Matt Choi's brother with an e-bike on the NYC 'thon course

Josh-Runna wrote:

Hi everyone,

Josh here - COO at Runna. Wanted to provide a quick update below.

Thanks all of your messages and emails. I want to be clear that this was not something that we at Runna knew was going to happen, or support as a company, and we have decided to terminate our relationship with Matt effective immediately.

As some of you have highlighted Ben (co-founder) had agreed to run alongside Matt to the finish, pacing him to a sub-3, and we had licensed photographers stationed throughout the course, so we (and Ben in particular) were particularly upset and taken by surprise that his production crew joined on the course. Ben assumed that they had been given official media licences given they were on the course and wearing high vis.

Our ethos and entire mission is about inspiring and supporting runners around the world on and off the race course, and so we are deeply uncomfortable with what happened on Sunday.

We’ve also since found out that Matt has done this before which was not something that we knew about and which was an oversight on our part - we are going to improve our ambassador screening processes as a result.

We expect all of our ambassadors and entire community to adhere to race safety rules and respect the safety of other athletes. Running should be for everyone. We will ensure nothing like this happens again, and thank you for your patience. We really value you sharing your feedback.

I also understand this has taken a while to respond on our part - we wrapped up our pop-up in NYC yesterday, had a full day of podcast recording and then flew back last night meanwhile the team in the UK were offline.

Happy to respond to questions in this thread - we don't have a fancy PR department it's just me! But I will share the above response with the team so that we can be replying to concerned runners and Runnas on Instagram etc too.

influencer annoy (again) wrote:

Celebrating the accomplishments of others takes nothing away from your accomplishments and there were plenty of accomplishments to celebrate at the NYC marathon.

Celebrate the people who motivated themselves to achieve a goal. Celebrate the person who was overweight or had health issues and decided to run a marathon. Celebrate the mom or dad who juggled a real job and kids to fit in their training. Celebrate the pros achieving superhuman feats. Celebrate the person who raised money for charity to get their marathon slot. A marathon time alone doesn't speak to any of this context.

That same context should be used to view Matt Choi's 2:57. The guy had literally every advantage at his disposal (youth, health, no real job, sponsorship money, pacers, etc...), ran a pretty average time within that context and still sought to make the event about himself. Kind of pathetic when you think about it.

Fbrndb wrote:

Josh-Runna wrote:

Hi everyone,

Josh here - COO at Runna. Wanted to provide a quick update below.

Thanks all of your messages and emails. I want to be clear that this was not something that we at Runna knew was going to happen, or support as a company, and we have decided to terminate our relationship with Matt effective immediately.

As some of you have highlighted Ben (co-founder) had agreed to run alongside Matt to the finish, pacing him to a sub-3, and we had licensed photographers stationed throughout the course, so we (and Ben in particular) were particularly upset and taken by surprise that his production crew joined on the course. Ben assumed that they had been given official media licences given they were on the course and wearing high vis.

Our ethos and entire mission is about inspiring and supporting runners around the world on and off the race course, and so we are deeply uncomfortable with what happened on Sunday.

We’ve also since found out that Matt has done this before which was not something that we knew about and which was an oversight on our part - we are going to improve our ambassador screening processes as a result.

We expect all of our ambassadors and entire community to adhere to race safety rules and respect the safety of other athletes. Running should be for everyone. We will ensure nothing like this happens again, and thank you for your patience. We really value you sharing your feedback.

I also understand this has taken a while to respond on our part - we wrapped up our pop-up in NYC yesterday, had a full day of podcast recording and then flew back last night meanwhile the team in the UK were offline.

Happy to respond to questions in this thread - we don't have a fancy PR department it's just me! But I will share the above response with the team so that we can be replying to concerned runners and Runnas on Instagram etc too.

I appreciate you hopping on here and you definitely need to refine your screening process because Matt chois behavior was widely known before this.

Josh-Runna wrote:

Hi everyone,

Josh here - COO at Runna. Wanted to provide a quick update below.

Thanks all of your messages and emails. I want to be clear that this was not something that we at Runna knew was going to happen, or support as a company, and we have decided to terminate our relationship with Matt effective immediately.

As some of you have highlighted Ben (co-founder) had agreed to run alongside Matt to the finish, pacing him to a sub-3, and we had licensed photographers stationed throughout the course, so we (and Ben in particular) were particularly upset and taken by surprise that his production crew joined on the course. Ben assumed that they had been given official media licences given they were on the course and wearing high vis.

Our ethos and entire mission is about inspiring and supporting runners around the world on and off the race course, and so we are deeply uncomfortable with what happened on Sunday.

We’ve also since found out that Matt has done this before which was not something that we knew about and which was an oversight on our part - we are going to improve our ambassador screening processes as a result.

We expect all of our ambassadors and entire community to adhere to race safety rules and respect the safety of other athletes. Running should be for everyone. We will ensure nothing like this happens again, and thank you for your patience. We really value you sharing your feedback.

I also understand this has taken a while to respond on our part - we wrapped up our pop-up in NYC yesterday, had a full day of podcast recording and then flew back last night meanwhile the team in the UK were offline.

Happy to respond to questions in this thread - we don't have a fancy PR department it's just me! But I will share the above response with the team so that we can be replying to concerned runners and Runnas on Instagram etc too.

influencer annoy (again) wrote:

Celebrating the accomplishments of others takes nothing away from your accomplishments and there were plenty of accomplishments to celebrate at the NYC marathon.

Celebrate the people who motivated themselves to achieve a goal. Celebrate the person who was overweight or had health issues and decided to run a marathon. Celebrate the mom or dad who juggled a real job and kids to fit in their training. Celebrate the pros achieving superhuman feats. Celebrate the person who raised money for charity to get their marathon slot. A marathon time alone doesn't speak to any of this context.

That same context should be used to view Matt Choi's 2:57. The guy had literally every advantage at his disposal (youth, health, no real job, sponsorship money, pacers, etc...), ran a pretty average time within that context and still sought to make the event about himself. Kind of pathetic when you think about it.