High School Track Walked So Strava Warriors Could Run: Competition, Commercialism, and Camaraderie in Modern Running
By Annabel Gregg
It’s 5:16 AM. Middle of February. My alarm goes off, incessant and plangent, and I slam the snooze button instantly. Sirens beckon me to skip the run entirely; never has my bed been so comfortable, never has sleep felt so lucid and promising. It’s still dark out, for fuck’s sake. Below freezing. It takes every ounce of petulant discipline I have to not not go.
As I sip coffee and yank on athleticwear, I look outside at the apartment building across my street, bemused at the beacon of light coming from one window. There is someone else awake right now! It warms me a little to pretend that we’re getting ready to go do the same thing, that we will do it together.
I jog up to 90th and wait for proof of life near the Engineer’s Gate, one of the more humble entrances to Central Park on the Upper East Side. A few minutes before 6:30, a woman runs up and stops her watch, anticipatory. It’s Ari, one of the coaches for the New York Harriers.
Some of the Harriers’ claims to fame: placing fifth in the New York Road Runners’ team standings last year (out of all club teams competing across the five boroughs), and “Pin Skin Man,” known for pinning his NYC marathon bibs into his bare chest.
About a dozen team members show up to this early morning practice, one of many they’ve held this week. The sun still hasn’t risen when Ari leads the runners through drills. A lot of them have carbon-plated trainers, opalescent white or varying hues of neon. Puffs of harsh air huff from each of their mouths, little steam engines.
Ari sends them out for a tempo run, one of their easier workouts at this nascent stage of the season. But before they go, she snaps a picture of the group in front of the blooming sunrise, orange light peaking out from between the skyscrapers behind them.
Then, half of them take off to lead an ambitious pace group: sub-six-minute-mile pace for the thirty-minute workout.
I stick with the second group, who start a little faster than a seven-minute pace. I learn that most of them have been on the team for over five years, some longer. Most are training for marathons.
With reverent disgust: “Why the marathon?”
“Because every runner in New York has to do a marathon,” one of them says, sardonic. This is Ian, one of the newer Harriers. Late twenties, wearing a hoodie in below-freezing weather. “Most of the people on the team have done, like, a hundred marathons. Ask Jeremy. Jeremy, how many marathons have you run?”
Jeremy’s raced 16 marathons. His next one is this spring in Serbia. Has been on the team for many years, now in his forties. After about a mile with our chatty pace group, Jeremy silently advances, separating. Cooks solo for the rest of the workout.
Later, when I ask him, he sums up modern running in one word: vanity. “I think running these days is a lot about showing off. Posting everything, taking pictures,” he says.
The social media content reflecting the world of running we see is polished—cheesing runners with cute outfits, running a PR every race. “I always said if I were to start an Instagram, it’d be about everything that goes wrong with running. Like injuries, having a sucky run, throwing up after races. Everything gross.”
Jeremy’s getting at one of the most modern aspects of the running world today: its commercialization.
February sun rises over some New York Harriers, warming up their morning tempo workout in Central Park
The entry point for many new runners is seeing other runners run and wanting to emulate the practice. Instagram. Strava. Apps that overlay Strava maps onto Instagram posts. I can’t help but sympathize with Jeremy: we have an overkill amount of technology in the name of human advancement on one extreme, and a social-media-artificial-competition monster on the other. The pursuit of progress, versus the pursuit of posting, or really, posing.
Promise I’m not writing this to be pompous; I use and abuse Strava. Simultaneous victim and perpetrator of Modern Running Culture: I posted my run with the Harriers immediately.
But if running seems hyper-commercialized in recent years, it’s about to get even moreso. Strava is reportedly planning to go public as early as this spring, notable given the company’s most recent valuation of $2.2 billion and base of over 50 million monthly users. That whopping number has been fueled by a swath of Gen Z-ers and Millennials getting into the sport: ostensibly, our Modern Runners. A quarter of U.S. marathon runners in the last three years were under thirty.
As more people “find out” about running, more people will be adopting the lifestyle. This led me to join the Harriers at six in the morning in the middle of winter, to investigate: what even is Modern Running Culture? And has it actually made running any better?
Sourced from Frank Campbell on Pinterest
I’ve been running since middle school. That’s a good chunk of the Modern Running population: washed-up scholastic athletes with a true love for the sport (a.k.a. can’t let go of that piece of their identity).
Take Connor: he’s also been running since middle school. “We’ll say I was semi-decent at mid-distance.”
When he moved to New York after college, finding a team to run with was his first step. “I had some friends here,” he says, “but I knew this would be a way to meet new people.”
He mentions the gazillion running clubs there are in Manhattan. Every type of group dynamic you could imagine exists: from the hyperion elite racing team to the let’s-jog-to-a-bakery group to the I’m-only-here-to-find-my-future-spouse-and-actually-hate-running “fitness dating” org.
In the modern era, we’re all desperate for real connection. There is no more accessible vehicle for human connection than running clubs. In a sport seen as largely solitary, 75% of Gen Z runners prefer to run with someone else. When I moved to a new city last year, a group of people to run with was the first thing I sought. While that’s partially because I’m in that “washed up” category, it’s also just a genuinely good way to get the fuck out of your apartment and talk to other human beings.
Something about the “clubs” that claim to be for runners, but only use running as the means for achieving some end, seems to muddy the once-pure Run Club waters. If you’re just getting people to run a mile or two to a brewery, promising them a date eventually as a result of participation, does that not render the run itself the least important aspect of the endeavor?
It appropriates camaraderie and running while claiming to fill a very real social gap, diminishing the true purpose of what these groups were designed to do: offer a true “third space” for people.
Going to a running group is one of the few things—especially in a city as expensive as New York—that is miraculously, necessarily, free.
In our modern era, we need running clubs. We need things to do that aren’t spending money, that enable us to spend time with other human beings.
The author (pumping herself up for) racing for ARE Racing Team at the Bandit Grand Prix in Brooklyn this July.
It’s still before seven in the morning, but we dodge and weave at least one runner every thirty seconds. Why does it feel like every person we know is training for some race right now? Why are so many young people taking up the sport?
“It’s more accessible now,” Ian comments. He took up running during the pandemic as a way to get out of the house. “More people see that they can fit running into their life, in whatever capacity they want. The basic components of running never change. More people feel like they can be part of it.”
Sure, maybe they’re out here because they saw some fit-fluencer, or Harry Styles, running a marathon. It looks cool. Runners are hot, exude youth. Super shoes, sleek race kits, snazzy tech. But despite the embellishments that may surround running in the modern era, the core of the sport is just putting one foot in front of the other. Anyone can do it.
And isn’t that kind of beautiful?
Claiming camaraderie, run clubs that offer a real place for connection (and running!) are not just good for the sport, but for humanity.
While Connor sought the Harriers to meet people, he also joined because he wanted to be fucking fast. Right now, he’s focused on training for a marathon, and edged the elusive three-hour mark at his last race. “That’s what gets me out here with these guys, is pursuing sub-three,” he tells me as we turn onto a road crossing at the north end of the Park. Slight incline, and he’s not even out of breath. Emblematic of what he’s after: pursuing the PR, pluggin’ away toward self-advancement.
I admittedly love that feeling, that drive to see just how fast these twenty-something legs can scramble. It gives an inherent sense of purpose—of life—to an often painful, boring, and/or gritty activity. You need somethin’ to chase.
But an ethic of running that is laser-focused on competition, whether internal or external, can be daunting, even demoralizing.
2025 Nike Cross Country Nationals Girls Race by Brian Eder
The treadmill in my building is in front of a blank white wall, so anything more than a mile threatens unimaginable tedium. It’s slushy and gross outside, a gray winter Sunday, so I’m forced to running indoors or not at all.
To kill time, I call my friend Erin. Bubbly, purehearted, persistent. Both of us are each other’s only friends from high school, because our only other friends in high school were the girls on our State Championship-winning cross country team, and neither of us has talked to the other since graduating years ago. To my knowledge, out of the seven of us, I am the only one who still runs.
That includes Erin. She doesn’t run anymore, not like we used to anyway.
Our team was competitive. The first time our squad won States, I was a freshman. Erin was in eighth grade. Even by then, we were taught to constantly compare, constantly improve, constantly win. Anything less was seen as a failure. Running was simply the vehicle to compare, improve, win. “There were definitely happy moments,” she assures, pointing out our friendship, and that she loved “long runs in the countryside. Seeing things I wouldn’t otherwise see. And it’s good for your health.”
But because our introduction to the sport was unsparingly focused on competition rather than enjoying the act of running itself, how could she associate running with anything else?
“I remember when we qualified for States [in track] for the four-by-eight [hundred meter relay].” The goal was to get on the podium and win a medal. “I had the slowest split on the team going into it.” A 2:23 for the half-mile, Reader. Did you just throw up a little?”
“And I was talking to my dad before we ran, just super nervous, and he said, ‘Well, you just have to go out there and do your best.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s not gonna cut it. My best isn’t good enough.’ I ended up running the fastest split on the team that day, but that wasn’t even what stuck with me. It was that mentality that there was really nothing I could do that would be my ‘best’ in my eyes.”
What remains unspoken here is why her best isn’t enough, why a 2:23 seemed like dogshit to her. She was comparing herself to the three other girls on the relay team. A lifetime best means nothing if you’re slower than the person next to you.
I can’t help but grimace, thinking of the toxicity that the social media surrounding Modern Running Culture might foster in a former competitive runner. At their worst, Strava and The Algorithm provide constant inundation with artificial comparison. Did you run as fast as this person today? What about this one? They ran a little longer than your lazy ass… here’s the exact map evidencing how much of a better runner they are. Your best isn’t good enough.
And yet, I will still upload this run to Strava once I leave the gym.
I flick a sweaty strand of hair out of my eyes, frowning even though she can’t see me. Between huffs: “Always trying your best is exhausting, no?”
“Well, yeah,” Erin murmurs, voice lilting. “But that’s how my brain was trained to work. I was really hard on myself. And if I wasn’t, like, puking or passing out at the end of a race, that’s how I knew I wasn’t giving it my all.”
I’m suddenly aware that she can definitely hear my heavy panting, my iterative stomps. I click the red stop button on the treadmill, and the belt slows to a walk, then stops. The white-wall torture is over. “Do you think you’ll ever want to run again?”
When she says, “I’d like to be able to run a marathon someday,” it’s hard not to grin. “That day just isn’t today, is all. I think I maybe unfairly associate running [itself] with that time... I think if I can separate those things, I could get back into it.”
It took me years to appreciate running for running’s sake, to not see it as solely a vessel for competition. For serious runners—whether high school girls or grown-ass men—training is hard.
But the morning I woke up at five A.M. to train with the Harriers, when I saw the lights on in a window across the street, my mentality shifted from dread to whimsy. Even just the idea that someone was going to get after it with me made the run a little less daunting.
It’s the same reason Connor gets up in the morning to go run really fast with a bunch of other runners. Shared commiseration is not really all that miserable.
And a team like the Harriers, which values camaraderie as much as competition, seems to have found the sweet spot for thriving amidst Modern Running Culture.
When I run back through the threshold of the Engineer’s Gate to get home, my feet bones feel splintered, and my calves hurt like hell. But it’s a good hurt. As I hobble up my stairs, I smile at the kudos I get on my Strava post, luxuriate in the satisfying pain of physical exertion, and pat myself on the back for interacting with other human beings before eight in the morning. I’ll even say I had fun.
Modern Running is a culture whose emphasis vacillates between camaraderie, competition, and commercialism. The key to thriving in it seems to just be finding a balance. And the best way to do that? Set some goals for yourself. Find someone to run with. Block out the noise. Then just get out there and fucking run.
