From punchline to movement
For a while "run clubs are the new dating apps" was a joke people made on the internet. Then the numbers caught up with it. In Strava's Year in Sport report for 2024 the platform recorded a 59% rise in running clubs, and 58% of surveyed users said they'd made new friends through one. One in five said they'd been on a date with someone they met through exercise, and Gen Z were four times more likely to say they'd rather meet people working out than at a bar.
The following year the growth got stranger still. Strava's 2025 report (based on a survey of more than 30,000 people, users and non-users alike) found that new clubs on the platform had nearly quadrupled to a million, running clubs specifically had grown 3.5x year over year, and club-organised events were up 1.5x. Nearly half of Gen Z respondents (46%) said they were up for a workout as a first date.
Meanwhile the apps have been going the other way: paying subscribers falling, features being stripped back, and a general sense that the swipe has run its course. Put those two curves next to each other and the joke starts to look like a demographic shift. The culture even has a name for it now: "dating by doing."
Why "dating by doing" beats the swipe
The mechanism isn't mysterious, and it isn't new. It's the same recipe relationship psychology has pointed at for decades: repeated exposure to the same faces, a shared activity that gives you something to do besides perform, and no explicit pressure to date, because nobody is technically there for that.
Repetition does most of the work. The fourth time you see someone, "hello" is easy: you're not a stranger making an approach, you're the person who's always there on Tuesdays. The shared activity does the rest: it hands you a script for the first ten conversations (the route, the hill, the weather, the injury you're nursing) so neither of you has to manufacture charm from nothing.
Apps invert all three. They front-load the pressure with a profile to perform and a match to grind. They strip out the shared activity, leaving just talking, in a vacuum, about talking. And they replace repeat exposure with a single high-stakes first impression that has to carry everything. It's a harder problem, dressed up as an easier one, which is a decent explanation for why so many people describe the apps as exhausting rather than fun.
What the data actually says, and what it doesn't
It's worth being precise here, because this story gets exaggerated in the retelling. The widely-quoted "one in five" figure is people who said they'd been on a date with someone they met through exercise, not one in five runners who've dated someone from their specific club, which is a much stronger claim nobody has actually measured.
Nor does the data say run clubs are better at producing relationships than apps. What it shows is that a lot of people are now meeting through exercise, that most of them are making friends rather than finding partners, and that the youngest cohort is unusually enthusiastic about it. The friendship number (58%) is much bigger than the dating number, and honestly that's the more useful headline: run clubs are a very good way to widen a social circle, and a decent side-door to dating.
That framing matters if you're deciding whether to go. Turn up expecting a romantic pipeline and you'll be disappointed and a bit weird about it. Turn up expecting to know fifteen more people in your city within two months, and the data is firmly on your side.
It was never really about running
Swap the run for anything with a room and a rhythm: a bouldering gym, five-a-side, a choir, a life-drawing class, a board-game night, a community garden, a volunteering shift. "Activity dating" and "hobby dating" are just names for the same underlying mechanism (repeat exposure plus a shared task) and running has no monopoly on it. It simply happens to be free, requires no skill to start, and has an unusually well-organised club scene.
The specific hobby barely matters. The repetition does. Which leads to the only selection criterion that counts: pick the thing you'd genuinely turn up to even if you never spoke to a soul. If you need the social payoff to justify going, you'll stop going the first week it rains, and then the mechanism never gets a chance to run.
How to start, even if you don't run
Choose one recurring thing and put it in the calendar as a standing commitment, not an intention. Most cities have free, beginner-friendly run clubs several nights a week, and nearly all of them have a slow group: searching Strava or Instagram for your area will surface them faster than Google will.
Then commit for six weeks before you judge it. This is the single most important instruction on this page. Almost everyone's first session is mildly awkward and mildly disappointing, because familiarity hasn't had time to accumulate yet. Sessions four through six are where it turns, and most people who conclude "that didn't work for me" quit at session two.
Show up on the evenings you don't feel like it: those are the ones that build the streak. Learn a few names early and use them. Say yes to the coffee or the pub afterwards, which is where the actual socialising happens and which a surprising number of people skip. And be a friendly regular rather than a networker: the goal for the first month is simply to become a familiar face.
The etiquette bit: don't turn the club into an app
One caveat, and clubs feel strongly about it. The reason these spaces work is that they're not dating venues: the low pressure is the whole product. Treat a run club as a hunting ground and you'll reintroduce exactly the dynamic everyone came there to escape, and people (women especially) will clock it immediately.
The functional version is boring and effective: be normal, talk to everyone rather than orbiting one person, let things develop over weeks, and take any interest to a separate coffee rather than making the club itself the site of it. Accept a no gracefully and keep turning up as though nothing happened, because you'll be seeing these people every week. The same repetition that makes the club good for meeting someone makes it unforgiving of anyone who makes it uncomfortable.
The gap hobbies leave
There's one thing a club structurally can't do: it runs on a schedule. You meet at 7pm on Thursday, not at 9pm on a spontaneous Tuesday when you happen to be out and up for it. That in-between state (out, restless, would happily meet someone if it were easy) is the gap no weekly commitment can cover, by definition.
That's the gap we built Everl for, so read this as an interested party's view rather than a neutral one. It's the same shared-intent energy without needing a scheduled club: you go "on" only when you mean it, see who nearby is in the same mood, and meet in a public place on a mutual yes, anonymous until you both choose otherwise, and 18+.
It isn't a replacement for the club, and the honest answer is that it shouldn't be. Repeat exposure is still the most reliable way anyone has found to make friends as an adult, and no app will out-perform turning up somewhere every week for a year. The realistic mix is one weekly hobby for the repetition, and a proximity nudge for the nights nothing's on.