Strava reported a 59 percent rise in running club participation globally in 2024. In the same report, 58 percent of people surveyed said they had made new friends through fitness groups, and nearly one in five Gen Z respondents said they had gone on a date with someone they met through exercise. Gen Z respondents were four times more likely to want to meet people through working out than at a bar.
Something is shifting in how young people build relationships, and run clubs, improbable as it sounds, are at the centre of it.
To understand why, look at what a run club offers that a nightclub does not. Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist at Oxford behind Dunbar's number, the estimate that a person can maintain about 150 stable relationships, has also studied what happens when people exercise together. In one Oxford study, rowers who trained in synchrony showed a higher pain threshold, a proxy for endorphin release, than rowers doing the same workout alone, so the brain seems to register moving with other people differently from moving alone.
The other reason is sociological rather than neurological. Run clubs solve the vulnerability problem of adult friendship. Making friends as an adult is hard because it requires you to be vulnerable: you have to approach someone, suggest getting together, and risk being turned down. Every step carries a real chance of embarrassment. This is why so many adults report wanting more friends and doing nothing about it. The activation energy is too high.
Run clubs demolish the activation energy. You show up. You run. You talk to whoever is next to you because you are both gasping for air and it would be weird not to. The structure does the social work for you. Nobody has to ask, "So, do you want to hang out sometime?" There is only next week.
Toronto's Beer Run Run Club is one version of the formula. It meets on Tuesday evenings, runs at all paces, and finishes at a rotating brewery or beer venue. Nobody has to be fast. The run gets a group of people to the same place at the same time, which is the hard part, and the hour afterward does the rest.
The Toronto run club directory has more groups with a fixed weekly schedule.
Vancouver's Mondays Run Club runs the same play out of Mount Pleasant, on the night when the weekend is over and nothing has replaced it yet.
The Vancouver run club directory lists other groups that meet on a regular schedule.
Gen Z grew up with smartphones in hand and social media as the primary social architecture. That same generation is now choosing to show up in person, on foot, at an hour when the bars are still empty.
The alcohol data points the same way. Statistics Canada has documented a decline in drinking among younger adults, and the bar, that venerable institution of adult socializing, is losing its grip. The socializing moved somewhere else.
What young people want is the thing technology promised and never delivered: the feeling of being known.
The distinction that matters here is between being connected and feeling connected. Digital contact rarely produces the second. A run club produces it almost by accident, because you are breathing next to someone and working at the same thing at the same time, and that is harder to fake than a comment thread.
Adults are admitting, openly and without much shame, that they need friends. That is new. For decades, admitting loneliness as an adult carried a stigma roughly equivalent to admitting professional failure. Lonely people were assumed to be socially deficient, awkward, unable to attract company. The loneliness was read as a symptom and the individual as the problem. That narrative is collapsing, and Gen Z is leading the collapse.
Run clubs work because they turn the need for belonging into a short list of physical acts: put on shoes, go to the place, move alongside other people, come back next week.
Jeffrey Hall, the University of Kansas researcher who studies how friendships form, calculated that it takes roughly 50 hours of shared time to move from acquaintance to casual friend, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. A club that meets weekly for an hour or two reaches 50 hours in about a year. That is the real timeline: a year of Tuesdays.
The nightclub promised connection through spectacle: loud music, expensive drinks, the performance of fun. The run club offers something older: shared effort, shared discomfort, and a Tuesday evening when you would rather stay on the couch and go anyway because the group is expecting you.
It is the expectation that matters. Being expected somewhere is a form of being needed, and being needed is the antidote to feeling optional in every room you enter.