The Sprit of Weekday Warrior

Our belief is that anyone can become a WeekdayWarrior. To do so, it begins with a challenge and set a new personal goal. But, that’s not all. Many have signed up for their first half-marathon, marathon, or other long-distance adventure, and many, have accomplished them as well. But for many, there has come a realization that there is much more to these adventures than accomplishing a specific distance or challenge.

A personal challenge in itself is something to aspire towards, but what are the moments that truly make those challenges worth pursuing? It’s the moments with friends, with family, with your neighborhood, and anyone else at all who is there to run with you, support you, or even congratulate you. It’s the moment when you managed to inspire a friend to run and it’s the moment you decided to run for a greater cause than yourself. Overall, it’s not focused on the race day either. It’s the moments you said hi to your colleagues as you ran to work, trained with those around you, and were given your running shoes by your loved ones as you were about to head out of the house. It’s the moment you send photos and tell everyone that you survived and had completed a new challenge. All of those moments in combination are what truly make Grande challenges worth pursuing. That, is the spirit of WeekdayWarrior.

My Ambition: Vocal for Local

My ambition has always been to find new ways to facilitate and create an economic world that promotes sustainable growth. My primary focus has been to try and understand how our financial and corporate ecosystems need to develop to generate true global welfare. Little did I know, was that my sports would play a larger role in my approach to try and solve this puzzle. I had always connected fitness and broader goals anywhere I could whether it be by advertising plant-based diets on my race shirts or by donating to a charity, e.g. humanitarian assistance to those in crisis. What I hadn’t understood is that there was a bigger opportunity out there to facilitate local connections, local impact, and local adventures. While the grandiose tales of Shackleton’s expedition and Nirmal Purja’s 14 peaks drive our imagination and motivation to explore the unknown and create impact, many similar feats can be achieved right in front of our homes. In fact, the majority of humanity’s greatest feats, before the age of sailing, were accomplished locally. For example, the Battle of Marathon continues to inspire us today, one race at a time. The natural question then becomes, what is your battle? Local challenges, local adventures, local impact.

Founder’s Story -Mikael Homanen

Summer 2022 and I had just finished another multi-day long-distance run. It was one of the toughest, but also one of the most fun challenges I had in a while. In total, it was eight 40km runs in eight working days. Why did I do it? In short, this was due to a long legacy of post-Covid lockdown driven adventures. The first one took place on my 30th birthday. The lockdown had just started, and after all races were cancelled, I decided to make my own race. I ran 300km in 15 days, 20km each day. It was tough, but surprisingly doable and from there it continued. In 2021, it was 31km per day for 10 days and in 2022, it was 40km per day for eight days. Overall, I survived all of them.

But it wasn’t just the distances that made it all worthwhile. In addition to running in the mornings and evenings, I went to work as well, splitting the daily distances depending on the demands of the daily grind. Some days I ran the full 40km before work, while ending the day with a pre-scheduled dinner date. On another day, I ended the daily run at the barber who would in surprise say “what? you just ran 100 miles?” and in other days, it was as simple as meeting friends or colleagues over a short jog to catch up. Every day was a challenge, every day was an experience and every day more people joined as well. From one step to another, more people joined and more people donated. I never created any major momentum, but I saw the energy it brought me and those around me. The most surprising thing about this was that in all three years, on the very last day, after the very last run, contrary to all other races I have ever done before, I wished it wasn’t over. I wished, it could last another day. That, is the spirit of WeekdayWarrior.

Many endurance events require participants to travel. Often, these races come with merchandise that are not being used to their full potential and their sustainability foot-print might be unclear as well.

Our sustainability strategy has two focus areas:

The first is to foster more locally driven running events for individuals and groups. Not all adventures need to be far away, many of them are waiting right at our front doors.

Secondly, we want to assist with the global transition to a circular based economy by offering the latest available sustainaiblity focused or locally produced products.

We are always on the look-out for the latest innovation and offerings so if you have any ideas or opportunities, please reach out. We'd love to hear from you.

Our first Weekday Warrior was made possible by the generous support from Rob Roy and Burton Flynn to whom we are very thankful.

We need your help to scale our impact. Please reach out to us so we can enlist more warriors and to help them achieve their goals