run clubs made me love running

I'm personally glad there are so many now!

Last week, I was chatting with my friend Jason and he brought up how much I write about running from the perspective of community and run clubs. I suppose I’ve been writing about run clubs regularly and deeply since March 2023, but that’s because I absolutely adore what they’ve added to my life.

I also understand it completely when people say it’s not for them. I spent the first 10 years of running as an adult running alone. As a music journalist, it was the hour of my day away from listening to music. I enjoyed the solitude. I enjoyed the relative quiet – even if I was running alongside a major artery road. Did I love running, though? Nah. It was just something healthy I did for my mind and body alike.

Back then, I was working from home, as I do now, but I got my social fix in at a concert in the evening. I was seeing bands play live three or four nights a week. My cup was full. I had good enough balance.

When I moved to LA, however, I was going out less frequently, largely because I had fewer people to go out with. First, I used 5k and 10k races around LA to get to know the city, and through those races I found crews like Blacklist and DTLA Running, but I was most excited by the establishment of the Los Angeles chapter of Mikkeller Run Club, and the LA Craft Runners not long afterwards.

I’d found my people. Yes, I wanted to pair my craft beer tourism with my exercise/hobby. Yes, I like my running communities to fit neatly into the life I already have established for myself, but that relationship has changed, even over the past decade.

For starters, I was not a dad when I started running in LA. It wasn’t a problem to attend evening runs after work followed by a couple of hours with friends in a brewery. In fact, Tuesday night run club was a firm fixture in my calendar. I had begun to truly love what running was adding to my life.

There were occasional efforts to organize weekend morning runs, but because they were geared towards finishing at a brewery for noon opening, running at those times was too hot for me.

So when I signed up for a half-marathon in 2017, I didn’t have any weekend early morning long run training buddies. Luckily, I was well-versed in running alone, and it was just an eight-week program that I’d devised for myself. Just enough to get up from 10k (still my favored distance) to 21k, but the longer runs were lonely, even if I was enjoying the clarity of mind during the longer distances.

Now? Every new run club that pops up begins with a weekday evening social run and soon adds a weekend morning long run, and it’s glorious. The long run training blocks aren’t just geared around the LA Marathon any more, and I take my pick. I started running with Blacklist again last year, and also join Eagle Rock Run Club or Silver Lake Track Club depending on whether I’ve got my Saturday or Sunday morning free. Dad life means that I’m no longer fully in charge of my schedule, but I have options and that helps.

I have friends in all three crews, so I know that even if I haven’t seen anyone outside of my family all week (a by-product of working from home), I can just turn up and will have someone to chat with for at least some of the time. It might only be 10 minutes of a 90-min run, giving me the best of both worlds. Both solitude and socializing in one excursion.

I’ve known some of the people from the LA running scene for almost a decade now, and and am happy to call many of them real friends, some of whom I even go to watch bands with now. How cool is that for a full-circle cross-pollination of hobbies.

So yeah, I write about run clubs a lot, and I write about running from the perspective of community, because my life has become many, many times better because of them, and I want to share that with you. Maybe you’ll find the same joy.

I’m interested to know how you interact with run clubs? If at all. And if that’s changed through life. I know that my perspective is very much one from living in a big city, because even when I lived in London’s suburbs, I was a 20-min Tube ride from Run Dem Crew, so I never went!

Last week on Running Sucks

I spent last week writing up the three evenings of conversations I had in London in August. They’re all linked, if you can believe that, so I recommend diving into all of them, one by one. I’d love to know your thoughts once you’ve digested it all.

Being a more effective ally for women runners

Do communities need brands?

The South Asian running experience

Those Oakley x Meta sunglasses

I’m something of an advocate for privacy. I’ve written about NOT sharing every single activity on Strava a few times, and definitely hiding at least your start and end locations on your runs, so the rollout of the new Meta glasses using the running community bothers me.

A big problem the first time around with Google Glass back in 2012 was privacy concerns. The great thing about the world in the olden days was that there was public pushback, which ultimately resulted in the tech giant shelving that product. This article in Wired from 2018 explains it, if you’re interested.

Has Meta and Google just waited until they’re fully in the pockets of an anti-privacy government before launching their new permanently-data-capturing product? Perhaps. Sad!

At a time when there are posters up on the London Underground explaining that taking up-skirt photos is a criminal offence, I feel like we’re somewhat beyond the pale as a society, so I have little hope of protest having an effect, but if you’re a runner, don’t fucking wear these things IMHO.

Running Sucks Haiku of the Week

From the embers came
intense productivity.
No time for complaints.

In a year that started with LA on fire and then under military occupation while I wrote my first book, it’s been one for the ages, but we’re not done with 2025 yet.

I’ve got a couple of fun running-related trips coming up to Texas (TRE) and the New York Marathon (not running it lol) that I’m very much looking forward to, a book to formally announce, and I’ve been hired by a very cool company to do some equally cool stuff that I might even be able to talk about here.

Maybe I’ll even be able to run again soon?! Physical therapy has been helping, and I’ve been incredibly cautious with my unhappy little tendons, so let’s see.

Housekeeping

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Thanks for reading
Raz x