In 2025, Nike ACG partnered with the Chongli 168 Ultra Trail Race. As one of China’s largest and most influential trail-running events, Chongli 168 carries both the intensity of ultra-distance competition and the character of a mature running community. For many runners, it is not only a professional race, but also a direct encounter with topography, climate, endurance, and willpower.

UDL was invited to create the complete visual experience for the 2025 Nike ACG Chongli 168 Ultra Trail Race. The scope covered a full range of touchpoints, from the early citywide warm-up campaign and race kits to on-site wayfinding, staging areas, apparel and accessories, category-specific tattoo stickers, Nike By You graphics, medals, and trophies. Our task was to build a visual system that could extend across the entire race journey—before, during, and after—so that runners could feel a unified and coherent experience at every stage.

The real challenge lay in shifting experienced runners’ existing perception of ACG, and making ACG’s wildness credible to people who truly run in the mountains.

For many people, ACG has always had a strong and recognizable aesthetic; it is also seen as visually appealing. But for trail runners, what matters in this race context is whether a set of gear genuinely understands the bodily experience of long-distance racing, the uncertainty of mountain environments, and the emotional fluctuations that resist easy summary: waiting, pressure, hesitation, collapse, persistence, and finally the loss of control and release that comes with crossing the finish line.

At the start of the project, we worked closely with the Nike ACG team and creative agency LxU to interview past champions, standout runners, and organizers from previous editions of Chongli 168. Through these conversations, we moved closer to what truly matters in the sport: what runners care about most in an ultra-distance race; how a person’s mental state shifts as weather and terrain keep changing; where fear begins when facing a challenge; and why, after overcoming it all, some runners end up in tears at the finish line.

The research also clarified another dimension. Trail runners have an acute sensitivity to the natural environment. They pay close attention to their surroundings, respect the mountains, and care deeply about sustainability. That attitude naturally connects with the outdoor spirit emphasized by ACG. In the context of this race, nature is not peripheral; it is a presence that must be taken seriously.

We did not begin by building the identity around a single graphic device. Instead, we started with Chongli itself, wanting the visual system to be truly rooted in place rather than remain at the level of a generic imagination of the outdoors. For trail runners, what matters is always more concrete: how the weather shifts, how elevation gain drains the body, how darkness amplifies fear, and how, over long distances, a person gradually edges closer to their own limits.

This site-specific way of thinking unfolded on two levels. On the macro level, Chongli’s coordinates, maps, mountain contours, topographic structure, and route information gave the system its sense of space and organizational logic. On the micro level, we brought into the visual language the plants and animals runners might actually encounter during the Chongli 168 race, including the Zhangbei horse, squirrels, hares, bees, ants, earthworms, mushrooms, golden lotus flowers, and ferns. These elements grounded the race identity in the reality of Chongli and gave ACG’s principle of responding to place a more tangible form. What runners truly encounter in the mountains should also appear in the visual world surrounding the race.

This visual system ran through the entire event journey: from the citywide teaser campaign to the race-kit experience; from staging areas and gear recognition after arriving in Chongli to the atmosphere built during the race and the design of commemorative objects afterward. Each touchpoint served a different function, yet all of them belonged, in experiential terms, to the same whole.

On July 13, 2025, the Nike ACG Chongli 168 Ultra Trail Race came to a triumphant close. This edition reached a record-breaking scale, spanning 30 provinces and cities across China and 22 countries and regions worldwide, and bringing more than ten thousand trail runners into the mountains. For UDL, this collaboration gave us the opportunity to organize the complex and fragmented experience of a major trail-running event into a visual language that could carry through the entire journey. We also hoped that ACG’s understanding of outdoor spirit could, through this race, form a more concrete connection with China’s trail-running scene—reaching beyond the event site itself and into the lived experience of runners.

When a runner moves through wind, gradient, darkness, fatigue, and finally the finish line, this visual system—built around the full race journey—becomes a constant presence: offering direction, creating order, holding emotion, and leaving memory behind.