Two people have set world records using things I made. I have never met either of them.
That is the part I want to be clear about before anything else, because it is the only reason the story means anything. Neither was sponsored. Neither was sent product. Neither was told what to say afterward. They bought the thing, used it in the hardest possible way, and it held.
You cannot buy that, and I have never figured out how to ask for it.
A marathon, on crutches, a week after the tear
NEW YORK CITY MARATHON · 5 NOVEMBER 2017 · 6:19:21
A runner tore his ACL and his MCL. The New York City Marathon was the following week. He had raised money for a children's education charity and had told people he was running it.
So he ran it on crutches.
Six hours, nineteen minutes, twenty-one seconds. The previous mark was 6:24:48. He beat it by five and a half minutes, on a torn knee, on Better Walk crutches, through five boroughs.
Think about what that asks of a crutch. A marathon is roughly 30,000 steps for a runner. On crutches your arms are the legs, and every one of those cycles puts your entire body weight through the point where the device meets your body. On a traditional underarm crutch that point is your armpit, where the brachial plexus runs. Six hours of that is not a pain problem. It is a nerve damage problem.
The whole reason Better Walk existed was that I had spent six weeks on standard crutches after breaking my ankle and found the experience genuinely intolerable. We moved the load onto the forearm. That was the entire design thesis, and it was tested in a lab, on a rig, by engineering students.
Then somebody took it through 26.2 miles without asking us first.
1,129.8 pounds
BENCH PRESS WORLD RECORD · MAY 2022 · IN LASSO SOCKS
A powerlifter bench pressed 1,129.8 pounds wearing Lasso compression socks.
The obvious question is what socks have to do with a bench press, and the answer is more interesting than it sounds. At that load, a lifter is not lying passively on a bench. The legs are driving into the floor, the whole body is one rigid transmission line, and stability at the ankle is part of the chain. Compression at the extremities is standard practice in maximal lifting for exactly that reason.
We built Lasso to stop ankles rolling in basketball. The compression pattern mimics what athletic tape does to skin, which is why it works in four seconds instead of ten minutes with a trainer. In our own testing it reduced angular deflection at the ankle by more than 75 percent against a standard athletic sock.
Nobody designed it for a man holding half a ton over his chest.
What products are for
There is a version of building things where the goal is the launch. You ship, you get the coverage, the metrics move, and the thing becomes a line on a deck.
Then there is what actually happens afterward, which is that people you will never meet take your object into situations you did not model and find out whether you were right.
Both of these men were, in the strictest sense, out of spec. A marathon is not a use case we tested. A world-record bench press is not an ankle-rolling scenario. In both cases someone extrapolated from what the thing was for to what it might survive, and bet a significant amount on the answer.
That is the only review that counts. Everything else is people describing a product. This is two people finding out.
A note on where this record lives
Both of these facts nearly disappeared.
The bench press result was announced on the Lasso company blog, and lassogear.com now serves a gambling site. The only surviving copy is a snapshot in the Internet Archive. I recovered it this year while pulling my own history back together, and I had genuinely forgotten it happened.
Two world records, set on two different products, five years apart, by two men who owed me nothing. And for about four years, neither was findable under my name.
That is a different essay, but it is the same problem.
BOTH RECOVERED FROM THE INTERNET ARCHIVE
