Simon Freeman was a designer in London with a running habit and a growing frustration. Every running magazine he picked up was about gear reviews, training plans, and race results — the mechanical side of a sport that, for him, was about something else entirely: solitude, landscape, rhythm, the particular quality of thought that only comes when your body is moving and your mind is free. In 2014, he launched Like the Wind from London with a proposition that was either brave or foolish: a running magazine with no gear reviews, no training schedules, and no countdown-to-marathon urgency. Just stories.
The gamble worked. Like the Wind quickly established itself as something unprecedented in sports publishing — a running magazine that read like a literary journal. Each issue features personal essays about running through grief, running across countries, running as meditation, running as rebellion. The photography captures the poetry of movement through landscape rather than the mechanics of stride. The illustrations add a dreamlike quality that no other running publication had explored. The writing treats running not as a consumer activity but as a practice with its own philosophy, its own relationship to place and time and mortality.
Contributors are drawn from the world of literary nonfiction as much as from the running community. The result is a magazine that appeals to runners who read and readers who run — people who measure their runs in experiences rather than splits, who care about the story of the trail as much as their time on it. The production quality matches the editorial ambition: beautiful paper, generous layouts, the kind of object that sits on a shelf long after the race it might have inspired.
Like the Wind proved that running culture could support the same kind of intelligent, beautiful, deeply personal media that surfing, cycling, and climbing had long enjoyed. For a sport often reduced to data and discipline, the magazine insists on something more expansive: that the most interesting thing about a run is never the number on your watch but the person wearing it, and the world they move through while they're wearing it.
Explore Like the Wind at <a href="https://www.likethewindmagazine.com/" target="\_blank">likethewindmagazine.com