RUNNING WITH 50,000 FRIENDS

Editor's note: Celebrating the New York City Marathon on Sunday 1 November – and its official athletic footwear and apparel sponsor, New Balance – we’re publishing online one of the stories from our first print issue of Tempo Journal. If you’re in NYC, you can pick up a copy, with an exclusive Big Apple cover, at Bandit’s Brooklyn and Manhattan stores. Look out, also, for something cool happening at Bandit’s marathon-week pop-up – to be announced soon. 

For New Balance, Run Your Way is more than a tagline. Launched in 2023, it's the brand’s philosophy of the sport: there's no right or wrong way to run, and if you run, you're a runner, whatever your pace, distance or reason. That thinking has shaped how New Balance shows up in community running. They have led the way in the space, backing the grassroots crews and everyday runners who are the engine room of the sport in Australia and New Zealand. 

New Balance invests in local run-club partnerships, supporting everyone from beginners to elites in order to lift up the whole running community. Developing greater female participation in the sport, their alliance with KICRun encourages women looking to build confidence and endurance. The brand also loves telling the stories of everyday runners from all walks of life.

One of New Balance’s boldest expressions of its commitment to community is also one of the most exciting: the chance for everyday runners to line up at a World Marathon Major. Tempo Journal has been proud to run alongside New Balance from the start. Here’s where it leads.

Mack Dewar still remembers where he was when he got the call. The Wellington-born video producer was with his business partner, parked outside a construction site for a shoot, wearing hi-vis and, as luck would have it, sick as a dog that day. New Balance’s NZ marketing Manager, Jess Wallace, was on the phone saying the company wanted to fly him to New York City to run the marathon. “Both of us were absolutely losing it in the car,” Mack says. “How often does someone call you up with news like that?”

That call, or one like it, is where these stories began. Over three campaigns – the New York City Marathon in 2023, London in April 2024 and New York again that November – New Balance sent 14 everyday runners from Australia and New Zealand to the start lines of the world’s biggest marathons. Two years on, Tempo Journal is going back to five of them with a simple question: what does it actually feel like to run a major?

For AM:PM.RC runner Katie Kelso, the call-up came in what she thought was a get-to-know-you chat. By the end of the call, having heard why running mattered so much for Katie, New Balance brand manager Polly Morris was in tears. “In the space of half an hour I found out I was going to London with New Balance,” Katie says. Two years later, “It still hasn’t sunk in. I feel insanely privileged.”

In Sydney, Furies stalwart Nima Mirzarazi felt two things at once. “I felt imposter syndrome, because I wasn’t a serious runner then,” he says. (He’s selling himself short even now; he told us at the time he was aiming for a time of just over three hours.) “But it was also the first time I’d ever felt like a professional of any sort,” he says. Meg Marshall, co-founder of Wellington’s Jog On crew, had eight weeks’ notice and was only running 5km twice a week. “It was surreal. The team wanted me to pause and think on it, because they knew I wasn’t prepared, but I was just desperate to do it.”

Not everyone got a phone call. Connor Sahely, who founded Olivers Hill Run Club on the Mornington Peninsula, was told in person – New Balance’s Mitch Knight and Polly travelled to Frankston for a pre-dawn session on the pretext of sussing out the crew, then broke the news in front of the entire run club. “To know I was going to be part of that was unlike any news I’d ever received,” he says. 

After weeks of training, the amateur runners touched down in their destinations. Nima had never been to New York. “Everyone says you can feel the magic when you land, and that was doubly intense because of the marathon weekend,” he says. “It felt like a bit of a fever dream.” Mack watched the city announce itself the whole way over. “From Melbourne to LA you might see one finisher’s jacket. From LA to New York you see 10. Then you land and the city has shut down for marathon weekend, and it feels like it,” he says. “Running is a universal language.”

For Katie, London did the same. “I’d never run a world major before. The whole city was buzzing,” she says. “The three or four days before the race were pretty much a whirlwind. We had a really amazing group … I was surprised how quickly we all became fast friends,” she says. Meg spent her days racing between events to soak it all up, including a shakeout run with New York crew Endorphins through the middle of the streets. “Hundreds of people, all that American energy, shouting and screaming and hyping us up. Not usually my style, but so fun.”

And then the start line. In New York they fire a cannon for every wave. “You get rushed into your corral, they play the anthem, and the cannon goes off,” Mack says. “The first two miles you’re on the Verrazzano, then you come into Brooklyn and it gets louder and louder until you can’t even think. It’s wild.” What follows is less a race than an immersion. “The most fun I’ve ever had doing something hard” is how Connor describes his 4:11 debut. It was the first race of any distance he’d ever entered, though he’d previously challenged himself to run the 42.2km distance solo.

Nima felt like he was living every New York movie he had ever seen: “The people were just amazing – on the fire escapes, on the stairs, like so New York, smoking, drinking, pumping music. There are these pockets of silence on the bridges, and then the crescendo of the crowd as you come off is unbelievable. It almost feels like a finish line every time.”

Meg went “between crying and smiling and laughing” the whole way. “I felt like I ran alone but I didn’t feel alone. People were looking at me, not through me.” She finished in 3:55, well under the 4:30 she’d braced for. Katie ran London, roughly two million spectators deep, in 3:20. “From the second you start till the end there’s just so much love and support from strangers. Around 30km there’s a gorgeous LGBTQI cheer zone, just when you need the energy, and that’s when the race really starts. It’s electric. Nothing compares.” 

So what makes a major a major? Meg puts it plainly. “People say, why pay $200 to run an event when you could do it yourself? A major ruins that argument. You cannot replicate that energy,” she says. “Even when running is this busy, everyone still pauses when there’s a major on.” For Nima, part of it is the sheer difficulty of getting in through the ballot or qualifying time and part is who you meet once you do. “Everyone’s chasing a six- or seven-star, or ticking off majors. People from different walks of life, different countries. You’ve never met, but there’s a smile, a nod of recognition.” 

Connor came to think of it as “running with 50,000 friends … We all have the same goal, the same passion. We all get to run to Central Park together on a Sunday morning.” For him there’s the gravity of the field, too. “There’s added weight when you know the elites who are there. Getting to see some of the best athletes in the world is amazing and super inspiring.” Mack, from a country of five million, still can’t quite get over the scale. “You go to a city where two or three million people come out to watch, and you’re running with 50,000 others. It’s so far from normal, and that’s what makes it special.”

And the friendships outlast the medals. “We went from strangers to best friends,” Mack says of his New Balance group. “After the race we had a long lunch, and it was like we’d known each other our whole lives.”

That community thread is one New Balance has been committed to from day one. For Katie, now in her third year with the brand, it reframed the hardest thing that ever happened to her: the day in 2020 she was hit by a bus while running and came away with an acquired brain injury. “New Balance gave me a new lease on life, in a way,” she says. “Something incredible came out of something awful. It let me reframe everything I went through.” 

And the brand’s reach into everyday running has a way of coming full circle. Mack ran New York as a community runner from Christchurch; that trip was his first contact with the Tempo team. Today he’s Tempo’s lead content creator, helping tell other runners’ stories. “It’s a full-circle moment,” he says. “Pretty dope.”

For Nima, it’s simpler still, and it’s why he’ll keep chasing start lines. “I love to travel,” he says. “Why not travel and run at the same time?”