value does The Speed Project generate? Inspiration is real and shouldn’t be dismissed. But inspiration generated by a content platform you cannot access, run by people you weren’t invited to join, featuring athletes whose primary qualification is their social media presence and brand alignment, produces a particular kind of aspiration, toward an aesthetic and a scene, not toward running itself. The most durable inspiration in running comes from communities that let you show up.

The Speed Project has had twelve years and a growing set of brand relationships to build a meaningful social programme. It could direct those relationships toward community development, removing barriers to participation for under represented groups/minorities, youth running, access initiatives, or charity fundraising. There is no evidence that it has done so in any material way. The social value it generates accrues almost entirely to those already inside its network.

A Final Word

My rambling, unsolicited opinion above holds no judgment towards the incredible athletes who have had very real and incredible experiences at TSP. For them, I only hold admiration. But I do think athletes are being exploited for the gains of a few, and there are very real alternative spaces where athletes will be better served. There’s one response to critiques like this that surfaces reliably: “You just don’t get it. You’re applying the metrics of traditional sport to something that transcends sport.”

It doesn’t hold up. I’m not applying traditional sporting metrics to The Speed Project because I want it to be a traditional race, I’m applying them because The Speed Project itself applies them, selectively, when they serve its interests. It celebrates times. It names winners. It generates athletic credibility for brands. You cannot invoke athletic seriousness when it flatters you and retreat to “it’s not really a race, man” when the logic of that seriousness produces inconvenient questions.

The deeper charge is simpler. The Speed Project took a genuinely interesting idea: a raw and unapologetic relay through the desert that rejected the sanitised spectacle of mainstream racing, and over twelve years converted it into a highly polished content engine serving the interests of a small, connected, aesthetically curated network, while using the language of inclusivity, rebellion, and community to make those inside it feel good about their exclusivity.

The original provocation was good. What replaced it is a shame.