You can buy an Inferno sleeping bag from The North Face that will, for $729 (£593), keep you warm in temperatures as cold as -40C. And top-quality gear designed to withstand the harshest conditions and last a lifetime does not come cheap. For genuine adventure, their marketing implies, you need top-quality gear. (Or, if you prefer, alone: the cover of the winter 2016 Patagonia catalogue features a man on a motorbike – carrying a pair of skis under one arm – smiling at a squirrel as it crosses the road.)īoth companies understand that the appeal of endurance sports has something to do with acquiring kit that boasts the most advanced technology. They are, above all, selling the allure of the great outdoors, offering their customers technically advanced gear for going off into the wilds with a friend or two. Unlike other billion-dollar sports brands, neither company sells balls or bats. To browse the book is to dive into a world of life-affirming outdoor feats followed by nights around the fire, swapping heroic tales.
The book contains lavish colour pictures of people in genial communion with nature. The company’s ethos is encapsulated in Let My People Go Surfing, the memoir-cum-management classic about Patagonia, by the company’s founder Yvon Chouinard – reissued last year in a 10th-anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Naomi Klein. If The North Face aims to appeal to the overachieving weekend warrior, Patagonia is for the slightly more mellow soul who wants to soak up the fresh air and enjoy the view as he ascends a craggy mountain. (“We have actually been approached with partnerships about spacesuits to Mars and things like that,” one publicist told me recently.) The North Face sells the idea of adventure – of pushing limits – whether running long distances, climbing an untried rockface, or sleeping outside at sub-zero temperatures.
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Central to the brand’s ethos are the professional athletes it sponsors, people not widely known but celebrated in their fields – names such as Karnazes and Pete Athans, who has climbed Everest seven times. Its stores are decorated with huge photographs of people climbing icy peaks and running through meadows. The North Face, a Bay Area-based outdoor clothing manufacturer, sells garments and gear for climbing, backpacking, running, and skiing. Karnazes’s superhuman exertions are sponsored by The North Face, the company that make the kit he wears in his coaching videos.
His account of his feats of distance running, Ultramarathon Man, is a bestseller. Karnazes once ran 350 miles in 81 hours and 44 minutes, without stopping to sleep. He has run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days in all 50 states, and taken part in such extreme competitions as a marathon to the South Pole and a 135-mile race through Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth. So began a career as an endurance runner. O n the night of his 30th birthday, after a few drinks, Dean Karnazes decided that he would celebrate by running all the way from San Francisco down the coast to the town of Half Moon Bay, a distance of 30 miles.
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