Cold Wet Nose

We’re running in the Nike+ Human Race this weekend. At this point I’m sorta having mixed feelings about the event… but since I’m generally an optimist, I’ll start with the good stuff, then the bad, then the weird…

The Good

The event is basically a collection of 25 different 10K road races taking place in different locations all over the world. Nike is also promoting the idea that anyone can join in by using the Nike+ foot pod gizmo to run a timed 10K by themselves. While it sounds a little cheesy at first, I’m all for supporting new ideas and new concepts… and in this internet/digital/connected world, we might just see some really interesting derivatives from a loosely-coupled global event like this.

The Bad

Maybe the other race cities don’t have this problem, but the temperature at race time in Austin is going to be in the 90-95 neighborhood… This combined with my perception of a intense marketing campaign has me worried that the big story from the event will “racers suffer in heat” instead of “racers unite the world”. I know I won’t be aiming for a fast time if the temps are as high as I expect, and I really hope that other goals get reigned in as well. The last thing we need is another fiasco like the 2007 Chicago Marathon.

The Weird

This just seems weird… To run the race, you have to wear the t-shirt. If the shirt is cool looking and it’s good technically, then maybe this isn’t such a big deal… so I’m reserving judgment on this one for now.

If the shirt is dumb looking, I guess it’s comforting that we will all be dumb looking together… But if it’s just a cotton t-shirt, then we have a bigger problem. Remember that it’s going to be hot… hauling around a soaked cotton shirt for 45-60 minutes will be miserable.

Any which way, it’s painfully obvious that Nike plans on using the impressive photos of the huge swaths of uniform nameless humanity to market their stuff. When you see the photos, just remember that by looking all alike we are representing the homogeneous The Human Race, just not the distinctly heterogeneous human race.

Tags: Nike+ Human Race

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Austin, Running, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.