When Justin Shields started the Venice Run Club in August 2020, he wasn’t looking for love.
Shortly before, he had deleted all the dating apps on his phone because he felt they were a “waste of time,” he told Business Insider.
And besides, Shields, now 34, who works in tech sales in Los Angeles, was focused on his new endeavor: a nonprofit that the run club was meant to drum up support for.
A month after Shields started VRC, an enthusiastic runner who worked in advertising named Erin offered to revamp the club’s socials for free. After a flirty DM slide on Instagram, their conversations quickly transitioned from business to pleasure, and Shields invited her on a run outside the club, just the two of them.
He had never found anyone he could see himself raising a family with until he met Erin, now 29. They married within the year.
Shield’s experience is emblematic of a wider trend of younger people losing faith in dating apps (the number of monthly active users on Tinder dropped in the first three months of this year, according to MatchGroup) and seeking real-world connections, whether romantic or platonic.
According to Eventbrite, the number of people attending in-person dating events advertised on the platform spiked by 49% since last year, while there was an 82% increase in people going to events dedicated to making new friends. This chimes with the increase in startups trying to facilitate IRL social connections that BI has previously reported on.
For the seven people who spoke to BI, run clubs — which have exploded in popularity among urban young professionals recently — were the perfect arena for all this to play out.
“Every time I would get on the apps, I’d be like, ‘What the heck am I doing? I don’t need somebody right now to fill a void.’ And I feel like I shine better in person — it’s cutthroat online,” Shields said.
“When you’re running with people, you just forget about everything around you. You feel like you’re part of a bigger mission, you lose yourself and you forget the activity that you’re doing,” he added.
In an increasingly online world where young people are feeling lonelier than ever, running clubs offer regular, real-life interactions with people with shared interests.
Meet-cutes at the run club
Since the hobby requires a degree of physical fitness, it’s not surprising that connections made at run clubs easily transition from the pavement to the bedroom — and sometimes even to the altar.
In October 2023, Hayden Boles, an investment banker, had been casually dating without much success, and Aniko Zabo, a speech-language pathologist, was just out of a serious relationship.
But when they met at a Halloween run in Denver organized by Cooldown Run Club, a self-described “social club disguised as a run club” operating in 11 US cities, they kept being drawn back to each other. Seven months later, the pair got engaged and said they have a “needle in a haystack” kind of connection.
Boles, 31, and Zabo, 27, said there aren’t many places to connect with similar-aged people post-college, so the run club provided them with a new way to meet people who were healthy, active, and had similar interests who they wouldn’t otherwise have met.
Emma Atwell, 26, and Justin Wagers, 29, from Colorado, also met at a Cooldown run. They’ve been together for a year and a half and are moving in together. For them, Atwell said, the run club was “way better than dating apps” because of the in-person contact and the promise of a shared hobby.
“Cooldown was a super low-pressure but effective way to get to know each other. There were no expectations, we were just going to runs and enjoying a beer together afterwards,” Atwell said.
Ready-made friend groups
Atwell and Wagers also frequently hang out with a group of friends they made from Cooldown runs, something which Daniel Belk, one of its co-founders, told BI is common among members.
He said many young people who move for work to the cities where Cooldown operates go from not knowing a single person to having a friendship group.
“It’s not as intimidating as walking up to someone at a bar or sliding into their DMs,” he said, which can often be embarrassingly interpreted as flirtatious.
Plus, running is a unique group exercise where you can sustain conversations, unlike yoga or soccer, Coodown co-founder Bailey Ness told BI. No matter your pace, you can run or walk with a variety of people with different abilities.
It’s the same in Venice Beach, Shields said: “We have so many people who have formed fantastic friendships that are now living together, that have taken trips together, done vacations, Thanksgivings together.
“I would say we probably have just as many as those as we have romantic relationships.”
He thinks this is because VRC unites people with similar interests in a confined context, just like a chess club or a beach tennis club.
“If you see the same people all the time, you start talking. Running is just the new popular thing,” he said. “But I feel like if you go to any club, if you have a hobby, if you are around the same people often you’ll most likely meet people.”
When asked whether starting the run club was a good thing for his life, Shields replied, “hell yes.”
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