The Strangeness of Instagram Running Clubs
And why the platform's antithetical to community sports
There’s a specter haunting western cities: the specter of Instagram running clubs. You may have seen their ads on your feed. They’re short, well-made videos constructed from GoPro and drone footage of attractive people running through “urban jungle” topography—concrete bridges and neglected street corners rather than leafy, expensive neighborhoods—that feature Nietzschean voiceovers about the “drive to succeed” and other individualist mantras. Successful clubs get sponsors that give their members things like free coffee or shoes at their weekly meetups. The only cost is that the clubs have to post photos of those young and attractive members partaking in the products. As with minimalist coffeeshops, the same type of running club pops up in cities like New York, Berlin, and Auckland, because their real home is Instagram. Everything is oriented towards the camera’s blank, round, glass stare, and I think it’s changing the sport.
At one Instagram running club I went to last year, the founder gave us a five-minute speech about how we were there because we had “the fire in our bellies” and the “will to succeed” before we ran a very slow 5k around the waterfront. At another, a man who spoke in a preacher’s cadence told us that we were “part of a family,” and made us do “team-building exercises” before we ran an even slower 6k. The speakers sounded like tech startup founders and youth pastors, snapped photos of us drinking sponsored coffee and snacks to put on their socials, and encouraged us to network with each other. Attendees wore expensive running streetwear and sweat-resistant makeup and seemed there to date rather than to train. I found the camera-ready charade discomforting. Something felt off, and it wasn’t just my unfamiliarity with it.
Running, to me, is about grinding discipline. I’ve been doing it competitively since I was 12 years old and I’m good enough to win races in Auckland. It’s painful, ugly, and well-suited to the uncoordinated. It’s also a sustainable form of consciousness obliteration that’s kept me from developing drug and alcohol dependencies. I think the most useful thing about it, as with any sport, is that it teaches you to set goals and accomplish them over long periods of time. If you do enough laps around a track at an 80-second 400 meter pace, you’ll know you can hold that same speed in a 5k race. It gives you faith in your ability to build a skill with practice, which you can then apply to other long-term projects like writing books, putting out albums, and more. I don’t need everyone to feel the same way I do about running, but its pivot to a looks-based platform over speed-based metrics makes me uneasy. I don’t think you should have to look good to play community sports, but its pivot to Instagram, like all industries’ pivot to Instagram, incentivizes that.
In Rebecca Liu’s White Review essay “There are only girls on the internet,” which she was gracious enough to send me a copy of after the magazine nuked its site, she writes that increased pressure to look good came “when the internet became oriented towards the image... when it became no longer about seeing but being seen.” Tarleton Gillespie similarly wrote in his 2014 essay “The Relevance of Algorithms” that social networks offer a kind of “mediated visibility” that people can profit from “by turning to face [the] algorithms.” The problem, of course, is that facing capitalist algorithms means turning your image into a product to sell. Selling that image requires manufacturing glamour, or the state of being envied. This envy, per John Berger, “steals people’s love for themselves as they are and offers it back to them for the price of the product.” I don’t want people to feel like they have to join a running club out of a sense of inadequacy, but there’s no other way to win on Instagram. If you’re going to proselytize on an ad platform, you have to become a compelling ad.
My problem with Instagram running clubs is my problem with mediating our interactions through for-profit companies writ large. I think community sports leagues should be welcoming, warm, and inclusive places for people to physically interact. But to successfully advertise them online, you have to make them glamorous, enviable, and exclusive. It’s antithetical to what I think community sports and community itself should be. But none of this is going to change as long as our communications platforms are for-profit ones. Seeing Instagram turn community sports notices into Equinox ads has reinforced my desire for a public internet after capitalism one day falls, and for there to be more common ways to interact in public space. In the meantime, I’m going to keep attending my old running club, for whom Instagram is secondary to winning and managing a youth sports league.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
Te Wiki Āhua O Aotearoa, or New Zealand’s underground fashion week, is doing a dance show this Saturday, July 12, at 9:30pm. They’ve never shown me a bad show and I’m looking forward to this one.
The Capitol Cinema Film Club is showing Cooley High on Wednesday, July 30 at 8pm. They’ve never shown me a bad movie and you can buy tickets here.
I've started doing Parkrun this year which has been interesting. I did high school cross country, consistently in the top ten but rarely in the top three, and the metrics stressed me out. In response, I've run regularly - more days than not - for the past eight years and never paid attention to the time. But there's something playful about Parkrun, and how it is and isn't a competition, it makes me want to excel and not just have a nice long think as my body moves up and down hills and gets sweaty. I like that there are kids and dogs and old people and people walking, and it makes me feel happy to be in the middle of others, each challenged in their own way. It's not something I want to do all the time (I would rather have hills and/or solitude) but I think it opens me up to others a little. I'm sure Instagram clubs do that for some people, but perhaps they're a little emptier, because the performance is the point.