7 min readThe following is an excerpt from This Is Running: A Celebration of the World of Running, Exploring the Culture, History, Brands, Races and People Behind It, which is available now.
THE QUESTION OF how best to make friends has been bubbling under the surface for eternity, but when a pandemic slowly but surely rippled across the planet, life as we knew it changed beyond anything we’d either experienced or could have expected, and it brought our communities—and the difficulties in finding them—into razor-sharp focus. For those living and working in cities around the world—over half the global population, and 80 percent of people in the USA—there was a new normal.
While service workers in America were hung out to dry with no pay at all as their places of work shuttered, the swathe of workers who would normally traipse into the office every morning suddenly had to grapple with the new dynamics of working from home. While the practical solutions of actually doing the white-collar work involved the relatively straightforward investment in a new desk and a chair to create a rudimentary home office set-up, the mental ramifications of adjusting to working in one’s living space were much more complex. Losing those soupçons of small talk by the water cooler with a revolving cast of colleagues, coupled with the stress of a deadly novel virus circling the planet, led to many reassessing their priorities altogether.
Regardless, it had to be business as usual, rent had to be paid, but leaving our homes was prohibited beyond the government-mandated single daily hour of outdoor exercise. A newfound lack of a commute, however, meant that people also had an extra hour on their hands every day. Many chose to use that extra hour for their health and, as we know, the easiest and cheapest form of exercise is to simply open the door and go for a run. Those early days of the pandemic had a real ‘make do and mend’ mentality, so after pulling on any old pair of shorts and T-shirt, and a long rummage through a closet for that pair of running shoes you bought a few years ago, you ran. It felt good to be outside, shaking off the listlessness by using your body. When you saw someone else using their own hour of freedom to run, you may have felt a strange sense of familiarity. You may have waved at one another from afar the way runners do.
Research suggests that up to 30 percent of runners in 2025 have begun running since the start of the pandemic, and a further 20 percent run more now than they did before the pandemic. The big change is that 70 percent of the new cohort of runners run for their health, compared to 20 percent of runners pre-pandemic. The complementary statistic is that newer runners are less interested in competition, and instead look more at the social side of running: run clubs.
A survey by Running USA found the number of members of running clubs in the States has increased by 25 percent since 2019. A Strava report identified that 78 percent of runners in Jakarta, Indonesia, and 57 percent of runners in Fortaleza, Brazil, ran with a group in 2024, and over a third of Los Angeles’s social run clubs have sprouted up over the past three years, so this is a worldwide phenomenon, caused by a worldwide event.
Bridging the Gap
THE SEEDS OF the latest wave of social running clans were sown a couple of decades prior, back in 2003 when Bridgerunners started running New York City’s bridges from critically cool Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn and back again. In 2007, Run Dem Crew started kicking up their own fuss completely separately in equally hip east London. Eventually, the mercurial founders of these two crews met, and between Mike Saes and Charlie Dark, a movement was born.
Their run crews formed the idea of a new identity of runner. These were not people who readily identified with the post-collegiate running world found in American amateur running, nor had they ever followed a paper trail across the English countryside. That was so, so far from being their world. Their playground was the grimier parts of the big cities they call home. They were DJs, graffiti artists, your local friendly raconteurs, but they ran nonetheless, and they wanted to find the others like them who reflected modern pop culture while also running their streets.
Over the next five years, they would go on to find similar run crews based in inner cities across Europe and America, and then further around the world. Late one night, Bridgerunners and Run Dem Crew concocted the idea of Bridge The Gap, where they created events around the globe, bringing together and celebrating the small but incredibly connected Rolodex of like-minded urban running crews like NBRO from Copenhagen, Berlin Braves, Paris Running Club and Patta in Amsterdam. Every time they converged upon a city from their corners of the world, they would emerge from the airport dressed in matching jackets, like they were a band. Jessie Zapo, who was one of the main organizers, explains how they would ‘touch down, put our stuff in the apartment, then we were clubbing that first night with all the people from all these other cities. The energy was electric.’ This would prove to be the first era of social run crews’ longest-lasting legacy—one that has gone on to inspire future generations of run clubs tens of thousands of miles further afield.
The concept of running clubs is nothing new, of course. While clubs such as the New York Pioneer Club formed in 1936 have been around since before World War II, it was clubs like Prospect Park Track Club and Central Park Track Club, which were started in the 1970s, and have endured for over half a century. Another of the earliest clubs still running cross-country is the Thames Hare and Hounds, which formed in London in 1868. Back in 19th-century England, practicing sports as competition during leisure time was the preserve of the ‘gentleman amateur’. With the art of cross-country running born from the stuffy boys’ school system, it was a fast run through the woods reserved for the best educated in the country. The UK still excels in this type of athletic club for serious amateur runners, which provide low-cost competition and community. You’ll see each club’s unique singlet in among the front-runners at the London Marathon, on the starting line at parkruns around the country, and dotted around at social running clubs’ meet-ups as well.
One of the common reasons given for not enjoying the traditional athletics club experience in the UK is that they can often seem a little old-fashioned. However, while these new, more social run crews might have started out as distinct from the established athletics clubs, by congregating at a watering hole instead of a track or clubhouse, slowly but surely they have added structure and desire to their club cultures. As members improved as runners, they wanted to run races. A marathon is the natural progression, and so they picked up training plans, added track workouts and long runs to the weekly schedule, and maybe even joined those stuffy, old-fashioned clubs. They may have emerged from left field, but ultimately some became just another option for runners looking to improve themselves. That journey was the conduit to Jessie Zapo getting her coaching qualification and then leaving her decade-long tenure as a captain in Bridgerunners to first form Black Roses, which had a deep focus on performance training, and then brought that mindset with her when forming one of New York’s first women-only clubs, Girls Run NYC.
In the same way, many of the new running clubs from the past quarter of a century act as grassroots communities that build a meeting point for a splinter of society. There are women-only clubs and LGBTQIA+-friendly communities like Frontrunners, clubs for South Asians like Masala Milers in New York or Sikhs In The City in London, there’s Black Men Run, which is a national organization of clubs across the United States whose goal is to get more Black men into the sport, and so many more. They all exist to support those marginalized groups of people who might not otherwise see themselves represented in the running world.
Run clubs have been a bold new conduit to expanding social representation within the sport, and, as a result, more people are running. As that happens, there will be greater numbers available to form these groups, so the make-up of the groups will diversify from the purity of just running for competition, or for friendship. We will see more and more reasons for people to join together and run. There’s a thought that, increasingly, there will be a focus to involve secondary activities, whether that’s layering another exercise in terms of adding HIIT or cycling, or a purely social element such as a speed dating event.
Finding a romantic partner is one of the most natural things in the world, after all, and if you’re in the same place and doing the same thing as someone you’re attracted to, you’ve already got two things in common. People joining a social event to find love is a tale as old as time. The Boston Barleyhoppers are a great example from the 1970s as they pulled up to 300 runners to the Bull & Finch pub—the setting for classic sitcom Cheers—before running through the Massachusetts capital. Twenty-two marriages came from the Barleyhoppers. Simpler times, perhaps, but founder Eddie Doyle has one hell of a legacy. And if there can be a time-efficient global network to find love via running, who says no? It might even help preserve the purity of those non-dating clubs.
Raziq Rauf is a running coach, journalist, and author of This Is Running: A Celebration of the World of Running, Exploring the Culture, History, Brands, Races and People Behind It, who has also written for the BBC, the Guardian, and his newsletter, "Running Sucks."
