A starter’s pistol won’t open the Philly Marathon. This West Philly native’s company created an alternative.

Kirkland Lynch was a freshman at the University of North Carolina when he heard a loud bang. A student with whom he was walking jumped to the ground, believing it was gunfire. Lynch, who grew up in West Philadelphia, laughed, as he knew the difference between a gunshot and a car backfiring.

“That’s when I was like, ‘Whoa,’” Lynch said. “When you leave the city, you find out more and more that what you think is normal is not.”

Lynch later became CEO of Barking Owl, a music and sound company, and had a client in Ukraine. The company was sponsoring a marathon but wanted to make the 2024 run accessible for war veterans. So they needed to find a way to begin the race without a starter’s pistol. They asked Lynch if his company could create an alternate sound.

“I’m not from Ukraine, but I am from West Philly,” said Lynch, 40. “And I remember growing up watching track meets and the gun would go off, and as a kid you’d duck down and get up and laugh. You found it funny as a kid and then realized as an adult that it was PTSD.”

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Lynch’s group — Start Without A Shot — created a sound with the help of neurologists and psychoacoustic professionals that could start the race. They studied the sound at Harvard Medical School through electroencephalograms and found the noise that least triggered brain waves. They used it at that race in Kyiv, and other races soon adopted it.

Lynch said replacing a starter’s pistol makes races accessible for runners with PTSD, veterans, and those who are neurodivergent. Running a race is enough of a challenge, and Start Without A Shot removed an obstacle. In November, the noise will start the Philadelphia Marathon in place of a gun.

“Clearly, this is something that’s affecting people all over the world in so many different ways and for so many reasons,” Lynch said. “There’s no reason that we use a gun to start a race other than it was the 1880s and it was around. No one is really saying, ‘No.’ Everyone is saying, ‘Why didn’t we think about this before?’”

Lynch started reaching out to race directors after the Kyiv Marathon to see if they would agree to use his sound in place of a pistol. His sound is free to use, and he told race directors it would be easy to implement and still preserve the competitive integrity of the event. Plus, Lynch reminded them that a more accessible race would mean more participants, which would lead to more business.

It was an easy pitch, and most agreed, but the Chicago Marathon said it couldn’t do it. That race follows the rules of World Athletics, and the governing body said a race must begin with a gun, airhorn, or cannon.

“Now, instead of a sales approach, I had to take on a lobbying approach,” Lynch said.

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Lynch connected with an official last year at World Athletics in Monaco, who listened to his pitch about changing the rules. Lynch was checking the rule book in January to show someone the rules when he realized it actually had been changed. World Athletics added an amendment in September 2025 to say a race could begin with “an approved sound.” They just never told the guy from West Philly that they did it.

“This little kid from West Philly changed international law,” Lynch said. “And it was due to what I experienced growing up in West Philly, and this whole Start Without A Shot unraveled from that.”

Lynch grew up on St. Bernard Street near 49th Street and Chester Avenue. His mom was a nurse for the city, and his dad was a forensic social worker. Lynch swam at Masterman and studied at the University of Southern California and Harvard Law School after graduating from North Carolina. His company, Barking Owl, has created sound used in Super Bowl commercials and ads for Fortune 500 companies. But to him, no one has topped the kids with whom he went to high school at Masterman.

“One thing I’ll always say about Masterman is that those are some of the smartest kids that I’ve ever met in [my] life,” Lynch said. “For better or for worse, the majority of them all go into some type of public or government service because it’s something about where we come from. No matter the education or the heights that we could achieve, the public service part always pulls us back.

“It’s not until you go to college, you meet these people who have the same education, but they’re thinking about how to join a hedge fund vs. the Masterman folk are the smartest people I’ve ever met, but they’re still about the community and the people and ‘How do we make the world better?’ I think it’s built into all of us there.”

A teacher who survived a school shooting in Florida reached out to Lynch to tell him how she signed up for three races but couldn’t run because she feared the sound of the starter’s pistol. His sound changed that, she said. A parent of a student from Colorado sent him a video of the cross-country team ducking from the starter’s pistol a few days after a gunman entered their school. And a YMCA director thanked him for finding a way for them to start a race for neurodivergent members.

Start Without a Shot has eliminated starter pistols from races in places like San Antonio, Texas, and Kansas City, Mo., but Lynch wants the movement to become even bigger. His company has an office in Los Angeles where the Olympics will be held in 2028. It would be something, he said, if their sound was played there. So far, everything has been funded by Barking Owl. He needs corporate partners, he said, to grow Start Without A Shot. He already changed international law. And now he wants to keep going.

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“Philly and West Philly made me everything that I am,” Lynch said. “I wouldn’t be able to change the world with Start Without A Shot without Philly because it’s my experience in Philly, for the better and for the worse, that made me realize that this a way to change the world and a way to help people who are veterans or PTSD-inflicted or are neurodivergent to feel included.

“This is a way that I really figured out how we can change the world. It’s easy to change the world. It’s scalable to change the world. And me being from Philly is really the impetus for all of this.”