Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos Getty Images
One Saturday morning in April, Amy was running along Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, one of her usual routes. It was a sunny spring day, and the sidewalk was crowded with runners, some running alone, like her, and others in big groups. At some point, she realized one of those big groups was headed straight toward her.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Amy, who is 31 and has been running in New York since 2015. It was, in her memory, a group of young women running “five to eight” abreast. “They were completely across the sidewalk,” she recalls. This was the most runners she’s ever seen taking up a path, but she’s gone head-to-head with run clubs before. Usually, she moves aside, even if it means briefly stepping into the street or a bike lane.
But this time, she wanted to test something. She didn’t change course. Neither did they. It was something of a game of runners’ chicken, which ended when Amy ran straight through the pack, colliding with one of the women. “Neither of us fell, but I think she was definitely shook,” Amy says. The woman started apologizing, but Amy didn’t stick around to hear it. She kept running, and afterward she went on the sub-Reddit RunNYC to vent her frustration. “Run clubs are a disease,” she wrote.
In the past few years, much has been written about the post-pandemic run-club boom. A recent survey by the nonprofit group Running USA found the number of running-club members in the U.S. increased 25 percent since 2019. It’s harder to pin down New York specific numbers, but individual clubs have seen their attendance and membership grow. Central Park Run Club, for instance, started in the fall of 2019 with a dozen or so people; now, 100 or more regularly show up to all four of the club’s weekly runs. And my own club, Prospect Park Track Club, had around 1,000 dues-paying members in 2020 and now has more than 2,500.
That’s a lot of people who seem oblivious to the fact that they are driving much of the rest of the city nuts. That non-runners are annoyed by run clubs is not especially surprising. “Run clubs make everywhere feel like Times Square,” said one woman, frustrated by the way her local coffee shop is overtaken by run clubs on the weekend, in a TikTok posted last summer. Another woman echoed the sentiment: “Newest problem in New York — the running clubs that go to bars after,” she said in a TikTok from October. “Y’all stink.”
But what is more surprising is that this boom in run clubs has caused some serious infighting among the tightly knit, tightly wound New York running community. It’s particularly an issue for some solo runners, who complain in group chats and on Reddit about the noisy, cheery clubs that have taken over their favorite routes in the city, like Central Park and the West Side Highway. “This year, some of these groups aren’t even attempting to move over or give some space on the running path,” one person wrote in response to Amy’s post. “They unashamedly take on the entire path!!!!” Eventually, the sub-Reddit moderators locked that thread, citing “threats and rage.” (Pity the poor moderators, who must manage a forum that’s ballooned to 30,000, doubling in size in a year.) Many solo runners, like Amy, are fed up.
“I think individual runners have a right to be frustrated,” she says. “It almost seems like run clubs have a sense of, I don’t know, that they’re better than solos.”
Andrew, who’s 45 and has been running in New York for five years, recently had an experience like Amy’s. Instead of moving aside for the pack of “20 to 30” runners headed toward him one evening on the Central Park running loop, he barreled right on through, knocking into a couple of them. It was something like the tenth time he’d encountered this group, and he was tired of dipping into the bike lane to get around them.
“The newer groups just go out there with so many people,” he says. “It’s trying to strike a balance between not shutting out anybody’s joy, especially new runners — and then also saying, like, What the fuck, guys?”
The complaints from grouchy solo runners tend to center around the same claim: These newer run clubs simply have no sense of urban running etiquette. The runners I spoke to listed these rules as the basics: Stay to the right. Never run more than two abreast, and be ready to morph into single file if it gets crowded or the path narrows. Notify pedestrians or slower solo runners before you pass them by saying “on your left” or “on your right.”
Ted, who is 33 and has been running in New York since 2021, would add one more: Please don’t throw your empty gel packets on the ground. “It’s like — there’s trash cans everywhere in Central Park,” he says. And don’t get Andrew started on the loud music. Within that running group that has lately become his nemesis, which he often sees on weeknights in Central Park, multiple members will sometimes carry Bluetooth speakers. “Running, for me, is a way to unwind,” he says. “They’re trying to get pumped up, I get it, but I can hear that shit from a mile away.”
He figured out the name of the club and sent a strongly worded DM on Instagram. “And whomever I spoke to was kind and was apologetic,” he says, “but nothing ever changed.”
In some ways, both sides of the run-club divide are a niche example of the poor public behavior that has been reported post-pandemic, like watching TikToks without headphones, or not letting people off the train first, or throwing a burrito bowl in a Chipotle employee’s face. Alyssa, who is 31 and has been running in New York for a decade, has a theory on the part of the run clubs. Maybe, she mused, it has to do with all the young people who’ve taken up running. (At last year’s NYCRuns Brooklyn Half, nearly three-quarters of participants were under 35.) “I don’t want to blame everything on COVID, but sometimes I do find that folks who are not used to doing things in a group get so excited now,” she says. “Because of the social nature of some run clubs … people get too caught up in conversation and trying to be next to their friends, and they’re not aware of their surroundings.”
And when large groups are running distractedly in packs around the city, there can be real consequences beyond annoying the solo runners. Last year, Alyssa was running through Chinatown with a club that had organized a Lunar New Year social run. She said around 200 runners showed up, though the group spread out; she estimates she was running the busy streets in a group of 30 or 40 runners. She hung back, uneasy about a group that size making its way through the crowds. “There were just so many of us,” she says. From the back of the pack, she watched with horror as those ahead of her ran into, and knocked down, an elderly woman.
The woman wasn’t hurt badly, but she did need medical attention from the nearby police officers, Alyssa remembers. It’s more than a year later, and Alyssa still feels awful about it.
“It was a really preventable situation,” she says.
Some clubs have grown so quickly, and so unexpectedly, that they’ve created logistical nightmares for those in charge.
In 2023, Mallory Kilmer was new to the city. She’d created an Instagram account specifically to post about her running hobby, and it had about 2,000 followers. One week in February, she posted a story inviting people to meet her that Saturday for a run around Central Park. Six people showed up. The next week, it was 30-something. By the third week, it was around 100.
“It just exploded,” Kilmer says. She hadn’t even named the group yet; she hadn’t even set out to create a run club, exactly. She was just tired of running alone. She named the group No More Lonely Runs, and it is still meeting every Saturday. About 100 people, and sometimes more, show up each time, she says.
Have you ever tried corralling more than 100 people on a run through Manhattan? It’s a daunting task even for an experienced run-club leader. That third Saturday, when 100 people showed up for the first time, “I was terrified,” Kilmer says. That day, all 100 set off at the same time from Columbus Circle, taking on the Central Park running loop together in one big blob.
“Was that the right thing to do? No,” she says. “But I had no idea what I was doing.”
Since then, she’s appointed a handful of regulars as run leaders, and the crowd breaks up into pace groups of about 15 people each. Every Saturday run is preceded by a crash course in running etiquette, but it’s not like you can force people to follow instructions, Kilmer says: “Think about a teacher in a class of 20. They can say, Hey, sit down in your seats, be quiet, and then there’s still gonna be that little rascal in the back.”
The city seems to have been taken by surprise by the growth of run clubs, too. Last summer, Kilmer says she received an email from Hudson River Park, demanding that she obtain a permit to continue bringing her club to the West Side Highway, where they’d been running every other Saturday for more than a year at that point. Hudson River Park didn’t return a request for comment, but the park’s website notes that organized events involving 20 to 100 people require a permit, as well as commercial events of any size. No More Lonely Runs has partnered with multiple brands, including Nike, Brooks, New Balance, and Goop (twice), and Kilmer thinks that is what caught the park’s attention.
When we spoke in late April, they were still negotiating. “I can’t pay $1,000 every other weekend,” Kilmer says.
When she started the club — when she realized she was starting a club — Kilmer decided she wanted to create a “community-driven, not necessarily running-driven, run club.” A focus on socializing over competition is a theme among many new run clubs, as fitness-industry trade publications have noted. And this may also be part of the reason these clubs get under the skin of longtime solo runners: This wave of run clubs is approaching their sport in a way that undermines what, to them, running is supposed to be about.
“It feels just like this popular social thing,” says Steve, who has been running in New York for 15 years. “And I think that there’s a runner’s mentality of being sort of a loner. I feel like that’s a trope that’s been around for a long time, like, the loneliness of the long-distance runner.”
This past year, Amy trained alone through the winter for a spring marathon and reveled in how empty all her favorite running routes were. As the weather continues to warm up, though, she expects to see those routes congested with more and more run clubs. Still: “I’m not going to change where I run,” she says. “I don’t want to change anything.” I remind her that the real busy running season in New York is still ahead. The city’s unofficial kickoff for marathon-training season is around July 4, when big training groups like Lululemon’s No Name and Bandit’s The Program tend to begin.
“Oh my God,” she says. “I’m scared.”
