Run Sonic Run: The Most Obscure Event in Sonic's History?

[Badnik Mechanic]

During the 20th anniversary, Sega really went all out to promote Sonic. If you were around these forums back then, you'll remember how crazy it was, every day it felt like something new was announced or leaked. 

They even held various events all over the world, most of these were basically conventions or parties such as Summer of Sonic and Sonic Boom, but then you had the really odd ones like the skateboarding event 'Generations of Skate.'

But there was one event which was held in the UK during May of 2011 which barely got any attention even back then, and in the 8 years since the event was held... Absolutely no new information has come to light... Until last week.

 

So in a nutshell... 

Run Sonic Run was a mini 5k Sonic themed marathon held in London during 2011. There was both a kids race and an adults race held, according to Sega, 500 kids took part in the first race from over 10 schools in the local area.

Apparently Sega did have plans to hold more events like this throughout the UK. In the video I looked at the photos carefully and noticed that they did have multiple banners for this, so it probably wasn't just a one off thing, they did invest quite a bit into this which does suggest they really were looking into doing more.

But the new information came last week. Several Run Sonic Run Goodie bags were sold at an internal Sega charity event and I was lucky enough to get one. 

This event actually had it's own branded merch, and in the video I do spot the merch in one of the photos.

 

Here we have a 20th anniversary event, which had over 500 people take part in, which gave away free branded merch... and for over 8 years there's barely any information online about it. The Sega Blogs who originally hosted the story are long deleted, even the predominant wiki pages like Sonic Retro and the Sonic fandom wiki don't have any mention of it.

So since 8 years have passed and some of the people who went on this are now likely in college or about to start uni... I have to ask. Did anyone here actually go to this? Or knows someone who did?

Just that I can't believe it's been 8 years and all we have are 4 low quality photos and then 8 years later the first images and video or the bags which were given away, we don't even know what was inside the bags or what actually happened at this event other than the race itself.