Fast fashion makes faster friends
If run clubs are the new nightclubs, can the line between social run crews and athletics clubs be fully blurred with a high-end racing singlet?
In the world of run clubs, it’s the occasional appearance of social crews on the news which allow your non-running friends and family a brief peek into why you seem hell bent on braving the elements to make your body suffer every other day. Deeper, and maybe more intensely into the sport are performance-oriented athletics clubs.
A newcomer to the sport will not understand the difference between an athletics club and a run crew. They’re both run clubs, after all. For instance, when I called Mike Saes the man who invented run clubs, he was at pains to point out that NYC Bridgerunners is a crew, not a club. Crews are social hubs built to support a community. Crews are there at mile 22 of your hometown marathon screaming for you to keep going just a few more minutes.
An athletics club is different. More common in the UK (there are over 2,000), they’re more formal, and all about performance. It’s about doing the work and getting faster. It’s Strava Local Legend mentality with a suitably stiff upper lip. It’s about fastidiously logging your times on a publicly searchable website (Power of 10) and beating the next person in amateur races. Your neighbor is more competition than friend.
“Something that gives me great happiness is seeing people who have discovered running through social runs start leaning into the [more competitive] culture. They didn’t take it up because they wanted to go on a performance journey, but realized that actually they can do both.”
“They can do the social side for all the camaraderie, and mental health reasons, but wanted to race, and brought with them standards from their other, more social world. The traditional racing world had to modernize.”
So says Rob Wilson, longtime member of Highgate Harriers. Founded in 1879, they’re track specialists, but Rob talks about how the run club culture of London is a particularly rich tapestry for runners both new and seasoned.
For instance, the Harriers introduced the Night of the 10,000 metres PBs at Parliament Hill in 2013, which changed how track racing was viewed round the world. It’s fair to say that event inspired the likes of Tracksmith’s Twilight 5000 and this year’s On’s Squad Race Relay, and is in the same vein as major events like Grand Slam Track and Athlos in terms of being designed to invigorate track racing.
While huge urban crews like Your Friendly Runners in London and Koreatown Run Club in L.A. added track nights to their weekly schedules once they’d completed capturing the essence of modern crew culture, Unsanctioned Athletics, which I featured earlier this year, went a different route. I think they’re the perfect confluence of traditional and modern run club culture.
Coming from a large crew in Nottingham, England, they host events around the UK (and beyond) where athletes from traditional clubs are invited to compete in a street race for real prizes.
They’re one of the run clubs who wear custom Soar singlets, for whom Rob does marketing. Over the past five years, the company has kitted out 200 run clubs and other entities around the world, with a focus on those old-fashioned athletics clubs whose dodderiness extends to wearing stale old kits made by no-name manufacturers (and you can feel that lack of name while you’re running). That’s the corner of the market that Soar has seized upon.
This tactic started in the summer of 2018 when Soar put on a mile race, in the style of those other corporate races by Tracksmith and On’s. That was Soar’s first full year of operations, but they spotted their opportunity immediately.
“We saw a lot of people out there who wanted to be Soar customers, but couldn’t because they wanted to – maybe had to – rep their club.”
So they made it happen. They already had a premium product for racing in. They just had to work on the logistics of getting their factory to make custom designs at lower quantities. As soon as they had proof of life, word spread, and more and more run clubs wanted a batch of custom Soar race singlets.
But while Soar singlets are performance products, they are also premium products. With t-shirts ranging from $105-$195, and a $510 rain jacket, it’s not a product line priced for the faint of heart.
Another high-end running brand, you might think. So what, you might think. All you need to run is an old t-shirt and shorts, and a decent pair of running shoes.
Here, Rob refers to the supershoe for making runners more performance-aware than ever before. He says that once they could stomach the price tag of a Vaporfly, it normalized paying a lot of money for nice gear that could aid their performance. He says runners shelling out money was already normal, though; that people were already leaning fully into the culture.
“They used to say runners won’t spend, but that’s just not true. Running is a broad church, just like society, and within that there are a lot of people who are already spending a lot of money. They’re spending on race entry, flying across the world to those races, physio, gym membership, wearables. All of a sudden an £80 ($105) vest (singlet – I will forever continue to translate from English to American) isn’t that expensive.”
In the grand scheme of life, it’s not a lot of money, and it dovetails perfectly into the new global wave of boutique running stores. Indeed, the stores in London, Edinburgh, and Los Angeles that I’ve profiled all stock Soar merchandise.
And the brand matters. With a race singlet, another company coming along with a product of comparable quality at a lower price point doesn’t matter. People are proud to wear Louis Vuitton when they’re going out. They keep the New Era stickers on their hats. A Soar singlet has become a status symbol in the same way as a Ciele-logoed hat or a Tracksmith sash.
While the ever-increasing demand for luxury running gear isn’t a direct indicator of the economy, it does point firmly towards consumer habits. If the latest reports say that younger generations prefer run clubs over nightclubs, that’s where those people are going to spend their money. Whichever club they’re attending, they’re going there to meet new people, and they want to look good while making their first impressions.
Yes, looking good means dressing well, but it might also mean improving their times; improving their performance. It makes sense that they go hand in hand.
Fast fashion, indeed.
Housekeeping
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Thanks for reading
- Raz
Wow! Just want to note that Rob can walk the walk. He put me in the pain cave a few times when I was training with Highgate during a grad-school stint in London. Rob's a guy you want in your interval workout—an absolute grinder.
Also want to shout Soar's race shorts in which I notched 2 marathon PBs. Solid solid kit.
Run clubs are definitely having a moment, and I’m here for it. I live in a small town where I’m known as “the runner in town” (which is still kind of funny to me), and just recently, a local brewery asked if I’d start a run club for them. Running and beer? Seems like a solid combo. It’s cool to see how much running is bringing people together lately.