Saucony Reveals Details on Project Peak

Another global running series launches, and again it’s promoted by a running shoes brand.

PROJECT PEAK is Saucony’s global trail running series culminating with El Cruce, the epic 3-day 100k race that traverses the iconic Andes Mountains.

The six events in the series are:

• Dolomiti Extreme in Val Di Zoldo, Italy
• Shuswap Ultra in Shuswap BC, Canada
• Garmin Epic Trail, Vall de Boi in Barruera, Spain
• Jupiter Peak 25K in Park City Utah, USA
• Saucony Bamm in Rikgransen, Sweden
• Mid Mountain 50K, Park City Utah, USA

With the final being the El Cruce, a multi day event between December 1-6 , San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina.

Not sure what to say about this other than that it seems that global shoe brands seem to think that promoting, marketing and organizing these running event series seem to be good for business. The North Face did it for awhile, La Sportiva used to have a Mountain Cup that event stopped in Olympia (I ran one of their races in the series and other than a few La Sportiva flags at the start/finish there was no local tie-in) Salomon obviously has the Golden Trail Series and HOKA seems to “own” Western States, its Golden Ticket Qualifiers and of course the UTMB World Series. Some events like Western States, UTMB or the Cirque Series of course existed before and will without their title sponsors (ON is the sponsor for Cirque), but the idea of launching a running series and sort of loosely connecting a few existing races into a series, promoting it together on the brand’s website seems to be the current playbook for marketing efforts for (big global shoe) brands.