Let Life Surprise You: Reflections on a Run Club

I loved playing tennis in elementary school and even went to a school summer camp for it for a couple years. Unfortunately, you couldn’t join the tennis team until high school. My brother, four years older, had been running cross country since middle school and—since tennis wasn’t an option—I figured that was a good enough consolation. 

I signed up for cross country in seventh grade with the full intention of switching to tennis in ninth. But then I fell in love with mud-caked sneakers, long runs and striders, and singing songs with my teammates on warm up runs to “strengthen our lungs.” I never switched back to tennis.

Instead, I signed up for indoor track and outdoor track and ran through high school and college. So much of my life is measured by the trails I was running or the people I was running with at the time. When I was 21 and a new college graduate, I moved to New York City and continued to casually run—mostly alone or sometimes with my brother. 

Every time I sent a picture of my running view to the family group text, I’d receive a separate message from my mom about how “couldn’t I find a group of people to run with?” And I wasn’t necessarily opposed. After all, I’d been running on teams my entire life. But it also wasn’t something I thought I needed. Running was a place where I could escape from the noise or stress and just be. It was my space to work through problems, my space to scheme new ideas, my grounding constant. 

So after a decade of being on a team, I spent the last decade running a majority of my workouts alone. Alone but not really alone in the way living in New York City promises. 

Last summer, I started training for my third marathon (in my third NYC neighborhood) and felt increasingly grateful for my proximity to a beautiful track. On the same day each week, I’d head to the track before work and do my speed intervals. The track was quiet at those hours. (Quiet but not empty, Mom, I promise!) Quiet until it wasn’t.

One day, halfway through the summer, a group of people showed up and seemed to be doing speed work as well. I didn’t think much of it until they came back the next week. And the next week. And the next week. Pretty soon, they became a regular part of my routine. I never engaged with them, but I knew if I kept going on my usual day, they’d also be there. 

For reasons I can’t fully articulate, I began to feel a sense of camaraderie with this group of strangers who I had never spoken to. When my friend came to visit and went running with me on speedwork day, I told him about the group and joked about how I had secret besties at the park. 

After 2 weeks of work travel, I was finally home on a speedwork morning (goodbye sad 11:00 pm hotel treadmills) and was eager to head back to the track. It was pouring that morning but would be clear by evening, and while conventional wisdom would tell me to do the workout later, I was surprised by how strongly I felt about going in the morning. “I’ve been gone for two weeks; I gotta go see my crew!” To be very clear—at this point I’d had no actual interaction with them. 

It wasn’t until after running my last speed workout before the marathon, that I decided I had nothing to lose. Why not just say hi? In a move that is ambitiously extroverted even by my standards, I waited until they seemed more or less done running and then walked over and said hi. 

That’s how I joined a run club. 

I waited two weeks after my race and then showed up to run with them. I have more or less been running with them every week since. Oh don’t get me wrong, I still get plenty of solo runs. But for 1 or 2 workouts a week, I have a team again. I didn’t think it was something I would want. I didn’t know it was something that would recalibrate things.

You see, the first time I ran 10 miles was sometime in high school with my childhood best friend. We were at the local park and we didn’t have fancy watches and almost certainly didn’t bother to run with our flip phones. But we knew how long the loops were and so lost in conversation were we that 10 miles spun past us in an instant. Being both of our first double digit runs, I remember being giddy and also I remember how easy it felt. Because we were together.

I’ve run ten miles many, many times since then. And generally, I think I have a pretty good idea for what ten miles feels like on my body. And then after a decade, I started running with people again. And suddenly ten miles felt different. Similarly, I thought I knew what 14 degrees felt like. But 14 degrees feels different—feels impossibly warmer—when experienced with a friend.

The night before I showed up to my first workout with the group, I was suddenly doubting myself. I had gotten really good at running alone. I didn’t need a group. Why not just go do my own thing? But my brain kept coming back to the uncomfortable truth of knowing this is the kind of thing you’ll wish you’d have done sooner. 

So I laced up my shoes and headed to the track not to run alone, but to run together. I stretched more than I typically do pre-workout. I learned more names than my brain could hold. I came home buzzing with the joy of meeting so many people before 7:00 AM. I came home laughing at how interval workouts are easier when done with others. I came home remembering why I fell in love with the running community in the first place. 

And as I’ve continued to run with this team, I’ve watched the group founders foster community and kindness. I’ve seen runners looking out for runners. I’ve watched encouragement and care and I’ve been inspired every single workout. In quiet ways, I’ve let it push me. I’ve run more through this very cold winter than I would have on my own. 

About a month before I started running with the group, I was talking to another runner friend in the city about how we’ve never joined run clubs because we’re both the kind of people that just want to wake up and do our workout and then move on with our day. Generally, that is still how I feel. I can be efficient to a fault. Joining a run club was never on my list. 

But I have long loved the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

And somehow, hasn’t my experience with the run club cracked even that wisdom? Somehow, they have helped me go farther and faster. 

We can be so sure we know what is good for us. We can be so used to doing things a certain way. But let life surprise you a little. You might just fall in love with a new way of doing an old thing.