Some mornings are simply bad. You wake up after sleeping just badly enough to feel tired, but not badly enough to justify cancelling anything. Before your feet have touched the floor, you have already checked your phone. There is an email you would rather not answer, three messages you forgot about yesterday, and somewhere between Instagram and TikTok, at least five reasons to believe the world is falling apart. It is only 6.32am.
Going back to sleep is tempting, and so is staying in bed and scrolling until the last possible minute. Instead, the phone goes down and you start getting ready before you have enough time to reconsider the decision. Running clothes, socks, shoes, a glass of water, keys and headphones. Once you have done it often enough, the small choreography becomes automatic – pretty helpful at an hour when motivation is still somewhere between the bed and the front door.
Outside, Berlin has yet to become the Berlin you know during the day. Delivery vans are parked along otherwise empty streets, the bakery downstairs is only just opening and someone is walking their dog, looking about as pleased to be awake as you feel. The air is colder than expected, but there is something strangely comforting about being outside while most of the city is still asleep. For a brief moment, it feels as though you have the streets almost to yourself.
Before your head gets the chance to interfere, you start running. The first minutes rarely resemble the version you imagined while tying your shoes, as your legs still feel stiff and your breathing is slightly off. Your body comes up with several convincing arguments for turning around, but you talk yourself into another street, then another, because you know the feeling usually passes. A few minutes later, it does. One foot follows the other, your breathing finds a rhythm and, somewhere along the way, the distance between your thoughts begins to grow.
Once that rhythm sets in, it seems almost strange how much we have built around an activity as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. There are watches to consult, kilometres to log and personal bests to chase. While Strava records the evidence, run clubs turn running into a social activity, shoes cross over into fashion and marathons fill entire weekends with spectators, going for a run has become part sport, part social life and part personal routine, with plenty of opportunities to show everyone else that you did it.
Those first few hours of the day have become prime time for self-improvement. Wake up at five, drink water, journal, meditate, run ten kilometres, take a cold shower, read thirty pages and make breakfast, all before work has even started. Running fits easily into this carefully planned routine, turning another hour of the day into something that needs to be used well.
We all know there is another side to it. Some runs begin without a target pace and end without a screenshot, and for half an hour there is nothing more pressing than finding a route and paying attention to your own body. The email waiting on your phone is still there and so are yesterday’s unanswered messages, but they become harder to obsess over when you are crossing a street, trying to steady your breathing and deciding whether to turn left or right at the next corner.
One brand that has built its identity around this relationship between physical movement and the mind from the beginning is ASICS. The name comes from the Latin phrase “Anima Sana In Corpore Sano”, meaning “a sound mind in a sound body.” When Kihachiro Onitsuka founded the company in postwar Japan in 1949, he believed sport could help young people regain confidence and a sense of possibility, and more than 75 years later, the same idea still forms the basis of ASICS’ Sound Mind, Sound Body philosophy.
Around 7am, the city begins to catch up with you. More bicycles appear on the streets, lights come on behind windows and the first cafés start setting out their tables. At the same time, the sky changes from one street to the next. Sunrise happens every morning, so reliably that it should probably have lost its ability to impress us centuries ago, yet familiar buildings suddenly look different when their windows catch the first light. Shadows stretch across the pavement and the sky briefly moves through colours that would seem almost exaggerated anywhere else, before daylight takes over and the whole thing disappears almost as quickly as it arrived.
That short transition provided the visual starting point for ASICS’ new RISE & SHINE™ COLLECTION, which translates the changing colours and energy of sunrise across eight running silhouettes. The line includes the SUPERBLAST™ 3, MEGABLAST™, NOVABLAST™ 6, GEL-NIMBUS™ 28, GEL-CUMULUS™ 28, GEL-KAYANO™ 33 and GT-2000™ 15, alongside the new SONICBLAST™ 2.
“The sunrise is one of the most meaningful moments in a runner’s daily routine,” says Lindsay Fattlar, Senior Manager of Performance Running Global Color at ASICS. “It represents new possibilities, a fresh start and the conscious decision to take time for yourself at the very beginning of the day.” Sunrise has carried ideas of optimism, beginnings and renewal for centuries, although these associations feel a little less abstract when you are physically moving through that transition. At one corner, the street is still empty enough to hear your own footsteps clearly; a few blocks later, someone is unlocking a shop, a bus pulls up beside you and the first commuters are waiting at the lights. The city changes almost imperceptibly while you run through it, until the quiet that made you notice all those small details begins to disappear.
Along for the run is the SONICBLAST™ 2, the latest version of ASICS’ dynamic running shoe and the central model of the RISE & SHINE™ COLLECTION. Its midsole combines FF TURBO™ SQUARED and FF BLAST™ MAX cushioning with a redesigned forked ASTROPLATE™, developed to create a more responsive feeling through the stride, while the new construction also brings the weight down by around 14 grams compared with its predecessor, based on Men’s US size 9.
A few kilometres in, however, the technical vocabulary fades into the background. Instead of thinking about how the shoe is constructed, you simply feel it underneath you as your attention shifts to the ground, the sound of your footsteps and the rhythm of your stride. By now, your breathing has settled and, without really noticing it, you have found your pace.
Once you reach that certain point of calm, there is a sense of relief in simply letting the run happen. You are no longer chasing a faster kilometre or checking how many calories you have burned, and for once, the morning does not have to prove particularly productive. There are already enough numbers following us through the day, from sleep scores and step counts to screen time, heart rate and recovery. Running can easily become another one of them, but right now, you can just keep moving and leave the watch alone.
A loud horn at the next crossing pulls you out of that rhythm. Cars are lining up at the lights, cyclists pass on their way to work and the pavements that were almost empty when you left home are filling up. As the city gets louder, the quiet part of the morning slowly comes to an end. Your phone has woken up too, with new notifications waiting alongside the email that was already staring at you at 6.32am. Whatever was bothering you then has not vanished somewhere along the route, but your body feels warmer, your breathing has slowed and, for a while at least, those thoughts had to make room for something else.
That freedom is also what makes running difficult to reduce to one thing. On one day it can mean training for a marathon with a plan and a stopwatch, on another it means meeting fifty people at a run club, and sometimes it is just a slow loop around the neighbourhood before anyone you know is awake. You can care about getting faster and still have mornings when the only achievement that matters is having made it out of the door.
Of course, getting up this early deserves some kind of reward. The post-run high can take some of the credit, but there is something about that first coffee or beverage afterwards that is difficult to beat. Still warm from moving and slightly cold from sitting down, you wrap your hands around the cup and watch the rest of the neighbourhood start its day. Cyclists pass, people queue inside and someone at the next table is already on their first call. Somehow, the coffee tastes better when you feel like you have already been somewhere before arriving here.
By now, the city has reached full volume and your phone is back on the table, ready with everything that was waiting for you. None of it has disappeared, and soon enough, you will be right back in the middle of it. For the first hour of the day, though, there was nowhere else to be, nothing to answer and no reason to make the time useful. You simply went for a run, and sometimes that is enough.
The ASICS RISE & SHINE™ COLLECTION, including the SONICBLAST™ 2, is available worldwide from September 1, 2026.
All Photography by Lilly Wetzel.