Oh, the humanity! with Josh Lynott

Find out how Australian runner and poet Josh Lynott - famous for his inspirational running notes on Instagram - started thinking more deeply about running

I’m on a video call with Josh Lynott. To many, the Australian is simply the purveyor of ultra-shareable, handwritten motivational running notes on Instagram, but he’s much more than that.

Right now, he’s having a relaxing week in Hawaii, and he has “some space in [his] brain today,” after a series of speaking events around the Pacific Rim focused on his book A Note to the Runners where he tells me that he rarely got his only rider request for a little bit of peace and quiet.

Josh, now 29, has amassed 100,000 followers on Instagram over the decade since he first understood the power of social media. They’ve not all come from running, though. He started out with travel photography, and then hiking content, which naturally led to the trail running life that now consumes him. It all started in Hawaii, after he realized the conventional path wasn’t for him.

“Writing has always been…