Every fall, our feed fills up with images from this three-day celebration of fitness in the middle of Georgia. A one-mile oval course. A cold plunge park that looks more like a lake. A sauna village the size of a small neighborhood. Thousands of people showing up to run, recover, sweat, compete, connect—and generally go all-in on fitness.

We’ve always been curious what it was actually like and now, we get to find out.

Runningman just announced its first wave of 2026 partners, and Front Pack Sports is officially joining the festival as the team behind the Runningman Learning Lab.

So… What Exactly Is the Learning Lab?

Over the course of the weekend, Front Pack will lead roughly a dozen live discussions and panels featuring athletes, founders, coaches, health operators, and some of the people shaping where endurance, fitness, and wellness are headed next.

And this is exactly where we want to be.

For the past few years, we’ve built Front Pack around a simple idea: there are incredible stories happening in and behind the performance.

We’ve interviewed athletes about what it actually takes to perform at the highest level. We’ve talked with founders building the next generation of endurance and wellness brands. We’ve dug into the business, technology, science, and culture changing how we train, recover, compete, and live.

Because we never just cover a race. That’s boring.

We want to know why an athlete lost, and what they learned. For the founder, it’s about what they’re building and what they’re getting wrong.

That’s the conversation we’re bringing to Runningman.

The mandate is pretty simple: put interesting people on stage who have something real to say, ask better questions, and then get out of the way.

And doing that in front of a live audience, surrounded by 1,500 athletes and some of the biggest names in the health and fitness industry?

Yup. We’re pretty excited about it.

Why Front Pack Sports?

This is an important one for us and to peel back the onion a bit, Runningman could have brought in anyone to fill a stage with panels and brand conversations but instead, they asked Front Pack to lead the Learning Lab.

Because what we’ve been building at Front Pack sits directly at the intersection of what Runningman represents: athletes, endurance, wellness, performance, brands, and the business behind all of it.

We spend our days talking to the people pushing these categories forward. And then we also test the gear and are athletes ourselves. We interview pro-athletes and founders on our podcast. We follow the money. We watch the trends.

We know this world because we’re part of it.

The Learning Lab gives us the opportunity to take what we’ve been doing through Front Pack and bring it into a completely different environment—off the screen and onto a stage, with a real audience sitting in front of us.

Again. A pretty damn cool evolution for us.

And Then There Are the Heavy Hitters

Take a look at the companies joining Runningman this year.

Altra is the exclusive shoe partner. Tempur-Pedic is bringing recovery. Fjord is behind the Cold Plunge Park. Almost Heaven is powering what’s being billed as the world’s largest sauna.

It’s truly awesome to be part of that lineup. They’re all helping define what the modern fitness experience looks like and we’ve written a lot about the rise of wellness festivals and the increasingly blurry line between endurance sport, wellness, entertainment, community, and culture.

So for three days, we’ll be on the ground at Runningman—leading conversations, meeting the community, talking to athletes, exploring the festival, and probably sweating far more than necessary.

And yes, we’ll be bringing you along for all of it.

So if you’re heading to Runningman Festival in a few weeks, come find us at the Learning Lab and pull up a chair and ask a question. 

We’ll save you a seat.