END Team: Not sure if this has been sent out to you all yet, but Paul has a great story and photo attached that many of you can use in talking about the brand.
For those of you who are “uninitiated,” the annual Hood to Coast relay race happens every August in Oregon and as you might have guessed by its name, is a very long, and very grueling team relay race that starts at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood and ends for most teams about 24 hours later on the Oregon Coast in a city called Seaside (best known for its two most famous campers, Lewis and Clark). Bottomline, round these parts, Hood to Coast is a big, big deal to us locals.
This is a race that draws teams literally from all over the world and companies like Nike, Adidas, Asics, Brooks, Saucony ALL send their BEST runners to and compete against one another head to head. Nike and Adidas field hundreds of company teams for this event. It was not to long ago you saw Alberto Salazar out there running this thing.
I tell you all the above to drive home two pretty cool points. First, as you will see down below our END Team KICKED ASS! Each of the 12 runners has to do three legs over the 197 mile course over unbelievably brutal terrain in which you run down a large mountain, through a major city, up another range of mountains and then to the coast. Imagine running UPHILL on a Coastal Range fire service road at 3 AM on jagged rocks the size of softballs and baseballs IN THE DARK. Two runners later, the athlete might find themselves running on a highway with cars zipping past at 70 MPH. To win their division is AMAZING!
Second is the fact that the entire team not only wore their END shirts proudly, but each person on the team was decked out in END trail, road and some water footwear that they wore for the entire race! We will start getting back some technical reports from the team today, but the initial read is that our END Footwear performed at the highest level and dare I say had a hand in Team END flying along at such a mind boggling clip. A big thanks goes out from the entire office to Paul for pulling this group together and for really promoting the brand out there. This is one of those check marks, like the Leadville 100, that allows you all to go out and talk about venues where the shoes are being tested in real world performance venues and coming away with fantastic results.
WAY TO GO PAUL AND TEAM END!
All the best
Ben Finklea
For those of you who are “uninitiated,” the annual Hood to Coast relay race happens every August in Oregon and as you might have guessed by its name, is a very long, and very grueling team relay race that starts at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood and ends for most teams about 24 hours later on the Oregon Coast in a city called Seaside (best known for its two most famous campers, Lewis and Clark). Bottomline, round these parts, Hood to Coast is a big, big deal to us locals.
This is a race that draws teams literally from all over the world and companies like Nike, Adidas, Asics, Brooks, Saucony ALL send their BEST runners to and compete against one another head to head. Nike and Adidas field hundreds of company teams for this event. It was not to long ago you saw Alberto Salazar out there running this thing.
I tell you all the above to drive home two pretty cool points. First, as you will see down below our END Team KICKED ASS! Each of the 12 runners has to do three legs over the 197 mile course over unbelievably brutal terrain in which you run down a large mountain, through a major city, up another range of mountains and then to the coast. Imagine running UPHILL on a Coastal Range fire service road at 3 AM on jagged rocks the size of softballs and baseballs IN THE DARK. Two runners later, the athlete might find themselves running on a highway with cars zipping past at 70 MPH. To win their division is AMAZING!
Second is the fact that the entire team not only wore their END shirts proudly, but each person on the team was decked out in END trail, road and some water footwear that they wore for the entire race! We will start getting back some technical reports from the team today, but the initial read is that our END Footwear performed at the highest level and dare I say had a hand in Team END flying along at such a mind boggling clip. A big thanks goes out from the entire office to Paul for pulling this group together and for really promoting the brand out there. This is one of those check marks, like the Leadville 100, that allows you all to go out and talk about venues where the shoes are being tested in real world performance venues and coming away with fantastic results.
WAY TO GO PAUL AND TEAM END!
All the best
Ben Finklea
