The Conscious Runner

  We live in exciting times. Depending on your perspective, you may interpret this phase as times of doom or times of departure. The current situation gives many people the feeling that they are overwhelmed by faster and faster developments. The recurring feeling is that you yourself are too small and your influence is not significant enough to cause change. In addition, there is an almost chronic feeling of being overwhelmed by ever new problem areas and constantly emerging new issues that need to be dealt with. Just having turned vegan and dropping short-haul flights, you are suddenly no longer allowed to eat avocados and sweet potatoes. There is aluminum in the deodorant, even electric cars need a dirty battery and suddenly you are also told that all your sports clothing is made of p...

On a typical day, you, as an open minded and generally aware person will be confronted with various situations where you are reminded of how bad you and your lifestyle can be. This can be exhausting. In the morning, many of us have the choice: Take the car, bike, or public transport. If you decide for public transport you are looking around yourself, heads down, everybody is staring at their smartphone. You remember the article you read last night about how smartphones and internet usage are one of the largest contributors to climate impact because the data usage (power supply for the servers), frequent production and replacement of these devices. Anyway, you take out your phone and use it. Opening up your Instagram account you will find many posts of people showing off their green li...

Running has turned to become a trendy sport. It moves the masses. That's awesome. With the growth of the running community, the sports gear industry has also been growing. That's also awesome. It has become really innovative to find solutions for the runners needs and has helped taken the sport to new levels. For every different use case you will find a running shirt that solves a multitude of different problems. There are dozens of solutions out there to make you a better runner in the form of clothing. As written in our other blog post, plastic already has a long history in sports gear. It is highly dominant. Over the past few years, more natural and chemical fibres have made their way (back) into the sport. Before we jump in to compare different fibres that can be used for running ge...

If you are a runner who tracks their performance and want to become faster on your favorite distance, you should keep reading. At the moment, my favorite distance is 10 km. It is a distance which currently fits perfectly into my daily life. With having an engaged worklife, wife and two kids I need to find the sweet spots in between to hit the road. Running long distances is often saved for the weekends. Some time ago I did a 10 km race and ended up at 48 minutes. I was definitely not satisfied and planned to work on it. Everybody told me that interval sessions are definitely needed to increase my speed. I was always a bit reluctant - simply because I enjoyed my steady runs so much. I didn't want to put any structure in it. You could also say, I enjoyed my comfort zone :-) Which isn’t a...

Very large sports brands have been selling synthetic fibre textiles for around half a century now. The majority of them have seen great success in sales, growth, and innovation. Customers are clearly satisfied with the products. These large brands buy their fabrics from specialized suppliers or even make them on their own. Whenever the purchasing staff of those brands is visiting trade shows and conventions for fabric, they are the most welcome visitors at the booths of their suppliers - for a reason. Now imagine, a small unknown brand (like us) comes to their booth asking for a certain fabric blend without any synthetic fibres for sports use for the purpose of avoiding the creation of more microplastic pollution. We’ve been to a few fabric and textile trade shows, our experiences var...

Running is not running. Over the years the running community has come up with creative ways to follow their passion. Combining it with other sportive elements or entering extremes. In this blog post we are presenting 21 different running styles. Try out something new in your next workout!

  You’re an active person. Exercise makes you feel good, it's good for you, and it's fun. Almost all of us wear dedicated fitness gear when being active. It’s supposed to improve your performance, make you look great, and keep you comfortable. Unfortunately, almost all of our sports gear we wear is made of 100% plastic based fabrics. This includes Polyester, Nylon, Polypropylene, Elasthan, and more. We use plastic based fabrics because they wick away sweat quickly as we begin to perspire, and can be easily shaped into whatever form we need.  However, when we look a little closer, we begin to see a lot of flaws in synthetic plastic fabrics. Here are three of those flaws:   1. The Microplastic Problem Harming the environment isn’t the first thing we think of when being active or playing...