Last week, ACG and pioneering platform Mental Athletic presented “Exhibition of S.P.E.E.D. (Mostra di Velocità)”, a disruptive ultra-trail race transforming the Slam Jam’s own Milanese urban cultural space Spazio Maiocchi into a closed-loop wild landscape, where the norms we’ve come to associate with long distance trail running were radically inverted. Rather than confronting the unknown of what lies ahead, runners were invited to face the same test over and over again, pushing performance through the delirium of repetition. By bringing the untamed outdoor environment within an urban context, spectators were given the unprecedented and otherwise impossible opportunity to witness in full scale a 100km trail run. The event opened just days before the unveiling of the ACG Ultrafly Trail SP campaign, developed in collaboration with Mental Athletic.
At its core is a 150-meter looped off-road course constructed throughout the gallery:
what would normally unfold across mountains, elevation, technical terrain, and changing conditions was forced into a closed loop with no variation and no release. Over three days, 27 international trail running athletes have repeatedly run this circuit across three escalating distances: 11 runners completed the 15 kilometers on day one, 8 the 50 kilometers on day two, and 8 the 100 kilometers on day three, 666 laps.
Recommended For You
Developed as a collaboration between ACG and Mental Athletic, “Exhibition of
S.P.E.E.D. (Mostra di Velocità)” inverts the mythology of trail running. Instead of
exploration, there is repetition; instead of wilderness as landscape, wilderness becomes an attitude. The project operated as a live testing ground for bodies subjected to continuous challenges. Running the same 150 meters hundreds of times is a bold task that demands sustained endurance, maintained speed and efficiency under fatigue. It draws from a culture of trail athletes who pursue the feral and irrational, extreme distance and output; it reflects an approach to running that embraces discomfort, repetition and risk, and where breaking points are part of the process. Performance is no longer adaptive; it is enforced. Progress is measured less by distance than by obsession.
The participants were 27 selected runners from around the world, drawn from both
Mental Athletic’s and the ACG Racing Department’s networks. Across the three days,
the exhibition unfolded as a durational run, with public access structured around the
athletes’ progression.
“Exhibition of S.P.E.E.D.(Mostra di Velocità)” is not just a race and not just a spectacle.
It is a closed-loop trial designed to break records, forcing performance limits and testing trail running under conditions it was never designed for. It is a visceral, shared
experience for runners and spectators alike, invited to observe in extreme proximity the sweat, pain, endurance, euphoria, and discovery intrinsic in running. By collapsing
distance between bodies, performance, and observation, the project brought people
together around trail running as a raw, collective act experienced up close, without
filters, and rediscovered in a radically different context.
