Bowerman Imports Jogging
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A story about how jogging became popular in America and led to the creation of Nike.
"In the 60s and 70s, there was this New Zealand track and field coach named Arthur Leonard. He had runners like John Walker and Peter Snell who started winning Olympics in the 1500 meters, 5K, and 10K. Everyone asked what he was doing with his runners, and he said they run like 120 miles a week, doing long distance running, going slow, just doing a shitload of it.
Bill Bowerman, the track and field coach at Oregon University, got interested. He went to New Zealand in the 1970s to learn from Arthur Leonard. When he came back, two things happened: University of Oregon got really good at track and field, and he started making shoes for his runners so they could run faster. He called that company Nike, starting it with another runner Phil Knight.
The other thing that happened - he started talking about it to all his friends and wrote a book about jogging. The idea of jogging wasn't even a thing in the 70s. People would ask 'What do you mean you're just gonna run? Are the police gonna go after you?' Prior to the 1970s, people didn't go out and run - that just wasn't a thing. Then there was the jogging craze of the 70s, and Bowerman created Nike to capitalize on it."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.