Community First: Run Clubs Then & Now
How do you navigate both building and maintaining a community in the blooming running scene. Some key Los Angeles run club leaders share their insights.
Community First: Run Clubs Then & Now
Last Wednesday evening, 30th April 2025, I brought four Los Angeles run club leaders and 50 guests together in one room at Heimat Club in Hollywood to explore what has fueled the building of run club communities across LA, both in-person and online, and how that has evolved over time and technology. Please enjoy some of the highlights.
Communicating in the digital world
Kit John - Movement Runners (2011): “I use Instagram, but I’m old school. I’ll just call you. I’ll text you. In the beginning I was texting my friends who didn’t run, but wanted to be active, get out of the house for a couple of hours. Sometimes you just have to give somebody a call and ask them how they’re doing.”
Hannah Maile - WeHo Run Club (2023): “I keep it very simple. Instagram’s what I do. Same time, same place, same route every single week, so everyone knows on Thursday at 7pm we’re turning up, no matter what. In the beginning I would send a direct personal message to anybody that looked like they could be a runner, telling them about the run club.”
Zaakiyah Brisker - South Central Run Club (2020): “I learned about all these run clubs from Instagram, but we’re doing a new thing where if you wanna get with South Central Run Club, you have to be in our Signal chat. South Central deals with hyper-policing. Most of our runners are Black and brown and you never know when ICE is gonna pull up. Instead of broadcasting our runs and making us vulnerable to surveillance, we stopped putting it on Instagram to make people feel safer to come and hang out.”
Richard Lin - Lombardy Run Club (2023): “We’re based in Pasadena, so we’re really saturated with a lot of run clubs that started over 10 years ago, and I didn’t want to [poach members], so with my media background, I found it really easy to advertise what we do on Instagram. It’s very low key, but we also have a Discord with 500 members.”
How does your run community communicate with one another? Tell us below.
Protecting your community in real life
Kit: “You have to nip it in the bud. I’m a big fan of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes we figure things out the hard way, but as I get older I know that you have to nip it in the bud. The sooner the better.”
Hannah: “As a leader of a run club, you have a responsibility to set the tone of what is expected. I think I do a good job. I’m not putting up with anything and I think a lot of people know that. We had an undies run and I was very nervous of that, but I had no problem grabbing the mic right before the event and saying, ‘Don’t be weird. We’re here to have a good time.’”
Richard: “We are a younger crowd and I think women in general are very targeted when running, which is why most of my leadership team are ladies. Having them there gives me a lot of perspective on how to handle people. We put a code of conduct on our website that if you don’t adhere to our community values of building a safe space for runners, we can kick you out. After we had an incident, we made our Discord private – we post all our private info there. You have to come to a run for us to let you into it, and we have an anonymous reporting form.”
Have you had a fractious moment within your run community? How was it handled, and what did you learn?
Showing the world your community
Zaakiyah: “We’re very conscious of the way we want our story to be told, which makes brand deal precarious for us. A lot of those come for us because we’re a historically divested run community and brands typically try to take our images and stories to try and use it for their profit, so we’re trying to build a grassroots supporters system as opposed to tring to rely on brands, because quite frankly we can’t trust brands to tell our story with dignity and integrity.”
Kit: “I don’t do it for myself. I’m gonna take care of my whole crew from the brands before I take care of myself. If you get a pair of leggings the first time you come out, that’s going to incentivize you to go out and run again. If you get a pair of running shoes, you might think about running a 5k. Just make sure you remember why you started doing what you do. Brands will come and go, but will your crew stay?”
Engaging with the wider community
Hannah: “The LA fires hit me really hard. The Sunset Fire was really close to home, so I just started acting and moving and telling people we need this and that, and within 48 hours we had a complete donation drive. We contacted seven different families directly and asked them what specific things they wanted. I couldn’t do it on my own, but everything I asked of my community, they just showed up more than I could have ever expected.”
Richard: “100% of our merch profits went to the Eaton Fire relief funds. We raised $1300. After that was the Rose Bowl Half, which is our home race, so we set up events and supported a coffee shop and a restaurant in Altadena. We also had a shakeout run in the burn zone, which was a very sobering experience. You can focus a lot of energy on the right areas when you have a lot of eyes on your club.”
Kit: “I use my friends and families in my run community to collect shoes, clothes, and hygiene kits for Skid Row. When community comes together, you’ll be surprised at how much you can get from just asking. One year, I think I got 500 pairs of shoes for the less fortunate. We need to get better at reaching out and asking.”
Take a moment to share a moment when your run community came together for the greater good. Let’s have a little good news, eh?
The effect of community on culture
Both South Central Run Club and Movement Runners have added directly to LA’s rich run culture by putting on their own races. SCRC host the Fuck White Supremacy 5k as well as the Hood Beer Run, because, “drinking in public in South Central is something else that’s surveilled, and why shouldn’t South Central be able to run and drink and have fun together?”
The coolest result of this evening’s meeting of minds was a moment reminiscing about an all run clubs picnic that used to happen in Griffith Park. Kit and Movement Runners are hosting the Hood 10k on May 17, so now we’ve got an all LA run crew picnic (all 150+ are invited!) in Edward Vincent Park in Inglewood from 10am. Tell your friends.
That’s the power of community.
Movement Runners [IG]
South Central Run Club [IG] [2024 profile] [Olympics op-ed]
WeHo Run Club [IG]
Lombardy Run Club [IG]
HUGE thanks to Kim Silverstein of Good Vibes and Friday Donut Run Crew for the photos.
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Thanks for reading
Raz x
Some fascinating insights in this Raz, not least that South Central Running Club has to use Signal to avoid ICE. What a mad world we live in 😔
To answer the questions…!
My wife and I run a little club called Step Forward With Lewis in Northampton in the UK, not quite as glamorous as LA:
1/ We have a Facebook messenger group to keep up with each other and post runs. I guess we’re just old school (old!).
2/ Fortunately, we’ve not had too many dodgy incidents, but we did have to ban one male runner who was tapping ladies on the bum as he ran past them in sessions. He was creeping a lot of people out and we had to move quickly and be decisive for the good of the group as a whole.
3/ We try and put on or get involved in as many community events as possible, from being parkrun regulars as a group to attending local races en masse. We’ve done everything from volunteering to pack Christmas gifts for cancer patients to putting on virtual runs to race money for various charities, but our biggest event is a local run in aid of a rough sleeper charity which has raised £1000+ for each of the last three years.
Ps… sound like a great event 👌