New Balance Canadian runner of the week: Richard Kuchinsky

Richard Kuchinsky designed shoes before he ran in them. Now, he’s adding up the mileage on runs that have spanned from the initial 800m to 42.2K.

Toronto’s Casa Loma is a pretty picture in early winter. Sir Henry Pellatt’s 1911 “House on a Hill” towers above the city and if its intricate brickwork and old European-borrowed model aren’t stunning on their own, the slow drop of the season’s first snowflakes visible in the castle’s streams of yellow light should be enough to leave a visitor stunned. Outfitted in lycra and winter active wear, Richard Kuchinsky stands, takes a good look at the Gothic-inspired behemoth and thinks “I’ve never seen it up close.”

That was a couple years ago now on one of Kuchinsky’s first ever runs with the Night Terrors Run Crew— a Toronto group of runners he has since grown to know quite well. Though he lives in Toronto, Kuchinsky found himself realizing how many spots in the city he had left undiscovered. Running a city inside out will change that. “There’s these runs where you’re celebrating the city,” he says. By now, he’s visited countless Toronto attractions on the run.

In total, Kuchinsky has been running for three years. Prior to that though, he was no stranger to the sport. He’s in the running shoe business, running a consultancy business called Directive Collective which helps companies with any part of the design process related to making or branding their shoes. “I’ve been designing shoes for at least 10 or 12 years. I’ve only been a runner for three,” he says.

For this runner, a day working out of his downtown Toronto loft could be a mix of sketching shoes, designing a box, creating a catalog or going for a run to test a pair that has recently been sent from China. “I review them to make sure they’re built correctly,”he says. Directive Collective is his own company and he mans it solo. That means everything is his role: create a slick look, package it properly, brand it, make sure it functions as it should.

This is a line of work Kuchinsky has been involved in for awhile. The runner studied industrial design at Carlton University in Ottawa, graduated in 2004 and from there was hired on at an athletic shoe company as a designer. But he wanted to branch out from doing more than the design. “I’d design a shoe and say ‘Hey this has a cool technology, this would be better understood with a logo and catalog,” says Kuchinsky.

Soon he moved on to a company in Denmark doing the same kind of thing but then eventually getting his hands on the graphics, packaging and marketing. Then, he thought about creating his own company. “I kind of realized that I can do it all. I can do it beginning to end,” he says. He moved back to Toronto and Directive Collective was born.

Oddly enough, Kuchinsky gained an understanding of runners’ footwear needs before becoming a runner himself. Upon hearing about the workings of his busy loft work space and massive shoe collection, many would have him pegged as a veteran runner but that is not the case. It was his involvement in the industry that led him to giving it a try though. “I was inspired by people I was meeting. Running always appealed to me as a sport in theory,” he says.

So he laced up and the shoes took out for a different, non career-related, purpose. His first attempts might have lasted about 800m but eventually he was able to turn that into 40-minute runs twice a week and Kuchinsky started to notice a difference in his endurance really fast. “Running is an amazing sport where you get instant improvement,” he says.

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Running is a sport which people heavily self-identify with. Running-related Instagram handles, tattoos or self-written bios will prove that. Kuchinsky remembers when he first started thinking of himself as a runner. He was planning on going out with a friend. On the phone he mentioned to his friend (also a runner) that he’d be skipping the night’s run thanks to the rainy forecast. The friend told him to do it anyway. He did. “From there, it’s any weather,” he says. “I run all through winter.”

It hasn’t amounted to nothing. His first race was the Yonge Street 10K in April 2014. He then moved his way up to the half-marathon racing at the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon and at this year’s running, he did his first full marathon.

Several pairs of shoes have come to life from their initial sketch in Kuchinsky’s loft, iconic spots of Toronto have been discovered on the run, Casa Loma is no longer a mystery and the maximum distance tolerated while running has taken an enormous leap– from 800m to 42.2K.