The following is an edited transcript of a conversation conducted in a parking lot outside a brewery in a mid-sized American city, twelve minutes after the conclusion of a Tuesday 5K social run. The subject, a 34-year-old logistics coordinator, requested we identify him only as “a guy who runs now.”
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So walk me through joining a run club. What got you off the couch?
Honestly? Three things. Community, cardiovascular health, and ass.
In that order?
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In alphabetical order.
Community first, then. Tell me about the community.
It’s beautiful, man. We’re the loneliest generation in recorded history. Bars are twenty dollars a drink, church wants a tithe, everybody’s therapist is booked until March. And then here’s this free thing where forty strangers meet at a coffee shop and just move their bodies together, in public, in the daylight. Third place. It’s a third place. I read about it.
And the cardiovascular component.
My resting heart rate was 78. It’s 61 now. My grandfather died at 58 of a heart attack in a Chili’s. I think about that a lot. I think about him every single time I lace up. Every time.
And the third thing.
Ass.
Do you want to expand on that at all.
What’s to expand? Running does something to the human posterior that no gym machine has ever replicated. It’s an established fact. Forty people in the same six-inch inseam, all doing squats for an hour, and then afterward we all stand around in a circle stretching. Stretching. In a circle. I’m not the architect of that. I just showed up.
Have you formed genuine friendships?
Deep ones. Wesley’s going through a divorce and I’m the only person he told before his mom. Priya got me into the half marathon block. There’s a woman named Diane who is 61 years old and runs a 7:40 mile and she has become, I would say, a mentor figure to me. I would take a bullet for these people.
And you’re also—
Looking. Constantly. At all times. It’s not a contradiction, it’s a stack. Like a tech stack. Community’s the front end, the cardio’s the infrastructure, and the ass is — I want to say monetization. That’s not right. But you get it.
Does the club know this about you?
Everyone in a run club is there for at least two of the three. Nobody’s a pilgrim. Wesley told me he joined because his ex is in the Thursday club and he wanted her to see him with visible obliques. Priya joined because her company gives her four hundred dollars a year for “wellness” and she’d already bought the sauna blanket. There’s a guy named Cody who is unambiguously only there to post about it. He runs 400 meters and then films himself drinking an electrolyte packet for nine minutes. Cody is the sinner. Not me.
Has any of it worked? Romantically.
I got dinner with someone from the Sunday long run in October. It went great. She’s a physical therapist. We talked for four hours about our fathers.
And?
She’s my closest friend now. Nothing happened. Nothing’s going to happen.
How do you feel about that?
Two out of three. Which — statistically — is better than church.
Last question. If you had to drop one of the three, which goes?
The cardio. Obviously the cardio. I’d walk. People do that. Hot girl walks. That’s a whole thing, and I would be welcome there, and I would be shameless about it, and my heart rate would climb back to 78, and I would die in a Chili’s like my grandfather, and I would go with a full heart and a full social calendar.