In Your Shoes

InYourShoes is a project born in 2017 from an idea of Francisco Grimaldi and the support of Giordano Bravetti. Its goal is to create a world running community that shares stories of sacrifices and success. This one sport creates an emotional thread between athletes of different nations. InYourShoes is a bond able to overcome boundaries with values that can be applied in sport as well as in the realization of personal dreams. In the moment in which an athlete donates his running shoes, he is also donating a piece of his own story, his own life, to somebody else. The shoes transcend their material value and become talismans containing the strength of spirit and motivation that help their owners to not give up in their darkest hours. It is a hopeful gesture, a sign of love that connects the hearts of people separated by continents, who might never physically meet but who remain tied together by the shared meaning of their daily fights against adversities. There is a place in central Kenya where all the fastest runners of the world come from. It is a small town rising on top of the Great Rift Valley, the birthplace of mankind, called Iten. Every year InYourShoes travels the world collecting shoes and inspirational stories and takes them to Iten, where athletes fight day by day to change their life through running. The shoes are tagged with the names of every single person who decided to donate a piece of his life in order to support the dreams of a Kenyan athlete. The shoes are all firstly shipped to Rome from the rest of the world; the IYS team makes the selection and tags each single pair to create a link between the donor and the new owner. Then the shoes are packed and shipped to Nairobi where the team will proceed with the import into the country and start the long voyage to Iten.