Somewhere this Tuesday night, at a community track near you, a guy who’ll never see a podium is toeing the line in a skintight one-piece built for Olympians. Blame Jakob Ingebrigtsen. When the Norwegian won 5,000-meter gold at the Paris Olympics in a unitard, he turned a look that a 24-year-old marathoner outside Chicago had found hilarious into something closer to a flex — and that runner promptly traded his singlet and shorts for one. As Ashley Mateo reports in this weekend’s Off Duty, he has plenty of company.
The suits do have a résumé. Sprinters have worn them for more than two decades, because when a race is settled by hundredths, every scrap of drag counts. This was the year they moved up in distance: in July, Great Britain’s Josh Kerr broke the men’s mile world record — a mark that had stood 27 years — in a bespoke Brooks suit, and in May, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha became only the second man to officially finish a marathon under two hours, wearing Adidas (ADDYY) Techfit. Tracksmith, Bandit and Soar now sell men’s versions — Bandit’s at $168, Tracksmith’s at $175, Soar’s at $345 — and Bandit says its speedsuits have been selling out fast.
The engineering is real. So is the vibe
Here’s the honest part. Nike (NKE) and Brooks have performance data showing a well-designed suit can cut drag and sometimes keep the hips and pelvis steadier over long distances. Mateo’s point is that gains that thin probably show up only at the very front of the field — a weekend runner trying to knock 15 seconds off his mile won’t find them in his splits. The real purchase, she writes, is the vibe. Patryk Odedina, a 36-year-old in the Bronx, ran a then-personal best of 3:12:59 at the 2025 Jersey City Marathon in Bandit’s $168 suit, and he owns the choice cheerfully: “You have to have some level of audacity to wear one.” The newsletter writer Cole Townsend sums up the appeal: “It makes people look at you and think you’re fast, too.” In fairness to the suit, it does a couple of practical things — compression that feels supportive, and pockets that carry the gels.
Our read
We like this story because everyone in it is honest. Nobody claims the suit makes an amateur faster; they bought the feeling, and at $168 to $345 that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to buy — cheaper than most midlife hobbies. The trouble starts when the same instinct shows up where it costs more and nobody’s being candid about it. Finance is full of speedsuits: the premium tier of the app, the pro trading platform, the fund wearing a famous manager’s halo, the strategy built for an endowment and sold to a household. Some of those features are real. Plenty only register at a size or speed most investors won’t reach — and the fee comes out every year either way.
So the test is behavioral, with a cash-flow (M5) footnote: name what you’re paying for. If it’s the look, the confidence, the fun, budget it as fun and enjoy the stares. If it’s performance, ask for evidence that the edge shows up at your pace, after costs. A portfolio review works like checking your splits — you want it before race day, not when your legs are already gone.