Do Monks Run in PUMA?
Meditation in Motion at a 15th-century Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the mountains of Ladakh
Ahead of the Ladakh Marathon, PUMA India has found an unlikely meeting point between two practices that appear, at first glance, to have very little in common: sitting perfectly still and moving relentlessly forward.
Its new campaign, Meditation in Motion, places Buddhist monks alongside the language of performance running, turning Ladakh’s vast, austere landscape into a meditation on focus, discipline and endurance. According to PUMA India, the campaign features 40 Buddhist monks in Leh wearing their traditional robes with PUMA NITRO Deviate PURE running shoes, photographed at the historic Thiksey Monastery.
Lo The image is deliberately arresting. Monastic robes are traditionally associated with contemplation; running shoes with momentum. One suggests withdrawal from the world, the other an engagement with it at speed. Yet the campaign’s central proposition is that these practices may share more than separates them.
Both, after all, require the management of attention.
A runner learns to settle into breath, rhythm and repetition, allowing the noise around them to recede. Meditation, too, asks for concentration and discipline: the ability to return, again and again, to the present moment. The destination may differ, but the mental mechanics can feel surprisingly familiar.
That connection takes on particular resonance in Ladakh.
The 13th edition of the Ladakh Marathon will take place from September 10 to 13, 2026, with distances ranging from a 5km Run for Fun to the formidable 122km Silk Route Ultra. The programme also includes the 72km Khardung La Challenge, as well as the marathon, half marathon and 11.2km race. The event describes itself as the world’s highest AIMS-certified marathon, while its ultra-distance races rank among the world’s highest and toughest endurance events.
This is running stripped of many of its urban distractions. At altitude, concentration is no longer an abstract performance virtue; it becomes part of the experience itself. The body has to negotiate terrain, thin air, distance and fatigue. Pace becomes personal. Breath becomes measurable. Every step has a way of bringing the mind back to the body.
In that context, Meditation in Motion feels less like a marketing metaphor and more like an observation.
The choice of Thiksey Monastery deepens the campaign’s visual and cultural tension. Located roughly 19 kilometres east of Leh, the hilltop monastery is a 15th-century Tibetan Buddhist institution associated with the Gelugpa order and remains one of Ladakh’s most recognisable cultural landmarks. Its architecture, rising in tiers above the Indus Valley, provides an extraordinary setting in which tradition and contemporary sport are placed side by side.
For a sportswear brand, this is also a notably different visual vocabulary. Performance advertising often leans on speed, spectacle and aggression. Here, the suggestion is almost the opposite: that performance can emerge from composure.
Running is movement, but good running is also economy. It is rhythm rather than chaos. A long-distance runner cannot sprint every kilometre. They must manage effort, ignore distraction and maintain attention when enthusiasm has long since given way to repetition. In that sense, endurance sport has always contained an inward-looking dimension.
PUMA India’s campaign makes that invisible interior experience visible.
The monks in the imagery do not need to become runners for the comparison to work, nor does meditation need to be recast as sport. The strength of the idea lies precisely in the distance between the two worlds. Stillness and motion remain different disciplines. But both ask something increasingly rare of us: sustained attention.
And perhaps that is what makes Ladakh the right place for the conversation.
The region’s landscape has a way of reducing experience to essentials. Mountain, road, breath, body. For the runners arriving for the Ladakh Marathon, the challenge will be physical, but never only physical. Endurance eventually becomes a negotiation with the mind—the question of whether focus can outlast discomfort.
Meditation in Motion takes that familiar runner’s truth and gives it a more contemplative frame.
The campaign’s most interesting idea is therefore not that monks and runners are the same. They are not. It is that stillness does not necessarily disappear when the body begins to move.
Sometimes, if the rhythm is right, it begins there.
As thousands of runners prepare to take on Ladakh’s extraordinary terrain from September 10 to 13, PUMA India’s intervention offers a useful thought to carry to the start line: perhaps the point of running is not always to escape the mind.
Perhaps, occasionally, it is to arrive inside it.
For more information https://ladakhmarathon.com www.thiksay.org
Images courtesy of Puma, Thiksay Monastery and Tourism of Leh.