Danny Orr’s stomach churned with nervous excitement last Saturday throughout his short walk from his hotel to London Stadium.
He downed a beer soon after making it inside, but even that did little to ease his growing anxiety.
Orr is the senior director of footwear innovation at Brooks Running, a Seattle-based company that specializes in performance running shoes and apparel. He had traveled to London to learn in person whether the most audacious marketing campaign the company had ever undertaken would turn out to be a strategic masterstroke or an ill-conceived misstep.
On March 28, Brooks-sponsored runner Josh Kerr declared his intent to run the mile faster than any human in history. With the help of a custom-made pair of Brooks spikes and a one-of-a-kind speedsuit that the company was engineering, the Scottish middle-distance star hoped to take down a world record that had stood for 27 years in front of 60,000-plus fans at the prestigious London Diamond League meet.
“Project 222” is what Brooks named the campaign, a reference to the 222 seconds it takes to run a 3:42 mile. That’s how fast Kerr would need to go to supplant Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj, who on July 7, 1999, at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico ran a time of 3:43.13 to become the reigning king of the mile.
#saturday
He downed a beer soon after making it inside, but even that did little to ease his growing anxiety.
Orr is the senior director of footwear innovation at Brooks Running, a Seattle-based company that specializes in performance running shoes and apparel. He had traveled to London to learn in person whether the most audacious marketing campaign the company had ever undertaken would turn out to be a strategic masterstroke or an ill-conceived misstep.
On March 28, Brooks-sponsored runner Josh Kerr declared his intent to run the mile faster than any human in history. With the help of a custom-made pair of Brooks spikes and a one-of-a-kind speedsuit that the company was engineering, the Scottish middle-distance star hoped to take down a world record that had stood for 27 years in front of 60,000-plus fans at the prestigious London Diamond League meet.
“Project 222” is what Brooks named the campaign, a reference to the 222 seconds it takes to run a 3:42 mile. That’s how fast Kerr would need to go to supplant Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj, who on July 7, 1999, at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico ran a time of 3:43.13 to become the reigning king of the mile.
#saturday
3 months ago
