How Run Clubs Are Becoming The New Dating Apps

A Trend You Can Actually Measure

It is easy to dismiss a TikTok phenomenon as a passing mood, but in this case the platform-level data tells the same story the videos do. In its 2024 Year in Sport report, the fitness app Strava documented a 59 percent jump in running club participation around the world, and it summed up the moment with a line that stuck: run club is the new nightclub. Those findings drew on data from a community of more than 135 million people across over 190 countries, alongside a survey of thousands of active people, so this is a broad behavioral picture rather than a niche subculture.

The momentum has not slowed. Reporting on Strava's 2025 figures, Fortune noted that the number of new running clubs on the platform climbed roughly three-and-a-half times year over year, with younger runners especially likely to use fitness as a way to meet people who share their interests. The shape of the growth matters as much as the size of it. People are not just running more; they are running together, in groups, on purpose.

And the social spark is showing up in the dating numbers, too. Drawing on Strava's survey work, Runner's World reported that roughly one in five Gen Z respondents said they had gone on a date with someone they met through a group fitness activity. For a habit that started as a way to get a workout in, that is a striking little statistic, and it hints at why so many people have started to think of the start line as a meet-cute waiting to happen.

The Quiet Exhaustion of the Swipe

To understand why run clubs feel so refreshing, it helps to look at what people are stepping away from. For a lot of singles, the apps have started to feel less like a tool and more like a chore. Summarizing a 2025 Forbes Health survey, Deseret News reported that more than half of Gen Z respondents said they felt burned out often or always while using dating apps, the highest rate of any age group surveyed. That is not a small grumble. That is a majority describing a daily habit as draining.

The dating coach Damona Hoffman has a memorable name for the loop that wears people down. She calls it "zombie dating," and she described it to CBS News as a cycle of compulsive browsing without much real intent to connect. "It's swipe, swipe, swipe, onto the date," she said. "Getting ghosted, getting frustrated, being burned out. Wash, rinse and repeat." Anyone who has spent an evening half-heartedly tapping through profiles will recognize the feeling she is pointing at.

That fatigue is showing up in the business numbers, not just the vibes. Citing Match Group's own quarterly results, CBS News reported that the company behind Tinder, Hinge, and Match.com saw its total paid users slip about 5 percent year over year to 15.2 million, with Tinder's paid base down 8 percent. Americans also downloaded dating apps more than 36 million times in 2023, a 16 percent drop from the 2020 peak. The swipe is not dead, but a meaningful number of people are clearly looking for another way in.

Real Effort, No Filters

So why running, specifically? Part of the answer is that a group run quietly removes almost everything that makes app dating feel high-stakes. There is no profile to perfect, no opening line to agonize over, and no pressure to decide in the first ten minutes whether this is The One. There is just a shared activity, a built-in reason to talk, and a natural ending when the run is over. If the conversation clicks, wonderful. If it does not, you simply keep running.

The founders of these clubs talk about this constantly. At the Chicago Run Collective, co-founder Jordan Williams told CBS News that people "want to see each other in their most raw state, no alcohol, in the morning," and that those grounded, sober, slightly sweaty conversations often start as friendships before turning into something more. His co-founder, Maya Carducci, made a related point: when you give people a low-pressure excuse to gather, and everyone there already shares an interest, connection tends to happen on its own.

There is also a practical reason the format works, and it has to do with pace. A social run is usually run slow enough to hold a conversation, the kind of easy, talk-the-whole-time effort that coaches often describe as a comfortable conversational pace. That gentle intensity is part of the magic. You are moving side by side rather than sitting across a table, which takes the spotlight off the interaction and makes it far easier to relax into a real chat. The table below lays out why the two ways of meeting can feel so different.

None of this guarantees romance, and it is worth being honest about that. But it does explain why so many people describe a run club as a more comfortable place to meet someone than a crowded bar or a glowing screen.

The Most Interesting Tension in the Trend

Not every run club approaches the dating angle the same way, and the differences are revealing. Some have leaned all the way in. In New York, Lunge Run Club, co-founded by Steve Cole and Rachel Lansing, is openly built around connection: singles wear black, people in relationships wear white, and an easy three-mile run or shorter walk flows into a relaxed bar social afterward. According to CBS News, the club grew from a few dozen runners to four or five hundred per event, almost entirely by word of mouth. Cole has called it one of the largest singles gatherings the city has seen, while still insisting on an important distinction: "We're a social club that runs, not just a run club."

Others are more cautious, and their reasoning is just as instructive. Frankie Ruiz, who founded Miami's Brickell Run Club and now draws close to 1,600 runners a week, actually met his wife, Carla Duenas, through running, and the couple wove the sport into their wedding. Even so, he is wary of marketing the club as a dating event. He frames romance as a bonus rather than a promise, and he wants people to show up for the running and the community first. That instinct, it turns out, may be exactly why relationships keep forming there.

The pattern holds across the country, from the placards at the Chicago Run Collective to the viral RunTok videos that pulled newcomers in. One of those newcomers, a 26-year-old named Deuce Caston, joined a Florida club after finding it on TikTok and cheerfully posted that he had gotten "good at running just to go to run clubs to find my wife." The clubs that seem to work best share a quiet philosophy: build a genuine community, keep the pressure low, and let people find what they came for, whether that turns out to be a training partner, a new friend group, or something more.

What the Run-Club Boom Is Really About

Step back far enough and the dating angle starts to look like the smaller part of a much larger shift. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory describing loneliness and social isolation as a national epidemic, pointing to research that links social disconnection to a roughly 29 percent higher risk of premature death along with greater risks of heart disease and stroke. That framing reaches well beyond dating. It suggests that a lot of people are quietly hungry for regular, in-person company, and that the run-club surge is one of the ways they are answering that hunger.

There is a useful old idea that helps explain the appeal. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term "third place" to describe the informal gathering spots that sit outside home and work, the cafés, parks, and community spaces where people show up regularly, run into familiar faces, and slowly build a sense of belonging. For previous generations that might have been a corner diner or a local bar. A weekly run club fits the description almost perfectly: it is free, it recurs, it welcomes newcomers, and it gives people a reason to keep coming back.

Seen that way, the romance is almost incidental. When you put the same friendly faces together on a regular schedule, around a shared activity, in a setting with no cover charge and no closing time, friendships form, and some of those friendships deepen into more. Run clubs did not set out to fix loneliness or replace dating apps. They simply rebuilt a kind of community space that many people had been missing, and connection followed.

A Gentle On-Ramp If You Are Curious

If all of this has you a little curious, the encouraging news is that the barrier to entry is genuinely low, and you do not need to be fast or experienced to belong. Most social clubs are built around an easy, conversational effort rather than a race, and many welcome walkers alongside runners. If you are weighing where to start, it can help to read up on the gentle differences between walking and running so you can pick the pace that feels right for you.

A few things tend to make the first visit easier, and you can take or leave any of them. Many newcomers find it helps to check a club's Instagram beforehand to get a feel for the vibe and the pace, since the larger groups often post their meeting spots and routes. Plenty of people also find it less intimidating to go in with the goal of simply meeting a couple of new faces rather than finding a partner, which takes the pressure off and, a little ironically, tends to make connection easier. And because these are public gatherings, ordinary good sense applies: meeting in a group, in daylight, and letting a friend know where you are headed are all easy ways to feel comfortable while you settle in.

It is also worth holding realistic expectations, in the most freeing sense. A run club is not a guaranteed path to romance, and the people who seem happiest with the experience tend to be the ones who show up for the movement and the company first. If a relationship grows out of that, it is a wonderful bonus. If not, you have still gained a healthier week, a friendlier neighborhood, and a standing reason to get outside. By almost any measure, that is a pretty good return on a single morning.