Every medal ends up in a shoe box

I run, and most of my friends run. Between us we have a lot of medals, and almost all of them are in the same place: a shoe box in a closet.

It always struck me as strange. You train for months. You rearrange your mornings, your meals, and your weekends around a single day. Then the day comes, you finish, someone puts a medal around your neck, and a few weeks later it's in a box with the others.

The race itself is the part worth remembering, and it's the part that disappears fastest. The course you ran, the hills you were dreading at mile eighteen, the time on the clock when you crossed. That's the actual story.

So I started building displays that put the whole thing in one place. Your route, built in 3D from actual elevation data, so the terrain you ran is terrain you can see. Your name, your race, your finish. And the medal itself, hanging where you'll walk past it.

Each one is made to order in a small shop in Bakersfield, California. I model the route, produce the piece, and pack it myself. There's no warehouse and no stock sitting on a shelf, because every display is specific to one race and one runner.

If you've got a race you're proud of, I'd like to build it for you.