The SportsCenter of Los Angeles running
If run clubs are booming, it’s because people can find them. In a city as massive as Los Angeles, though, you can rely on the L.A. Running Connoisseur to highlight the communities in your neighborhood
How do you find a run club? Word of mouth? What if you’ve just started running, and you don’t yet know anybody to ask? How do you find your community?
This is a world where the USA is losing 2.5 local newspapers every week (over 2,900 since 2005), leaving over 200 counties as complete news deserts - they have no local news outlet. Over half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information. Gone are the classified ads pages where you might find someone handy to put up some shelves, a romantic partner listing their desires in 80 characters, or scan the listings of the local goings on that week. This might’ve been the place you found a bunch of like-minded pavement-pounders. That is no longer the case.
We now have various apps for finding contractors or love interests, journalists are being laid off from publications of all sizes (we’re down 43,000 newspaper journalists since 2005), and advertising in general has migrated to online only, while being completely decimated in value. The civic service of local news has been dismantled. It’s simply not economically viable to build a nice society.
Cut to Los Angeles, however - a city where newcomers have long complained about its vastness and loneliness - and you’ll find one woman on a mission to help as many people as possible find their people. Enter Kate Olson AKA The L.A. Running Connoisseur, and her exhaustive listing of the daily schedules of over 150 Los Angeles-area run clubs.
The website is a straightforward but exhaustive resource. As reference material goes, listing every run club by location, region, and by day is exceptional list-making. On top of that, every single day on the @larunningconnoisseur Instagram, you will find details of the day’s running meetups around Los Angeles. Whether you’re someone looking for a new run club to join, or you’re going to be in a different region of this gigantic conurbation and want to get a run in, you can find all the info you need without prejudice.
It all started in 2019 when a friend of a friend wanted to run “but she didn’t want to run alone.” Kate was tasked to list some run clubs, so she did. She started a spreadsheet, and it “just kept on expanding.” She asked her friends to plug in what they knew, and within a month there were 100 run clubs on the list.
There were two differentiating categories: where they run, and when. There were links to the run clubs Instagram and/or website. It was an insider’s resource. If someone asked the question out loud in the right place, overheard by the right person, they’d be handed a link to the spreadsheet.
Last April, when Kate left her job, she “was looking for something to do to feel like [she] was useful to the world.” Midway through updating the spreadsheet, she started resenting the spreadsheet. She started resenting how insular the information was.
“I just kept thinking, ‘What can I do that is important to the community?’”
It was a couple of months later that she commandeered the Instagram handle (another idea birthed while talking on the trails with a friend). The LARC website retained those categories and links. The L.A. Running Connoisseur database had gone public.
The initial idea was to share the list passively, and to write run club profiles of this exciting new dimension of running that Kate had found herself in after so many years of running alone, but she soon tried out posting the day’s runs on IG stories. It spiraled somewhat.
“I've only taken one day off doing the daily posts. Last July, I was even worried about being able to post because I was in Washington state pacing my buddy for his 100-miler, and we were just in the middle of the forest. I got a breeze of service… and I was posting.”
Since then she’s posted from multiple states, a couple of different countries, an airport, from her car, and perched on the side of the road “so many times.”
“But I want to get them out. I've got it down to a kind of science.”
It’s a curiously unique act of service. Spending at least an hour every single day updating the day’s information from multiple sources at no cost to the run clubs is a huge task. Some clubs don’t post every day, but are very reliable. Some only post on Strava. Some only have websites. A couple have no digital footprint at all, but run every single day in different locations. Kate trawls every source to maintain the integrity of her listings. With over 40 new run clubs in L.A. in the past 18 months, it takes some keeping up with.
Some run clubs have reached out, meekly asking to be included in the daily updates, expecting to receive an invoice for her work, and they’re surprised when it’s a free service. Requiring payment would lead to it becoming an incomplete product as some non-paying clubs would be left off. That would devalue the product.
The dedication to maintaining the list comes from Kate’s first moments in running. She wants to bring more people into the sport. She wants more people to experience the joy that she’s found through running.
“I want people to realize running is not scary. I want more people to understand what I talk about when I talk about running.”
Kate started running when she was 13. She and a friend were training for a 5km race, and while her friend soon gave up on the training, running outdoors woke something within a teenage Kate Olson. She was enjoying it. She persevered, but her running seemed a peculiar activity to those around her.
“I grew up with not really anyone understanding it. I was playing soccer, basketball, and softball, but I was also running. I had people understanding everything else but with this one thing, they were like, ‘Why is she doing this?’”
On one level, a young girl - a child - roaming the streets could be a scary thing for adults, parents to see. Running maybe wasn’t as normalized in society in the 90s, but she continued running. She excelled in competitions, and she trained alone, for the most part - running is very happily a collection of individuals doing the same thing. So, aside from the initial request to list a couple of suitable run clubs for a vague acquaintance, why has someone who tells me that “running alone is [her] me time” built a resource around run clubs that she didn’t even know existed until five years ago.
“In 2019 I started running with a run club for the first time, and it was like a whole world had opened up. I ran alone until then. Running with a group is like play. I still play when I'm on the trails, but when I'm with a running club, I feel like a kid again. We're just doing this fun thing playing outside. I’m running with my friends, and I’m running with these strangers who may become my friends, too.”
Friendship is at the crux of Kate’s run club revelation. As a very, very decent runner, she is around men. She competes, and beats the men she runs with, but through run clubs she has finally found female companions in the running world.
“For the first time, I have lady friends. I have women who understand me, and it's huge. Growing up, I had women around me while playing team sports, but running's different. Running didn't have as many women, and it's really cool that I can have a real chat with a woman who is also a badass runner now, and no-one is intimidated. It's just normal. That feels so good.”
As far as I’m aware, this kind of run club listings database doesn’t exist anywhere else. Not to this extent, anyway. There are a number of websites and apps that you can list a run club on, but it’s a fragmented world, where nobody can get the full picture of what’s available to them. L.A. Running Connoisseur is the closest thing we’ve got to the verified fact-checked reporting of local running news.
In a world where social connectedness has been disintegrating for 60 years, there has been a steady but definite erosion of community. Consider run clubs as a way to combat that.
Robert Putnam has been in the news this week both talking about his new book Upswing, and as the central figure of a new documentary, Join Or Die. A New York Times interview last week has him talking about how joining a run club can translate to saving democracy.
Putnam has made a career out of explaining how social capital can be spent to improve health, wealth, and everything in between. He has long written about the increased pressures we face to keep up, and the detrimental effect that has on society. Does the dismantling of local news media fit into that dialogue? You’d better believe it.
Putnam says that “joining a club … does help democracy … It’s only by connecting with other people that we generalize from our experience. In the running club, you learn that you can trust other people, and learn in a way what you need to do to maintain that trust.”
As humans are made into islands, researching and dissecting information while hunched angrily over a glowing electronic limb extension, this is the human response. The real-world communities that we join are the checks and balances we need as humans. When we see our favorite facets shining in others, we return to a happy medium. That is impossible when we rely solely on electronics for company.
To take it one step further in this rage against machines, if we are serious in protesting against artificial intelligence, the L.A. Running Connoisseur is a solitary human filling a gap in the chain of building that local community for people.
“I love helping people find running. For me to see how many runners there are now at run clubs, it just feels good.”
Feeling good is important, but don’t be fooled into thinking that finding a running community is a facile act. Join a run club, and the fabric of the society around you will be woven more strongly. In that scenario, being an island stops being an option.
Links & further reading
LA Running Connoisseur [WEBSITE] [INSTAGRAM]
Save democracy. Join a (running) club [Breakfast Club]
Robert Putnam interview [NYT]
News deserts [US News Deserts] [Northwestern.edu] [NPR]
Housekeeping
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Thanks for reading
- Raz
Love this! It resonates.
I'm so happy to offer the Run to Write Club to folks in my community. It's been a blast so far! Running and writing together. :)