THE JOURNAL
Since launching in 2010, the Swiss sportswear company ON has developed a reputation as a bit of a maverick – a running brand that zigs when the competition zags. That’s not only true of its products, which immediately stand out from the rest of the field on account of their unconventional designs, but of the general direction of the brand, too. The launch this year of the Cloudmonster shoe, accompanied by the marketing slogan “Get Weird”, tells you a lot about the alternative ethos at ON.
So does its most recent campaign, Point2, a series of events taking place around the New York and London marathons that celebrate the part of the race that almost everyone agrees is the absolute worst: the final 0.2 miles. If you’ve never run a marathon before, then a distance of 0.2 miles might seem inconsequential, and in the grand scheme of things it is, representing less than one per cent of the overall race. But when you’ve just struggled over the 26-mile mark, hopelessly fatigued, being asked to run that extra fraction of a mile just feels like adding insult to injury. (Who invented the marathon? Why on earth didn’t they just round it down?)
But this distance is what makes the difference, according to ON. It’s in these final strides that we ask ourselves the big questions; it’s here that we truly begin to understand the true meaning of the “marathon mindset”. And after joining the team at the London Marathon earlier this month, we have to admit that we were maybe just a little bit won over by their argument. After all, it’s only by going the extra mile – or, in the case of the marathon, those extra 385 yards – that we find out what we’re truly capable of. It’s often more than we thought.
Savouring, rather than suffering through, the final 0.2 miles of a marathon ultimately requires adopting a different point of view. Luckily, looking at things differently is what ON Running is all about. It’s what inspired its founder, the retired duathlon champion Mr Olivier Bernhard, to attach pieces of garden hose to a prototype running shoe, an experiment that ultimately resulted in the brand’s patented CloudTec technology, a unique cushioning system that is utilised in the Cloudmonster along with many other models in the ON Running footwear line-up.
You can identify it from those distinctive little “clouds” running along the sole, circles made of foam that compress to provide a soft landing before rebounding for an explosive takeoff. The Cloudmonster provides the biggest and most supportive CloudTec cushioning system seen yet in an ON Running shoe, making it a no-brainer for the marathon and other endurance-running events.
The big question: will these little clouds under your feet make that final fraction of a mile any less of a challenge? You’ll have to ask the throngs joining the New York City Marathon this November when ON Running returns with the second leg of its Point2 campaign.