Drew Hunter’s Fresh Start

Editor’s note: This is an evolving story. We expect to hear more about the future of Tinman Elite in the near future. When we do, we’ll update this article with new information.

“Tinman Elite is not dead,” Drew Hunter insists. “It's definitely wounded right now. That's sort of how I describe it. But I also think there's a light at the end of the tunnel and there's definitely a way that these wounds can heal and we can come back even stronger.”

I’m on a video call with the former teenage running prodigy, now 27, who famously walked away from an NCAA call-up to sign a 10-year deal with adidas. A deal that led to the creation of Tinman Elite, the Boulder-based pro team that changed the way fans related to their heroes with a new era of warts-and-all social media and long-form video.

In other words, Drew Hunter has always been an adidas man. And the team he founded alongside his friends Sam Parsons and Reed Fischer has always been bound up with the Three Stripes. So it came as a surprise, to put it mildly, when he announced two weeks ago that he had signed a sponsorship deal with ASICS.

“I’d never trained in anything other than adidas shoes for almost a decade,” Drew says. “I’m a deeply loyal person. When I signed the adidas deal, I wouldn’t even go to a running store and try on a Vaporfly or anything. I was like Three Stripes till I die.”

Drew had a good 2024. He’d set new personal bests in his chosen distances of 1500m, 5000m, and 10,000m. He had narrowly missed making the US Olympic team when he placed fourth in the 10,000m trials, finishing less than a second behind Nico Young, who was chasing Woody Kincaid and Grant Fisher.

“I was one spot away, but it was such a great race for me. And the guys I was around were really, really elite athletes. These are not guys to scoff at being in the mix with,” Drew says.

“So I felt pretty confident that adidas would be interested in re-signing me at a value that I was excited about and that was enough, at the end of the day, to support my family.”

Things shifted after a shocking moment in October. Hunter was at the hospital with his newborn daughter, his second, when his agent called with adidas’s renewed contract offer. “It was so laughably bad that I was almost immediately just offended,” he recalls. With his wife having left her career to support his running and raise their two daughters, the numbers simply didn’t add up.

“But I also didn’t even know because I had not done contract negotiations for almost a decade at this point. I didn’t know. I was like, maybe that is my value. Maybe that’s the most any shoe company is going to pay me. But there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to go out and get other offers and see what the actual market value is,” he says.

“I told my agent, ‘Absolutely not. I cannot support my family on that. I would rather quit running and go get a real job and move on than take that and run for a few more years while selling out my family financially.’ I just was not willing to do that.”

“I think runners are interesting because what we’re doing is our passion, and so we’re willing to do it for such a little amount of money. But that actually hurts us because companies know that. They go, ‘Well, we don’t have to pay these guys as much because they do this shit for free.’

“I was not going to play that game. And I think that was actually my strength. In the off season, as we considered my options, I told my agent, ‘Hey, you’ve got to get me to this number. Otherwise I’m walking.’”

The search for a better deal led to ASICS, who offered not just the financial support Hunter needed but also the flexibility to maintain the training environment that’s brought him success. “ASICS were just happy to support me and they really wanted to invest in me as a runner.”

He can continue living in Boulder and working with his parents, Joan and Marc Hunter, as coaches, even though their employment with adidas continues as part of Tinman Elite’s team deal. For Drew, there are some interesting conditions attached, but let’s set those aside for now.

The ASICS deal marks a new chapter for a runner who, when he founded Tinman Elite in late 2017, was just a running wunderkind looking for training partners. He’d grown up in a small town in Virginia. A star of track and cross country, he won a stack of titles and broke a slew of age, meet and national records. The buzz got even louder when, in 2016, he became only the eighth high schooler to run a sub-four-minute mile, when he ran 3:58.25 at the Armory Track and Field Invitational. Of course, that’s an indoors race – making Drew only the second high schooler to go sub-four indoors. Two weeks later, he would repeat the feat in the Wanamaker Mile and later in the year, outdoors, at the Prefontaine Classic.

Which is when adidas made him an offer he didn’t refuse. The contract meant putting aside his plans to enrol at the University of Oregon – alma mater to Steve Prefontaine, Matthew Centrowitz and many others – and compete in the NCAA. It was a hard decision, but Drew had set out on his road to Boulder.

“I spent most of 2017 just figuring out where I wanted to live, who I wanted to train with – figuring out my life. I had to decide where I wanted to be for the next eight years. I tried Flagstaff and a few other places on the East Coast. Then I did a training stint in Boulder and I just fell in love with it. I love the mountains, love the running community here, love the weather – just everything,” he says.

“Then I just needed to find some guys who believed in me. I had to convince a bunch of guys who were graduating college that they wanted to hang out with a 19-year-old kid in Colorado and train with me,” he remembers.

What emerged was something entirely new in professional running. Along with co-founders Sam Parsons and Reed Fischer, Hunter created a team that prioritised transparency and authenticity. Their “media guy”, Max McNerney, lived with them, documenting not just the triumphs but the struggles.

“We were ourselves and we were completely authentic, and this is going to sound funny but we weren’t the best runners in the world. We were relatable. We were trying to be the best runners in the world, and we’re very close to the top, but I think there is this untouchable nature about, you know, the Galen Rupps and the guys who win, the Jakobs of the world.”

“I think people saw us and they said, ‘Well, Reed was okay in high school, but I knew lots of people as good as him. Maybe one day I could be competing for a US title on the roads,’ or, ‘Drew’s just a normal kid going to college, and he has the same sort of struggles and excitement about things as I do.’”

This approach resonated deeply with the running community. By 2019, they were drawing hundreds of fans to community runs in unlikely locations. “We went to Des Moines, Iowa, for the US championships,” Hunter recalls. “We had like 200 people show up. It was crazy. In the middle of nowhere, in June, so it was super hot. It’s not a major city or anything, and we had all these fans showing up in the gear that we sold, and they just wanted to interact with us.”

The gear – merch – that Drew mentions there is another important part of the Tinman Elite identity. And it’s an interesting thing to consider in a broader discussion about athletes’ value to brands.

As well as being early adopters of a BTS approach to social media, Tinman Elite had swag that their fans wanted a piece of. Signing a team deal with adidas in 2019 or 2020 (Drew says he can’t remember the exact year) meant the team could get apparel at a cheap price so that they could then sell merch to support their growth.

“That’s actually how we support most of the team, through our merchandise sales. Which is hard – you’ve got to hustle for that. This is not the NBA or the NFL; there’s not millions of fans that are invested. You have to fight tooth and nail to convince people to support a professional running team, especially one that doesn’t have gold medals around its neck all the time.”

“And people were amazing. We would sell out drops in like three minutes. We had sort of a cult-like following, and that was really, really special because that money was going directly back into the team, paying our media people, paying our coaches, paying the athletes. It was this cycle where we could give as much as people were willing to give us … We could go out and get a better recruit or a runner that really made a big difference for our team, or we could hire someone to travel with us to races, or a strength coach.”

The other side of that equation, as Drew sees it, is that Tinman Elite were making good money for adidas and lending their credibility to the brand. Drew says he’d like there to be a more robust conversation around not only the money brands are paying professional runners but also what the goals and objectives are. In a recent blog post discussing his move to ASICS he wrote, “I wish we could talk numbers, but I am not allowed. This would certainly make contracts better for everyone.”

Asked to expand on that, he says he believes “if everyone knew what top athletes were making, the ceiling would just get a lot higher for everybody” and that currently “it’s so hard to know what the shoe companies want”.

“Is it all about performance? Is it all about status? Is it all about ROI? I mean, we sold stacks of adidas gear. So to me, that seemed like a worthwhile investment, but maybe it wasn’t for their brand – but no one tells you this stuff, no one communicates with you about what the goal is,” he says.

“Obviously medals are important, but if a brand’s entire goal is a top-three medal every four years that doesn’t seem like the only thing they really want. I mean, do they want any other promotion? Do they want you to do community things for the sport? I would love more transparency within contracts, but also for brands to just say, ‘Drew, we really want you to focus on talking about the technology of shoes. That’s really what is good for our brand.’ Or, ‘Drew, we really want you to focus on the community aspect. Like let’s create a camp with you for young high schoolers … Or they could say, ‘We really want you to focus on the roads or the track.’ I love that feedback, like I would love for someone to say, ‘Hey, I want you to go all in on the 5K.’ Great. All right, let’s do it. Hearing you say that makes me excited because I know that I have the support from you guys and I know that you’re excited about my goals.”

“I do want that transparency around payment out there; I think that’d be good for everyone to know. But more than anything, I’d love to know what brands want and what makes sense for each brand – because every brand’s different.”

He’s excited about the openness to feedback he’s found at ASICS. Upon signing with them he sent an email outlining some of his initiatives at Tinman Elite over the past eight years and offering to help them test products or potentially even build a new team. “I want to be a valuable asset for you guys, so please put me in a position so that I can do that,” he told them. ASICS were open to this and Drew is talking to the product team and other groups within the company.

“I’m a go-getter type person. If I’m empowered to do something, I can go do it. I just need backing from the people that want to help me with that. And that’s what I’m hoping in my new relationship with a new company is, just to have that confidence to be like, ‘Drew, we really want you to go do this.’”

But Tinman Elite now faces perhaps its biggest challenge. Hunter’s move to ASICS creates a complex situation where he can train with the team but can’t appear in their content. Which creates a few obvious practical difficulties.

“How it looks like in this situation is I’m at practice and say they’re filming a YouTube video with Reed that day, I would just not be included in it. And for any of the social media posts, I would not be in the background or anything like that. This is for our media team to figure out because I don’t know exactly how that’s gonna work. Yeah, unless he’s really dropping me or I’m dropping him, it’s kind of hard not to be in frame, but that’s sort of the idea.”

Meanwhile, Parsons is a free agent, while Fischer remains with adidas. How can Tinman Elite survive with its three founders going in three different directions?

“That’s the great question,” Drews says, “and that’s what we are exploring: if there’s a route where we can do this all together, or if there’s a route to pivot and rally behind Reed, and then me and Sam would almost leave the team. The idea was, potentially, to have a marathon-focused group with Reed, backed by adidas.” There’s one scenario where a marathon group coheres under the Tinman Elite banner and another track-focused group is born under the current coaching moniker of Hammer & Axe.

“But that’s still all up in the air because, believe it or not, Reed’s two biggest training partners are me and Sam, at the moment. So [from Fischer’s perspective] it’s sort of like, ‘Wait, you start a whole new group – you’ve got to find new guys – but really the guys I train most with are Drew and Sam and Joey [Berriatua], who are not with adidas.’ Like I said, it’s complicated.

“Really, we want to find a situation where the team can stay together. That’s our goal, and I’m not entirely sure what that looks like, but that seems like a really, really good goal for all of us.”

Drew sees possibilities even in this uncertainty. He’s found renewed excitement in his training, pushing into uncharted territory with higher mileage than ever before. “I’ve never run more than like 80 miles [almost 129km] a week before,” he explains. “Now, I hit 102 [164km] last week. I’m really starting to get up there. I don’t know why I put such a limit on myself early on in my career.”

For now, though, Hunter is focused on balancing personal ambition with helping Tinman Elite find its next iteration. “I was the first person in the team and, like any person who starts a company or anything like that, they want to be able to retire or move on and for the entity that they helped create to live on,” he says. “My focus is helping the team with the next phase, whatever that may be – even if it doesn’t involve me.”

That might mean splitting into separate track and marathon groups, or pursuing an independent path without a title sponsor. The details are still being worked out.* But Hunter’s optimism about both his personal future and Tinman Elite’s next chapter is infectious.

“I’m jazzed, man,” he grins. “I’ve done the same shit for so long that, even just a brand new pair of shoes on my feet – and meeting new people that I’m bumping elbows with and getting excited about – like, that’s just fun, new and exciting.”

It’s this enthusiasm, coupled with his commitment to innovation, that has defined both Drew’s career and Tinman Elite’s impact on the sport. As he laces up his new ASICS shoes and charts a course toward Los Angeles 2028, Drew Hunter is showing that sometimes the best way to honour a legacy is to keep pushing it forward.

*After our call, Drew let Tempo know that Tinman Elite, as a team, is close to concluding a new agreement that would clarify its operating structure moving ahead. We will update this article as new information comes to hand.