Hundreds of young, single adults were spotted out in Manhattan one recent night. They were dressed in black and looking for romance.
And that is news, how?
This was no normal outing. They were part of a running club: one that links jogging with finding a date. Held Wednesdays, there is one rule: wear black if you’re single.
After nearly two decades of enduring internet dating sites and apps, young adults are trying a more traditional face-to-face approach. Run clubs and other athletic groups across the country are working to attract new members with the tantalizing prospect of meeting significant others in the flesh, sweaty as it might be.
Attendees tell tales of success. And of awkwardness. But hey, at least you’ve burned calories either way.
In New York, the Lunge Run Club, which asks singles to don black to signal their status as available, has grown from 30 people at the first run in May to around 900 on a recent evening, when runners set off from Washington Square Park on a three-mile course while walkers could tackle a shorter stretch.
For those wondering if it is easy to flirt while working up a sweat, the event includes a post-exercise shindig at a bar. “I’m not a big talker when I run,” conceded 20-something attendee Slade Parson, who works in tech consulting. “But after the run, it is actually good to talk to people you spotted out during the run or meet new people that you didn’t see.”
‘Not just on the couch’
Belex Cheng and Reid Sherman met last March on a run along San Francisco’s Embarcadero waterfront. They were both in the same run club. Sherman was promoting a race and asked for Cheng’s number to see if she would be interested in being on a team for a 100-kilometer relay Sherman was doing with friends.
Later that night, the two kept talking and realized they were in the same surfing group chat that had grown out of the run club. Both were hesitant to date within their club because they didn’t want to fracture the group. But a couple nights later, they got pizza. Two days after that, they went to brunch. Within weeks, they were in a relationship.
“We joke around a lot that we joined a cult,” Sherman, 33, said. “You see the same people out at bars. You do a lot of the same stuff together, a lot of social events.”
Cheng, 29, knows several couples who met through run clubs and friends have told her they joined run clubs to meet like-minded dates.
“Running clubs filter in a way,” Sherman said. “I’m only meeting people who run a couple miles.” They’re “not just on the couch watching Netflix.”
San Francisco’s self-proclaimed “most unhinged run club” is the Fat Boys Run Club. About a year and a half ago, Russell Denhert organized a run with a small group of friends. To his surprise, they wanted to do it again the next week, and the name he had jokingly suggested stuck.
Fat Boys now has runs twice a week. Its group chat has about 300 people, Denhert said, and more than 1,500 follow its page on the fitness-tracking app Strava, which has gained a reputation as a dating app.
‘Came for the girls’
Denhert, 36, said Fat Boys is a casual club where people come for a good time without romantic pressure. He can usually tell when people join with the sole intention of dating, and as the club’s “coach” sometimes finds it hard to maintain a comfortable atmosphere when knowing romance might be top of mind.
“I feel like I can’t, as the founder, be like, welcome to the meat market,” he said.
Ryan Fritz didn’t know anybody when he moved to San Francisco, so he joined Denhert’s run club. He thought it would be a good way to meet new friends and potential dates.
“But it is a terrible place to find romance,” said Fritz, 28. “I came for the girls and what I found instead was friendships and community.”
It was easy to make small talk but could be hard to gauge whether someone was interested. He went on a few dates but nothing stuck. Lunge Run Club’s popularity ‘shows that people are over the endless swiping,’ a co-founder says.
Fritz met his girlfriend on a dating app in March, and he doesn’t regret trying to date through his run club. He’s still an avid member.
There is also the risk of awkwardness in sharing the same club if things don’t pan out. Sarah Heartfield, 35, started seeing a member of her San Francisco run club in January. The first date went well. The second date went south after Heartfield accidentally tapped his car door against a fire hydrant.
“His whole demeanor changed,” she recalled. “I couldn’t wait for the date to be over.” After the date, he stopped showing up at the run club.
Fritz also knows people who stopped going to his club after they didn’t find a romantic connection, or to avoid seeing someone they dated. He guessed they might be running in a different crowd now. “Just like Tinder and Bumble, you can switch between run clubs.”
This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
