There’s a new chat-up line doing the rounds, and it isn’t “can I buy you a drink.” It’s “what’s your Strava?” Which tells you almost everything you need to know about how a generation decided to find its people in 2025. Not in the pub. On the pavement, at 7 am, in trainers.
The running club, quietly and rather beautifully, became the new bar.
The bar is out, the run club is in
The scale of it genuinely surprised me. Strava’s end-of-year report, drawn from more than 180 million worldwide, found that its clubs nearly quadrupled in a single year, tipping past a million clubs in total. Running clubs grew three-and-a-half times over — hiking clubs, extraordinarily, grew close to sixfold, even outpacing the runners. Over on AllTrails, the map app of choice for the walking crowd, membership swelled by a fifth to ninety million. A movement that had been bubbling for years hit unmistakable critical mass.
You could see it without any of the data, mind you. Every city park at dawn is suddenly dotted with clusters of people in matching club tees, catching their breath and swapping numbers. Something had shifted.
It was never really about the running
Here’s the part I find most telling, and most heartening: the fitness was almost beside the point.
When you ask people why they joined, the answer overwhelmingly isn’t “to get faster.” It’s to belong. More than a third say a run club is simply a good place to meet people, and the cultural chatter has been even blunter — run clubs branded the “new dating app,” the new social hub, the thing quietly replacing the Friday-night bar. The exercise, it turns out, is the ticket price; the real product on sale is the company.
And that makes complete sense when you look at what shifted around it. A whole generation drifting toward health-consciousness and away from alcohol-soaked socialising left a rather large hole where the pub used to sit. Something needed to fill it — somewhere to see the same faces each week, decompress, and feel part of a thing. The run club stepped neatly into that gap, and it did so without charging at the door.
The third place, rebuilt
Sociologists have a lovely term for what was missing: the “third place” — that essential social space which is neither home nor work, where community actually happens. Cafés, pubs, churches, and libraries once did the heavy lifting. Over the last couple of decades, a great many of those quietly thinned out or moved onto our screens, and we ended up lonelier for it.
What the run club pulled off was rebuilding the third place from scratch and — crucially — building it open, with no membership fee. No kit required beyond shoes you already own. Every pace welcome, from the sprinters to the shuffling-at-the-back brigade (a proud category I know well). That accessibility mattered every bit as much as the sense of belonging, because a community with a velvet rope isn’t much of a community at all.
The brands, naturally, noticed. Nike, Adidas, Lululemon and a swarm of smaller labels came running — sponsoring routes, stitching up club collections, throwing the post-run coffee socials. When the marketers arrive in force, you know a trend has hardened into an institution.
But strip away the sponsorship and the slogans, and what’s underneath is genuinely rather moving: people, en masse, choosing to move their bodies and find their people at the same time, out in the real world face to face. In an age that spent years nudging us apart and onto screens, that quiet rebellion feels like exactly the right one. It’s the same reason I keep championing real, in-person connection over the digital sort — some things can’t be done through a phone.
So no, you don’t have to run. But finding your people, showing up weekly, belonging to something? That never goes out of style. Lace up, or don’t, go and find your version of the run club.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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