Kevin Gunawan: The Teammate Behind the Lens

Kevin Gunawan went into running mainly to make friends.

He grew up in Apple Valley, “a cookie-cutter suburb” in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and didn’t run until high school. Cross country was the one sport with no try-outs and, for a kid whose middle school didn’t feed into the high school he went to, it was a way to get to know “a great group of guys” who would stick with him through the rest of school.

It helped that he turned out to have a bit of talent and a lot of obsessiveness. “When I’m passionate about something, I go all in,” he says. Going all in took a 21-minute 5K down to 16:18 and, supported by good grades, earned him a spot at Loyola University Chicago, where he ran NCAA Division I cross country and track and field while studying film and digital media.

It didn’t last. Chasing the full-ride scholarship he’d missed on his entry to the college system, Kevin trained harder, faster and longer than his coach was asking for. The result was a badly knotted back, a pinched nerve and, before his sophomore year was out, a medical retirement from running.

That’s when he showed his ingenuity, resilience and determination. Rather than drift from the team, Kevin asked the athletic department for a creative services internship and became the runner with the camera, shooting stills and video, making YouTube videos and running the team Instagram while he travelled with his closest friends. He went on living the team’s life after he’d stopped racing it, and those remain some of the best years he’s had. “I never saw myself as less just because I wasn’t competing,” he says. By his final year, recruits were telling him they’d picked Loyola partly because of the culture they’d seen in his work. 

That set the template for much that followed. In spring 2021, Tinman Elite hit Instagram to say they wanted a creative intern, a “Tintern”. The adidas-sponsored crew with the rock-star attitude was simply one of the hottest things going back then, and groundbreaking social media and YouTube content was a huge part of the team’s mystique. Kevin got the job. At the time, the ongoing pandemic meant most track meets were cancelled, and campus life was reduced to Zoom meetings. So, asked if he could start early, Gunawan replied, “How about next week?” He packed a 2001 4Runner, drove 15 hours to Boulder and, two months short of graduating, dropped out of college.

The work carried him from there. After his spring and summer at Tinman, he found his way to Heartbreak Hill Running Company’s Chicago outpost. Responsible for most of the content for all four stores (three in Boston plus Chi-Town) he put in serious work for the next few years. Social media strategy, shoots (with attendant name, image and likeness deals to look after for the NCAA runners known as the Love Squad), community events and shop runs, product shoots, shipping on sought-after drops, and de-facto store manager duties – Gunawan learned how the industry actually operates and found he loved belonging to a team with something to prove: being one of the best run specialty stores in the States at a time when digital was redefining everything. 

Other interesting offers came his way, which he tried to balance by using his vacation time for freelancing. A two-week Puma shoot at the 2023 Budapest World Championships, a job he couldn’t take without quitting, tipped the scales and he left Heartbreak to become an independent photographer, cinematographer and producer. Having poured all his energy into Heartbreak for two years, he took six months off before he started. “Work is fun, so you almost want to continually do it,” he says. “But if you keep doing that year after year, there’s always the possibility of burnout.” 

He hadn’t leapt entirely without a net. By then he and three friends – Joe Hale and Max McNerney (both fellow Tinterns), along with Stone Malick – had started Footstep Creative, a production collective whose biggest gig is a contract with TCS spanning the New York, Boston, Chicago and Toronto marathons. Each member has his own busy career, and the full collective works together a handful of times a year, on jobs like Brooks’ Boston Marathon campaign or Puma’s Project 3. 

Other interesting offers came his way, which he tried to balance by using his vacation time for freelancing. A two-week Puma shoot at the 2023 Budapest World Championships, a job he couldn’t take without quitting, tipped the scales and he left Heartbreak to become an independent photographer, cinematographer and producer. Having poured all his energy into Heartbreak for two years, he took six months off before he started. “Work is fun, so you almost want to continually do it,” he says. “But if you keep doing that year after year, there’s always the possibility of burnout.” 

He hadn’t leapt entirely without a net. By then he and three friends – Joe Hale and Max McNerney (both fellow Tinterns), along with Stone Malick – had started Footstep Creative, a production collective whose biggest gig is a contract with TCS spanning the New York, Boston, Chicago and Toronto marathons. Each member has his own busy career, and the full collective works together a handful of times a year, on jobs like Brooks’ Boston Marathon campaign or Puma’s Project 3. 

Freelancing has since shown him much of the world “through the lens of the sport”. Now and then it turns the lens around. Last summer Nike flew him to Barcelona on 48 hours’ notice for its “Why Do It” campaign and billed him alongside LeBron James, Carlos Alcaraz and Sha’Carri Richardson. He was chosen, he was told, because he fit the profile of a creator who was also a runner. The ads ran during the World Championships, major marathons, and NFL broadcasts. Friends would message him to say he was in their feed or on TV. “The coolest part is that I didn’t even have to touch a camera for this one,” he says. 

The projects Kevin rates most highly tend to be the ones that pull people together. He recently contributed to Generations, a 300-page book documenting seven years of Tinman Elite. It reunites former Tinterns Gunawan, Hale, McNerney and Ben Weingart. They pre-sold most of a 500-copy run and launched it at the Boulder house Kevin now rents from former Tinman Drew Hunter. He has also spent summers as a counsellor at the New Generation Track and Field camp, teaching young creatives how he broke in. Kevin is particularly proud of Project Stella, covered elsewhere in these pages; bringing it together meant drawing on his whole network, proof of an “ability I have to bring people together in community from different eras of my running and my career”. 

Recently Kevin has partnered with Nike Running’s Swoosh TC as one of the creative brains building their new Instagram channel. Swoosh TC is a global network of elite running teams based in Flagstaff, Arizona; Eugene, Oregon; and Provo, Utah. He says it’s a dream come true; having grown up watching the Nike teams of Evan Jager and Galen Rupp, he now wants to share the excitement around a new generation of athletes.

“I love being a part of a team,” he says. He always has. He just had to find the right way onto it.