BY Ben Hooke

Testing is the most important process in creating a new product. Testing is learning, which leads to iteration, which leads to improvement. 

After months of lab and wear testing, our products go for their final test: The Blind Test. The Blind Test is the final chance to see how those hours and hours of tweaking, developing, improving and evolving have come out. You think you've created a great product? 

The data you have says you've created a better product for planet and performance - but data is no match for the human eye - how it looks out of the box, how it fits on the feet of someone outside the loop and, crucially, how it fairs on its first outing.
 
The Blind Test validates your data - provides the qualitative to your quantitative.

The hylo RUN’s first outing took place in the open plains and oak-clad country roads of Lincolnshire - located in England’s East Midlands. The county is also well-known for its Jurassic limestone and Cretaceous chalk too.

Our Champions of Tomorrow get an opportunity to put these Forces of Nature through their paces.

When Gordon Clark met the RUN, we wanted to put him to the test, as well as the shoe. Test his force of nature.
5km. Fast. Simple. Not Easy.

  

This is Gordon’s experience of “meeting the monster”, as he puts it:
“Racing sucks. Hard efforts, intimidating and awful (IMO). Usually within the first three minutes I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing. How can I quit? God, how good it’d feel to just quit!

“Racing, for me, sucks. Never the seek and destroy type, more the hold on and don’t crack.. It’s a curious thing, those hard efforts, racing.  How your body seems to turn on you.

"I call it The Monster. The command you had of your heart rate, your nerve. All of these things, that energy, it’s all now running amok.

“Even when you know you need it tempered, you’re at the Monster’s mercy. I hate racing. And the most maddening part: As soon as you’re done. You chest your way across that imaginary line. Your searing muscles twitching out, blood pumping hard, full on oxygen debt. Slowly, so slowly, recuperating, oscillating. That dry breath, metallic taste. You swing your arms over your head, trying to release. All of that discomfort, so many things rushing and swirling through you. Racing. Hard efforts.

“Then: You start saying to yourself, Let’s run that back! I can do better, I know it. 
Absolute bonkers. But what’s even more far out: We’re ready, so damn ready to dump ourselves into that pain cave again. Face down that Monster once more.”
 
 

His first outing in the RUN?

“You stay really locked in - the lace system is secure. There’s really, really decent return energy and good off-the-toe pop, this thing performs. Combine that with the markedly light weight. She’ll do great on the track. 
“Good for your medium-distance runs, tempos. Really just a super solid trainer. Doesn’t hurt the things ain’t bad to look at.”
“You NEVER see me giving a good push with a shoe straight out the box. Too risky. A simple recipe for injury, in my book. This: Not even the slightest. Haven’t given a 5km a hard go in a minute. Pre-pandemic really. These little rollers in that back-country spot we ran on. Could totally see someone, hell me even, breaking 16 in the shoes over the next month or two.