Story
Why runners collect cities
Ask a marathon runner about their first race and you will not get a time, you will get a city. "Berlin, 2019." "Vienna, in the rain." "New York, I cried on the Queensboro Bridge." Runners remember places. And at some point many of them start collecting them.
The medal on the hook
Almost every runner has one: the wall, board or hook where the medals hang. Next to it a pile of bibs you cannot throw away and a drawer full of finisher shirts. Each of them stands for weeks of training, early alarms and one day when everything came together.
The problem: the medal stays at home. And the finisher shirt looks exactly the same on 10,000 other people, sponsor logos on the back included.
A city is more than a course
Every city runs differently. The bridges of New York. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The Ringstrasse in Vienna. If you ran there, the skyline is not just sights, it is kilometres, cramps and the moment after the finish line. That is why runners collect cities, not just races.
The idea behind VELYX
That is how VELYX started. Every Raceday shirt shows the skyline of a city with the distance below it, to the metre: 42.195 for the marathon, 21.0975 for the half. No sponsors, no bib number, no date that feels awkward three years later. Just the city and the distance you ran there. A shirt you wear because you earned it, and one that works for training as well as for your next race.
And because collecting is addictive, there are the Collector Boards: shirts with a map where you can add a patch for every city you finish. The matching patches are in the works.
Which city is next?
Maybe it is the city you have already run. Maybe the one you just signed up for, the one that is supposed to get you out of bed every morning now. We make shirts for more than 90 cities, from Berlin and Vienna to Paris and New York. And if your city is missing: write to mail@velyx.run, the list keeps growing.
