Kilian Jornet and NNormal Are Radically Changing Trail Running

For the third installment in our ongoing Sole Searching series of deep dives into past, present, and future icons with partners Vibram, our scope organically grew beyond a single style to share a larger story of an athlete-owned brand’s unique origin and its core efforts to tackle sustainability, durability, and longevity through conscious design. To see how we got here, check out past Sole Searching features on Bedrock Sandals and the Arc’teryx Vertex Alpine.

Kílian Jornet has never shied away from doing hard things. The renowned Spanish ultrarunner has logged too many achievements to list—from fastest known times on the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc to countless trail race wins, including four at the infamous UTMB. Even against all that, the athlete’s more recent self-imposed gauntlet might be the most challenging yet: creating a sustainable running company from scratch. Somehow, it’s not surprising that with NNormal, the brand he co-founded in 2022, he appears to be succeeding.

In the lead-up to creating NNormal, Jornet, a father of two, began wondering about the sustainability of his athletic pursuits and whether he was doing enough to live a low-impact lifestyle. In a single year, an ultrarunner of his caliber competing at different distances might burn through more than a dozen pairs of shoes, leaving behind a trail of waste in the form of beat-up sneakers. This notion led to NNormal’s founding principle: sustainability through unsurpassed quality.

Source: https://fieldmag.herokuapp.com/articles/nnormal-brand-history-kilian-jornet