LIFTS Episode 86 - Inside the Running Boom and Smart Footwear Revolution with Royi Metser

0:00If you take 25 grams of creatine it's going to improve cognitive performance. I think creatine is one of the things where it's accessible, it's affordable, and now there are additional health benefits coming out from it. You don't really need much equipment. All you need is a pair of shorts and some shoes and you can run. I can't imagine a future in 20 years where footwear is not instrumental with technology. There's a massive opportunity to guide people to run better, to run more efficiently, to guess less, and to reduce the risk of injury and help them reach their performance goals more efficiently.

0:44Matthew Januszek:Welcome to this week's episode of Lyfts. I'm Matthew Januszczyk. I'm here with my co-host, Mo Iqbal. Mo, how are you doing today in Chicago? Okay. I'm doing good. Yeah, I'm at a friend of the podcast hotel, Midtown Hotel in Chicago. And the friend we're speaking about is John Brady. I don't know if we've had John as a guest on the pod, have we? I don't think we have, no. But he's been sort of threatening me that I should come and say it's hotel for a while. So you'd have to tell me what it's like at some point. Well, typically, this is, I think, my third or fourth time staying in the hotel. It's nicely done.

1:17The best thing about it is that you've got full access to their flagship gym here in Chicago, which is, if people have not been, it is tremendous. I think it's one of my favorite gyms in the country. In fact, I'm staying here with a couple of colleagues and we're walking in and I said, this is a real treat. It's one of my favorite gyms in the country. And they've got a restaurant here. They have a spa here. And it's pretty close to downtown Chicago. So whenever I'm in town, if I don't need to be downtown in Chicago, I always opt to stay at Midtown. but this kind of is a continuation of some travel which I've had I was in Asia last week and in Tokyo and then Kuala Lumpur on a very quick turnaround which is always challenging when you're traveling I think you just came back from vacation but Matthew you sent me a link on Instagram which I actually put to you so it was really timely you sent me a link around creatine and loading up on creatine when you are sleep deprived.

2:17I was a bit skeptical. I take creatine about five grams a day, maybe 10 some days, but I've never kind of loaded up on 25 grams. So what this post that you sent me talks about is that if you are sleep deprived, which I was, because then you have all the effects of it with brain fog and low energy, that if you take 25 grams of creatine, It's going to improve cognitive performance and your energy levels, which is what I did. So I said, okay, let me take this. And so for that week, I actually took 24 grams of creatine per day. And I have to tell you, it was really helpful. So thank you for that tip.

2:58It was timely. I put it to you. So I'm curious, since you sent it to me, have you actually tried it?

3:04Matthew Januszek:I haven't. No, I just went and disappeared for a week in Mexico. but I would like to pick it up because I've not been doing creatine really. I have some that's in my, like there's a pre and post workout thing that I take, which doesn't have anywhere near enough what it suggests that you take. But I was curious, you know, what brand of creatine did you take? Did you do any research in choosing a particular brand? And I'm guessing there's different qualities that provide different results as well, I would have thought. yeah so i took one um so when i was so i got the post while i was in transit so i had a container creatine with me which is from a company called pillar performance and i might have spoken about them before but i also take their magnesium supplement they've got this supplement called triple magnesium which i take before i go to sleep so i just kind of it's a good thing i had a you know half a container left but that's kind of what i loaded up on to 25 grams i don't recommend taking it, I don't think you could stay at that dose for a sustained period.

4:03But it's interesting, right? I don't think we've ever covered creatine recently, but you and I have probably been taking creatine on and off for the last 25 years, maybe even longer, but mostly as a strength tool. But now there's all these benefits of creatine which are coming out, which have all these additional health benefits to it. The best thing about it too, is that it's still one of the more affordable supplements. So when you're looking at, we've talked about things like NAD drips, as an example, where the science is still being baked. And it's also very costly. It's a supplement, which is at a premium.

4:37I think creatine is one of the things where it's accessible, it's affordable. And now there are additional health benefits coming out from it. So

4:47Matthew Januszek:I don't know if you follow James Smith, PT, either of you, but he's done a few very interesting posts on creatine gummies in particular because there's a lot of these new gummies coming out which i guess it's an easy way to get the amount of creatine that they're saying you need nowadays but but he's been testing a lot of the most popular brands that are out there really and finding that the amount of creatine in them is is is not at all what what's been sort of published on the packaging so yeah i think it's an interesting space um but it it seems as though there's a lot of scams going on in the area, as usual.

5:24Matthew Januszek:So maybe we need to find a creatine expert at some point and get them on to do a deep dive. Yeah, we should. We should. But look, so having things in a candy format, like you just talked about, is the reason why, as a country, we are now taking more vitamins than we have ever before. And it was because we transitioned from pills and powder to these candy or truable formats. and that's led to this explosion of everyone taking more vitamins than ever before. But I think the efficacy of, so think about this. Someone mentioned to me creatine as well, right? But if you were to chew that, 25 grams of chewable creatine versus a powder, I mean, that's a lot of, right?

6:08That's quite a bit to take on. And I don't know what 25 grams looks like, even in a capsule format. So I've just been opting for the powder form. But look, today we are talking about something which I do quite a bit. Matthew, you do a lot as well, which is running. And we are both runners. And there's been a boom recently in running, especially post-pandemic. But before we get to that, I'm excited to have someone who I consider a friend. I'm an advisor to his company. and the guest is Roy Metzer, who's the founder and CEO of Velo Running. He is behind the company of what people are calling the world's first truly smart shoe and I want to get into that in a minute.

6:56Roy's background includes time at InsideTrack, which is actually how we first met. And now he's leading this startup of Velo Running, which just blew past his Kickstarter goal in record time. So I want to chat about that as well, but Roy, welcome to Lyft. Thank you, Mo. It's great to see you and thanks for having me.

7:16Matthew Januszek:Running is an interesting thing. I'm in my mid fifties now and it's something that's been around in my sort of, I guess, fitness, if you call it routine forever. I sort of came off the back of the original running phase, which was probably sort of like late eighties when everybody started to run. And, you know, it's almost like the first big wave of fitness that I can remember in my lifetime. And it seems to have gone through so many different phases. And as we're preparing for this podcast today, I was just putting some stuff into chat to see what's popular in that space. And there seems to be all of these running clubs.

7:54Matthew Januszek:Last week, Ma and I chatted about the Diplo one, which I thought was a bit of a one of a kind. But apparently there's a lot more. There's the Venice Run Club in Los Angeles. There's the cool down run club, which apparently is operating in 11 cities as this sort of social club disguised as a run club. There's another one in Texas called the MBTX Club. There's one in London called the Say Yes Club. And it seems to be driven by a lot of the younger generation that are using it as an alternative to actually go out and meet other people instead of going to places like bars and nightclubs, which is what happened in my day.

8:30Matthew Januszek:So I'm just curious from your perspective, Roy, what are you seeing in this? If we zoom out and look at the space as a whole, what are some of the trends that you're seeing? Not necessarily just related to your product, because I'm aware that it is sort of relatively specialist. But what are you seeing in the space that probably people that are listening may not be as aware of that is starting to develop at the moment? It's been probably 50 years of growth and running. it started actually back in the 70s if you go all the way back to the first what people consider to be the first running boom at least in the U.S.

9:08and it was driven by a coach named Arthur Lidyard who's actually Bill Bowerman one of the co-founders of Nike went over there and observed you know Arthur Lidyard who's a legendary running coach and Bill Bowerman came back to the U.S. and wrote a book called jogging and it was the first time that people started to actually run for fitness, like go out and just jog. And that was in the 70s. And the US really took off as a recreational form of fitness in the 70s and grew from there over the course of the next few decades. That was kind of the first running boom. And then we're in the midst of what I think many consider to be, and you touched on it, of a second running boom.

9:47And that was in part accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. It was actually what led me to find running personally. And so I'm one of the people who is newly participating in this community, at least much more actively in the last, call it five or six years. And I think there's a lot of people just like me who found running as a primary form of fitness or something that they want to have goals around and really train for during the pandemic or shortly thereafter. And then it's really exploded in growth and continues to from there. We're seeing participation in races continue. I mean, you're seeing almost every single major marathon break attendance and registration records over the prior few years.

10:29You're seeing run club participation explode and Strava publishes a lot of good reports on the participation because they just have so much good data on this. You're seeing a younger generation of runners as well. So the sport is being driven or the popularity is being driven in large part by Gen Z. And in particular, women are participating in the sport much more than they did in the past. And so, yeah, it's really, we're in the middle of the second running boom, and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. And of course, that leads to a lot of great communities, a lot of great innovation. And so, we were part of that wave and aiming to, I mean, we didn't start this company because of this running boom.

11:15It just happens to be a great time to be building for this community and this market. You touched on the running boom really driven by Gen Z. I would even go further that it's driven by young women. And unlike some of the previous booms I've had, some even say this might be the third one, because I think we had another mini one in 08, 09 during the last financial crisis, which is also interesting because a lot of people, which is a whole different conversation, a lot of people turn to running in times of need. It's just been such a great tool that people have used. But this one is incredibly diverse compared to the last couple of running booms.

11:55I mean, you talked about the London Marathon, Rory. The London Marathon saw over 1.1 million ballot entries this year. That is double compared to two years ago. And the best thing about it, though, is that it has nearly equal representation across all genders. It saw a surge in participants aged 18 to 29. And I think, you know, influencer-based platforms like TikTok and Instagram have really played a big role in the running movement. And to your point also that it's really a post-pandemic boom that we've seen that started during the pandemic, but also then really grown post-pandemic as well. But I'm just curious, given this boom, do you think that there's going to be a boom and a bust?

12:44In the last two booms that running had, you saw this big increase come up, but then you also saw a decline in the following years. Why do you think this time might be a bit different? Well, I think if you look at over long periods of time, running has continued to grow pretty consistently. Obviously, if you look at short periods, maybe there are spikes and short declines. But I think running has a lot of things that make it unique. One is it's a very accessible thing to do. And so I think that's why it's, you know, perhaps you could say the second most popular form of exercise in the world may be behind walking.

13:24There's hundreds of millions of people, about 600 million people who participate in running globally, about 150 million people around the world who run at least once a week and about 50 million of those are in the U.S. And those numbers have probably grown. There's tens of millions of people who have run a race or run a race annually in the U.S. So it's obviously a gigantic community and a gigantic market because it's relatively easy to get started, right? You don't really need much equipment. All you need is a pair of shorts and some shoes and you can run. It's also something that for some reason, I think a lot of us see running as this natural thing that humans were born to do.

14:04And in many ways, that's true. Human beings have been running for a very long time. You can look back in history and you can see that there's actually forms of running called endurance hunting, where the human body was actually designed to be able to run long distances much better than other species. And so if you read reports of running dating back, centuries and even longer, you can read about the fact that some humans used to basically try to outlast their prey by running for longer than their prey could. And so it is a very natural thing for human beings to be able to do. And so I think it's just something that, yeah, I don't see it ever going away, honestly.

14:48It's just, it's so accessible. And obviously, the health benefits are tremendous. I don't really need to go into detail there. I think Anyone who runs knows that if done correctly, you can experience tremendous improvements to your cardiovascular health and fitness, your metabolic health and fitness. Of course, if you have weight management or weight loss goals, it can be very good in support of those objectives. And then mental health. I mean, anyone who runs knows the mental health benefits of going out for a run and how good and clear you feel after that run compared to before. it. And so I really don't see this slowing down anytime soon.

15:26Now, of course, I'm building for this market. So you could say that I'm biased, but it's just such an accessible and beneficial form of fitness that it's never going to disappear. And it hasn't for the last 50 years. It's just continued to grow.

15:40Matthew Januszek:Many of the listeners to this podcast are involved in the gym business where they've got physical locations. And one of the things that we've been hearing a lot although there have been some exceptions to the to these claims but we've been hearing a lot that there's a reduction in people using treadmills inside of gyms what what what's your experience if any on that statement are you is this becoming more of a thing now that people do outside of the gym and they're finding particularly some of the the gen z's are now going to other places to have that kind of experience that they would have done with the gym which is a little bit more social or are you did you see that this could be the beginning of that picking up back again in regular gyms where people start training for competitions last week we talked a lot about high rocks which again is i'm sure in terms of your world is is a is a great opportunity because there's a huge amount of running that goes along in that and with it my guess is is coaching people how to run effectively and and um and and so you know that how do you see those two sides coming together, if at all?

16:43It's a great question. I haven't looked too much into the data around the participation from runners on treadmills versus outdoors and how that's changed over time. I mean, I can tell you that part of this boom, I think you touched on it, it's really driven by people's desire for social connection, and they're using run clubs as a way to connect with other individuals. And so, of course, it's great to be able to do that. Run clubs typically meet, you know, outside or run outside, I should say. And it's a chance to be outside to, um, to run outside with other people. And, um, you know, most races are outside.

17:21And I think there's just something special about being outdoors and being in nature that running kind of forces you and allows you to do. And so you're kind of killing two birds with one stone, right? You're getting a great workout in, but you're also being out in nature, experiencing fresh air. And obviously that's, that's a beautiful reset. I don't think treadmill running is ever going to disappear. I think especially for people who are training for a goal or have a running related goal, a treadmill can be a great tool to have to support their training and allow them to follow a training plan when running outdoors is obviously not feasible due to weather or any other reason, travel.

17:56I think the other thing that's happened that we've seen is trail running is is exploding in popularity too. That's another sector of the running market that's experiencing tremendous outsized growth over the last few years. So people really want to be, I think, again, in nature. And so the trail running market and participation and trail running, I think it's still nascent. But that's going to continue to grow. And maybe that's pulling people out of the gym and to the trails. I'm not sure. It's hard for me to say. I think that, But yeah, I don't see treadmill running ever going away. I think the treadmill hasn't been really reinvented for a long time.

18:34It's been kind of the same experience for decades. I know there's great companies that are working on innovation and in improving treadmill running. So, you know, maybe there's some great innovation on the horizon or some that's been released in the last year or two that can make it perhaps a more interesting experience for folks who feel like it's a little boring. So, yeah, for me, I just run outside. I mean, I can speak from personal experience. That's what I love. I love to be outside when I run. And so I think a lot of runners are like me. They just enjoy that form of the sport. Yeah, I'm like you too, Roy.

19:06And I think Matthew too, we're mostly outside runners. I've opted for the treadmill. I think if it's too hot and I can't get a run in the morning and it's like 90 plus, or sometimes if the weather just doesn't support it, if it's like snowing a lot or there's icy conditions and whatnot. But I want to touch on one point here. So running, many clubs in our industry, and I posted a link about Lifetime Fitness. Lifetime Fitness has had and supported run clubs for many years. And I've been a member at Lifetime, I think going back to the 2010s, and they've always had an outdoor run club. And then you look at, it's like High Rocks, which is really founded on running.

19:42So you have a lot of people who now want to compete and train for High Rocks and find out that I'm good at the functional movements, but I'm not good at running. So they now pick up running. I've spoken to so many people who picked up running purely because of high rocks and are trying to find ways to quantify and make that 1K divided to eight laps to be more effective. And then even you look at retail stores like Lululemon or running shoe stores, all of them, for the most part, have some semblance of a run club. They either meet once a week or twice a week, and they meet outside the store. So it's been a great way to point where to bring community, to bring them to your store and to kind of bring people together.

20:23I personally use running as a way to meet people, too. Like if I have instead of a business meeting and having a coffee, I'm like, hey, why don't we meet in the morning and head out for a run? It's just been a great way to even conduct business. I do want to switch gears into Avello itself. You look at, and I know you and I have talked about this for the last couple of years, but big brands like Nike and Under Armour have tried creating the smart kind of running shoe before, but they've never been able to crack mainstream adoption. What do you think is different between then and now, both in market and also the tech?

20:58And why do you have confidence that Avello can succeed where these other big brands have not been able to do that? Yeah, it's a question I've fielded quite a bit over the last two and a half years, as you can imagine. I mean, dating back to 25 years ago was probably one of the first attempts that most people who are in this industry remember, which is Nike building what they called Nike Plus. and so they did instrument footwear at the time this is in the late 90s early 2000s and they created a little pod that you could insert into a compatible nike shoe now we're talking again before the iphone we're talking before gps was really used mainstream right so allowing an athlete or a runner to track their pace their distance and their steps on a run was pretty groundbreaking at the time.

21:46And so it was actually my co-founder was the lead executive at Nike, working on this project, Nike Plus, and they partnered with Apple. And they created a little adapter that you could attach at the time to an iPod and stream your data from your Nike Plus pod to your iPod and then see all the data. And that was, again, 25 years ago. Ultimately, Nike's core business is not technology that they tried a few other things. You know, you guys probably remember the fuel band and, um, they could have, I, I believe, and many others I've talked to, they could have built a great wearables and technology business.

22:22I think that the fuel band was ahead of its time. Um, but it's just not their, their core business. It's not, it's not what they're, um, necessarily the strongest at. Um, even though you could argue they have endless resources, they're there they have a core business it's it's obviously they have the the arguably the greatest brand in the world and and they know how to make great footwear great apparel and work with great athletes um technology is not really where they're the strongest it's also not their priority right they have a a very successful business in apparel and footwear um and so to get a technology business off the ground and scale it to the point where it makes a meaningful impact for a company like Nike in terms of financial performance and contribution to their revenue and profit.

23:10I mean, Nike is a$40,$50,$60 billion a year revenue company. So for an initiative like this to make an impact for them, it has to be pretty big. And it takes some time, as you guys know, to take something from a very early stage to the point where it's doing$100 million plus in revenue. And even then for a company like Nike, it would be a drop in the bucket. So it's been tried by several footwear brands and almost, well, not almost, every single time it's been tried before Avello, it's been by one of these incumbent footwear brands. And it's your classic innovator's dilemma, right? It's not their core business.

23:41They're not serving necessarily initially their core customer. They're serving kind of the early adopter customer. And they're typically slower. They're more bureaucratic. They're more risk averse, right? So it's for all these reasons that we feel that it's a startup that's the right organization, a startup that's specifically and solely focused on creating smart footwear with the team and skills that are required to make smart footwear, not just footwear skills, which of course are required because you have to make a great shoe if you want people to use a smart shoe. But you need exceptional hardware skills and expertise.

24:17You need exceptional software and firmware engineers. And you have to be obsessed with making all of those things work seamlessly together and then creating an experience that takes the data that comes off of the sensor that's in the shoe and then also making it useful, insightful, engaging for athletes, which I would argue is one of the hardest challenges. And so this is not an easy thing to do. It has to be your sole mission and sole focus. And it can't be an innovation project off on the side that, you know, if it works great, if it doesn't work, no big deal. It's got to be, I mean, honestly, life or death, which it is for us.

24:50And so we're obsessing over every single detail. and that's why one of the reasons why I believe obviously have great conviction that it's not because the market isn't there it's not because it's not technically feasible it's just that the execution hasn't been there it hasn't been the right party that's attacked this and and we're obviously attacking it in a very different way given that we're a startup and our sole focus is building a smart running shoe I think the market has also changed dramatically in the last two decades I mean you guys you guys have seen the explosion of adoption of wearable devices so the The consumer today is much different than the consumer was 20 years ago.