MORE THAN MILES: THE RISE OF THE RUN CLUB

Published: 15/04/2026 | By: Alex Courbat

Run clubs are everywhere right now – group photos, shared miles, strangers turned teammates. But the real story isn’t in the finish line shot. It’s in the dark runs, the group chats, the quiet reasons people don’t want to run alone anymore. This is what’s really behind the rise of the run club. Because with them, miles mean more.

Run clubs are everywhere right now. You can't scroll through Instagram or Strava on a weekend morning without stumbling across a group finish line photo, sweaty and grinning. But to understand why they've exploded the way they have, you have to go back a little further than the aesthetic. Because the run club, in its truest form, has always been about something far bigger than the miles.

The roots of group running stretch back decades – long before anyone thought to make it look good on social media. Road running clubs have existed in Britain since the late 19th century, initially the preserve of competitive athletes chasing podium places and personal bests. Then came the running boom of the 1970s and '80s, sparked in part by the global jogging craze and the rise of mass-participation marathons. Suddenly, running wasn't just for the elite. It was for everyone. Community running clubs began to multiply, and with them, something shifted in the culture. It was no longer purely about how fast you could go. It was about showing up.

Fast forward to the 2010s, and a new wave of run clubs began to emerge in cities – hipper, more informal, less about club vests and handicap times and more about community, identity and belonging. Groups like November Project, which began in Boston and spread globally, or Midnight Runners in London, rewrote the rulebook entirely. Forget membership fees and race qualifications. Just turn up, run, and see what happens. These clubs traded on energy and accessibility, and people responded in enormous numbers. Running, for the first time, felt genuinely cool. Not in an exclusive way – quite the opposite. In a radically welcoming one.

Social media poured fuel on the fire. Strava turned every training run into a shareable moment. Instagram made the post-run coffee as important as the kilometres that preceded it. And then the pandemic happened, and everything changed again. With gyms shuttered and team sports suspended, running became the great democratic outlet. Millions of people laced up for the first time. When restrictions lifted, many of them didn't want to run alone anymore. Run clubs didn't just survive the pandemic – they thrived in its aftermath, becoming a beacon of collective victory in the wake of a history-shaping period of loneliness.

But here's what the finish line photos don't always tell you: the most interesting run clubs aren't just about running. They never really were. And nobody illustrates this better than Patty Lafleur, co-founder of Nuitcollective, a women's running collective based in North London that began not with a grand vision or a sponsorship deal, but with a damp evening and a Strava story.

"It was dark and it was wet," Patty remembers. "I'd gone for a run on my own because none of the girls could run that day." She posted to her stories, as runners do, and a message came back from Chiney – her eventual co-founder – asking a deceptively simple question: what are you going to do when winter really kicks in? The conversation that followed wasn't really about running routes or training plans. It was about safety. About the very particular calculation that women make every single time they want to go for a run after dark – weighing up the risk, changing the route, texting their location to someone who loves them.

"Every single girl at that table had a story to tell," Patty says, recounting a post-run breakfast where the conversation turned, as it so often does among women runners, to the things that happen when you're out there alone. Harassment. Being followed. Worse. "We're not necessarily accepting it, but we kind of just turn a blind eye to it. It needs to be a big deal. It should be a big deal."

Recollective's answer was elegant in its simplicity. Rather than launching yet another run club with a weekly schedule and a Linktree, they committed to monthly activations – group runs in the dark, by women, for women – designed to make a point as much as to cover ground. No one gets left behind. Speed is irrelevant. The only qualification for joining is wanting to feel safe. "It's more of a social," Patty explains, "but being able to do it in the dark and feeling safe, really."

What's grown from that initial exchange is a WhatsApp community of women from right across London, dropping pins, sharing routes, organising spontaneously. There are grander ambitions too – Patty and Chinyere have talked about a dedicated app that could connect women runners across the city, a kind of safety network built specifically around the rhythms of training. "Just really highlight it," Patty says. "Women shouldn't feel scared."

This is what modern run clubs, at their best, have become. Not just a vehicle for getting fitter or faster – though they do that too – but genuine communities built around shared experience, shared identity and, in Recollective's case, a shared refusal to accept that running after dark should feel like a risk. The miles have become almost incidental. What matters is who you run them with, and why.

You see it everywhere, once you start looking. Run clubs organising mental health talks at their weekly meetups. Groups fundraising together. Collectives built around specific communities – queer runners, runners of colour, new mothers, older athletes – who've found in running not just exercise but expression. A place to sweat their everyday sorrows away. A place where the can feel at home, because that’s the beauty of the track. It has always been a great equaliser. It turns out, so has the pavement.

Running, as Patty puts it, is everywhere now. "You always see people at the finish line. You always see everyone with their medals. You never actually see what it takes to get there." The run club, at its heart, is the bit in between. The dark mornings and the wet evenings. The group chat that gets you out the door when you'd rather stay in. The hand on your shoulder at kilometre 18 (or 3). That's what all those finish line photos are really celebrating. Not the race. Not the sweat. Not the PBs. But the people who ran it with you.