This is a story that starts in Ukraine in 2024, where the bombs and gunfire are so much, too much, but the city of Kyiv is going to hold its annual marathon because road races bring people together, and the war with Russia cannot tear this country apart. But the bombs and gunfire – all those shots – they’re just so much. And how does a marathon begin?
It starts with a pistol.
It starts with a shot.
That won’t do, not in Kyiv in 2024, so what happened next? We’ll get there.
This story starts against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, yes, but it crosses countries and oceans and even states, all the way to Indianapolis, to the halls of Brebeuf and Purdue and to the peace of Eagle Creek. It makes a stop along the way, picking up a U.S. veteran from Ohio, a football state champion – before his leg was severed – and a gold medal winner at the Warrior Games. That came after he lost his leg.
What does any of this have to do with a road race in Kyiv?
Better question: What does any of this have to do with the 2027 Mini-Marathon in Indianapolis?
Pay attention. Because that’s where you come in. But first, in this story that starts with a shot, there’s someone you need to meet.
She’s the executive director of Start Without a Shot.
Started at 2024 Kyiv Marathon
Her name is Emily Smith Pirrello, she graduated from Brebeuf in 2006 and Purdue in 2010, and a few months ago she was like you and me: Aware of the war in the Ukraine, familiar with the start of a road race, completely oblivious to the connection. But she’s a humanitarian, having volunteered at the Lafayette Crisis Center and worked at the United Nations Foundation, and something on LinkedIn got her attention.
It was a post from the CEO of Barking Owl, a sonic strategy and branding company based in Los Angeles, looking for someone to grow its non-profit initiative into something global. The initiative: Replacing the traditional starting sound at road races and other sports – gunshot, airhorn or cannon – with something better. Something less triggering. Something less … terrifying.
What a concept, right? Smith Pirrello was like you and me, remember – and her initial reaction to the idea of replacing that race-starting gunshot was like yours, mine, so many of the people she’s met since then:
“It’s always a slow burn,” she says. “You hear about the mission. Then a pause. Then: ‘Oh, OK, that’s interesting.’
“Then you sit with it a minute, and you get a conviction: ‘Yeah, yeah, we should change this. Why is this still this way? It’s outdated!’”
Smith Pirrello was there earlier this year, in the same place the CEO of Barking Owl, Kirkland Lynch, had been in 2024 when a P.R. firm representing the Kyiv Marathon had reached out to his sound company – Barking Owl strives to use “the power of sound to drive social impact” – with the strangest ask. Paraphrased, translated, the request went something like this:
The 2024 Kyiv Marathon is inviting hundreds of active and former members of the Ukrainian military to the race. It will have close to 5,000 runners near the starting line, and thousands more in the vicinity, coming together as a community, celebrating the victory of courage and resilience even as Russian bombs and gunfire are exploding.
And what we can’t have, Kyiv Marathon directors had decided in 2024 – two years after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths – is the race starting with a gunshot.
Start without a shot? Lynch, a 2014 graduate of Harvard Law, had never considered such a thing. Who had, you know?
Other than people in a warzone?
Helped by neurologists and psychoacoustic professionals, with folks at Harvard Medical School testing sounds through electroencephalograms, Barking Owl created 70 alternative sounds. Those were narrowed down to four, and tested on runners and veterans and PTSD survivors – same thing, in some cases – before Barking Owl settled on an electronic, symphonic sound.
The 2024 Kyiv Marathon, also known as the Nova Post Barrier-Free Marathon, used it.
The feedback was enormous. Next thing Kirkland Lynch knows, media is picking up the story and word is spreading and he’s getting calls from race organizers around the world – globally, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, there were 59 regional armed conflicts in 2023 – who are experiencing that slow burn: The pause, OK that’s interesting, some contemplation, and finally conviction.
Yeah, we should change this.
They’re calling from Sacramento and Puerto Rico, from San Antonio and Kansas City, and soon Barking Owl has shared its electronic, symphonic sound – it’s free, and available on an MP3 that works with most existing sound systems – with 200 events around the world. This is terrific, it’s amazing, but Kirkland Lynch already had a full-time job, you know? Now his race-starting initiative is becoming a full-time job all by itself. He needed an executive director. He shared a post on LinkedIn.
He had a non-profit organization, and a name: Start Without a Shot.
Then he hired a former state-champion rower from Brebeuf.
(Hear the starting sound here.)
Proud graduate of Brebeuf, Purdue
The thing about Emily Smith Pirrello: She’s going to win. Doesn’t matter if doctors are diagnosing her with a learning disability as a kid. She’s going to graduate high school, then college – summa cum laude at Purdue – and then get a Master of Science at Georgia.
Doesn’t matter if Brebeuf doesn’t have a rowing team. She wants to try rowing, so she joins the Indianapolis Rowing Center at Eagle Creek as a freshman, is a co-captain as a senior, and won several state titles.
What she’s doing now, trying to get 500 more events to partner with Start Without a Shot (SWaS) before the end of the year? She plans to win. It’s phone calls and emails from her office in Cincinnati, personal visits and LinkedIn notes, and a few weeks ago SWaS landed another big one: The 2026 TIAA Philadelphia Marathon.
Now Smith Pirrello is eyeing an even bigger trophy, the biggest of all:
The Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics.
“Having the 2028 Olympics here in the United States, we’re really pushing for this inclusivity and change at a global level,” Smith Pirrello says. “And if we’re unable to make that happen, at least use it as an opportunity to story tell and get it out there.”
She’s relentless, this 2006 Brebeuf graduate, and people like this tend to flock together. Her husband, for example.
His name is Matt Pirrello, and he was a star cornerback for Archbishop Alter High outside Dayton, helping the Knights to the 2008 Ohio state championship before becoming a scholarship cadet at Ohio University’s Air Force Reserve Officer’s Training Corps. A parachuting exercise before his sophomore year went wrong, a gust of wind slamming him into a windsock at 80 mph, and he severed a leg.
Relentless? Matt Pirrello went through rehab, got back into ROTC and served three deployments to Afghanistan in counterterrorism. He also served as team captain for the U.S. Air Force team at the 2011 Warrior Games, where he won individual gold, silver and bronze medals.
Today, Matt Pirrello is a brand director at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. A lot like his wife, this guy: He’s going to win.
“He’s a big reason why I feel pulled by the mission,” says Emily, 38, who met Matt a decade ago when they worked in Washington DC. “One of the driving things for me is knowing how critically important sports was for his healing. He used a 5K race as part of his journey, and the whole family came out and ran it with him. It was a big moment of celebration.
“Matt is not sound-sensitive in that way, but through him I am privileged to be part of the veterans community, and I do hear about the impact of startling sounds.”
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 29% of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffer from PTSD, and “noise-related trauma – such as blasts from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), artillery, and gunshots – is one of the most common causes of PTSD in veterans.”
Civilians also can experience noise-related PTSD, whether from nearby wars – a leading health journal in Europe suggests 54% of Ukrainians have a form of PTSD – or, closer to home in the United States, mass shootings. One of Kirkland Lynch’s most motivating correspondences is the letter he received from a former teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., where a teenager killed 17 students and staff in a 2018 school shooting.
“That teacher let us know how important this is,” Emily Smith Pirrello says of Start Without a Shot. “She was a lifelong runner, and she’d signed up for three races after the shooting – but couldn’t go through with any of them for fear of the starting line.”
And then Emily Smith Pirrello remembers another email, from the father of a runner in Colorado. In Littleton, Colorado.
Columbine, remember?
Charlie Kirk, school shootings … and pistols?
Sean O’Neill remembers the gunshots, over and over. He remembers the kids wincing, over and over. And he remembers thinking:
There has to be better way.
This was Sept. 13, 2025. It was the Liberty Bell Cross Country Invitational at Heritage High School in Littleton, 5½ miles from Columbine High, site of a 1999 school shooting that left 15 dead and 20 injured.
The race in Colorado was three days after Charlie Kirk had been shot dead in Utah at a Turning Point USA event, a national tragedy that overshadowed another one that day, one much closer to Littleton – a school shooting in Evergreen, Colo., that left two students critically injured and the shooter dead.
Three days later, the Liberty Bell Cross Country Invitational went off as planned. Evergreen High was there.
So were the starting pistols.
Twelve races in all – boys and girls, varsity and junior varsity, in three different divisions – and every race started…
“Gunshot after gunshot after gunshot,” Sean O’Neill is telling me by phone. “My oldest daughter was at the meet. I’m watching all these people wincing and holding their fingers to their ears.”
Organizers had set up a table to honor Evergreen High, with cards and pens for competitors and their parents to leave notes in support. O’Neill remembers seeing kids at that table, writing notes for Evergreen survivors, literally flinching as another race started with another gunshot.
“We’re just a few miles from Columbine, and this is days after the mass shooting at Evergreen,” O’Neill says. “All sorts of madness – Charlie Kirk assassinated the same day. And these gunshots are going off and people are wincing and I got emotional.”
Then he got on the phone. He reached out to Kirkland Lynch of Barking Owl. This being a small world, O’Neill was already aware of Start Without a Shot. He spoke with Lynch, telling him about the surreal scene at a cross country meet in Littleton.
“(Lynch) said, ‘That’s exactly why we do this,’” O’Neill remembers. “He said, ‘Give me the organizer’s name, and I’ll reach out.’
“This is how change happens.”
Doyel in 2018: As Noblesville hero Jason Seaman heals, a community heals with him
Doyel in 2022: Chaos outside after active shooting leaves four dead at Greenwood Mall
How to partner with Start Without a Shot
For a school or road race, partnering with Start Without a Shot is simple. The sound is on an MP3, free of charge, and can be shared instantly. The advocacy costs money, though, including Kirkland Lynch’s visit February to the annual Running USA industry conference in St. Louis, where he shared his vision for Start Without a Shot with U.S. and international race directors – and asked for their help with one particular hurdle:
Races sanctioned by World Athletics – the international governing body founded in 1912 as the IAAF – could start with one of just three sounds: gunshot, airhorn or cannon.
Less than three weeks later after Lynch’s appearance at the conference, Running USA announced an amendment to the World Athletics rulebook: Sanctioned races can now start with an alternative sound.
“That makes it such an easy lift now,” Lynch was telling me this week. “(Switching to the alternative sound) doesn’t require money. All it requires is getting people to say yes. It means getting people to care.”
That’s where Emily Smith Pirrello is particularly effective. She’s working on events as globally significant as the 2027 Invictus Games in England and the 2028 L.A. Summer Olympics – and has targeted races as localized as the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon here in Indianapolis.
“The 2027 Mini is on my list,” she says.
How will you go about it? That’s what I’m asking the executive director of Start Without a Shot.
“It starts with you,” she tells me.
Excuse me?
“My goal talking to you today,” Smith Pirrello tells me, “is that you and I will talk again in May 2027, because the Mini is adopting this sound – because of this article.”
Because of … what?
“Everybody can play their part,” she says. “It’s not just people donating – but if anyone does, we will use it thoughtfully – but also advocating. It’s people using their voice at the grassroots level to help make this change. Hopefully Kirkland and I aren’t the only two people out there making this ask.
“As people read this article, they themselves can use their voice and advocate to their local school or race director – to the Mini – and they can say, ‘You should get a call to Emily to get this implemented.’ Every person who reads this could lead to one more race adoption.”
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You’re relentless, I’m telling Smith Pirrello. Anyone ever tell you that?
“It happens,” she says, chuckling, then turning serious. “Think about it: This July 4, this is our 250th celebration – and as you think about all of the tech advancements of the last 250 years, why is this one still stuck in the past? Gunshots, really? Races have evolved to electric starting pistols, but as we reflect on 250 years, let’s also think about how things can be different 250 years from now.
“This should be one of those things.”
So how does it sound, this alternative way for a race to start without a shot? It sounds electronic. It sounds symphonic. Sounds like victory, is what it sounds like.
More: Join the text conversation with sports columnist Gregg Doyel for insights, reader questions and Doyel’s peeks behind the curtain.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Doyel: Ever wonder why road races start with gunfire? Someone did in Kyiv. Then this happened.
Reporting by Gregg Doyel, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Gregg Doyel, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
