Is running too cool for school?

I recently got invited by a PR contact to an ‘unsanctioned race’ hosted by two brands and a running crew. My first thought was: have they sent this to the right person?

Unsanctioned races are grassroots events, usually organised by run crews rather than official race bodies, with no chip timing, no goodie bag and often no route revealed until the last minute. They sit outside the traditional race calendar deliberately – that’s the point - and they’re pretty cool. Too cool for me to have ever done one.

I’m glad that world exists. Crew culture has been bringing new people into running for years. It has introduced different groups of people to running who might not have seen themselves as runners, before while traditional athletics clubs often attracted people who were (mostly) always runners or at least sporty. My women-only running groups sat somewhere in the middle.

There’s been a massive explosion in running over the past few years. Of course, running has boomed before. The 1970s jogging craze swept the UK and US before fading almost as quickly as it arrived. The early 2000s brought a marathon boom that packed out race fields and sold a lot of trainers, and then died down. Each of these booms were a fitness thing. But this time something has shifted, and running hasn’t just become popular again – it’s become cool, and those are different things.

Garmin research released for Global Running Day confirms that Britain is in a running boom – nearly two thirds of Brits now identify as runners, with a fifth saying they only started in the last six to eleven months. Running has crossed over into fashion, into the way people talk about their Saturday mornings, into music videos and brand campaigns and the general texture of being a young person right now. The unsanctioned race invite landing in my inbox was, in its own way, a sign of that.

The latest London Marathon ballot had a record number of applicants – and the demographics tell their own story. Women aged 20 to 29 made up the highest bracket of UK applications at over 179,000, with 18 to 29 year olds accounting for 35% of all UK applicants. For the first time, applications from women were almost exactly level with men, and that matters.

We know what happens to girls and sport: the dropout rates from PE and the years of being made to feel that physical activity wasn’t really for them. If running being cool brings young women into the sport and keeps them there, that’s absolutely worth celebrating.

But I also have two concerns. The first is about who cool leaves out.

For a long time, the thing putting women off running was a specific image: fast men in short shorts, running clubs that felt unwelcoming and the sense that unless you were, quick you were wasting everyone’s time including your own. A lot of work has gone into dismantling that – parkrun, inclusive clubs, coaches like me who built their whole thing around the idea that running is for everyone.

The new image of running isn’t fast men in short shorts. It’s groups of young people out before work in the latest kit, looking effortlessly good, moving through cities like they own them. It’s compelling, but it doesn’t speak to me. And I suspect it won’t speak to the 47-year-old woman who has never run before and is wondering whether there’s a place for her in this sport. Have we swapped one intimidating image for another?

The solution to this, as always, is visibility of people like me and you maybe who show up to run through perimenopause and beyond, not always in a coordinated outfit or not with their hair or make-up done, to show that running is for everyone - the cool kids and the ones who feel like they don’t fit in. And it would be good if more brands reflected this in their marketing.

My other concern is about what happens next, because cool is not a guarantee of longevity. The people who stayed after previous running booms were the ones who found something underneath the trend worth holding onto.

I’ll still be running when this moment passes and I hope that newer runners and all those women who entered the London Marathon ballot stay too. I hope that somewhere between the first run that they hated and the tenth one that they didn’t, something shifted – the way it shifts for most of us eventually. I hope it stopped being about any of it the kit, the image or the identity and became just about moving, and how it makes you feel.