When the writer Murakami goes for a run, he is in his “own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence”. Running on Instagram is a little louder. Nearly 90 million posts are captioned ‘#running’ and I am currently unable to open the app without virtually joining the jog of an enthusiastic Instagram user (whilst holding their phone remarkably still, might I add).
When you’re sat slobbishly on the sofa, crick in your neck and biscuit crumbs in your tea, you might not want to be greeted by a perky influencer shouting: “Run with me!” But apparently we do. The ‘#runwithme’ tag has garnered 171,000 posts. Not since lockdown have I noticed such clamour online for the humble jog. In spring 2020, the number of sedentary adults in Ireland halved. In the UK, the ‘Couch to 5k’ app – which helps new runners build up to a thirty minute run – was downloaded nearly one million times over the pandemic. As movement was restricted, exercise became sanity-saving. Running, specifically, was not only a way to stave off stagnation but an excuse to be outside.
As movement was restricted, exercise became sanity-saving. Running, specifically, was not only a way to stave off stagnation but an excuse to be outside.
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As a sixteen year old girl back in 2020, I was also keenly aware of the other messaging around exercise that lockdown brought, namely the pressure to ‘glow up’. Youtube channels and social media challenges encouraged highly regimented eating and exercising in order to emerge from a COVID-chrysalis physically transformed. Exercise online is often shrouded in the language of self-care whilst subtly promoting hyper-fixation on image improvement. These recent videos about running seem to be a change in direction.
133,000 people on Instagram are following Savannah Sachdev’s ‘run streak’, which has seen her run on nearly 800 consecutive days. She runs to get pastries, she runs on her period, hungover, or when she’s fighting with her boyfriend. I know this because she shares it. The running videos that Sachdev and similar content creators post are intentionally imperfect. They start with someone rolling out of bed sluggish and puffy eyed, but end on a runner’s high. Monologues about how running can help you “get out of your mind and into your body” accompany someone lacing up their trainers. The tone is humourously self-deprecating and encouraging.
The handling of food in these videos is also a departure from the norm. They don’t tell you to be ‘strong not skinny’ because they don’t tell you to be anything at all. Videos of longer runs explain how the runner fuels themselves – be it electrolyte gels or Percy Pigs. Food is portrayed as a necessary counterpart to moving your body. It is a complement to exercise instead of a punishment.
Food is portrayed as a necessary counterpart to moving your body. It is a complement to exercise instead of a punishment.
Generally, these videos encourage moving at your own pace to make your mind feel a little better. Sometimes they’re the push I need to wrangle a sports bra over my head and go outside. In her book ‘Jog On: How Running Saved My Life’, Bella Mackie describes how she saw running as “something that only happy healthy bouncy people did, not neurotic smokers who were scared of everything”. Running online no longer looks like this. I was never sporty at school and remain utterly uncoordinated. I apparently lost my first ever Sports Day race because I stopped to pick a flower. The other day my dad said he could recognise me running because of my “funny gait”. However, this virtual run club feels welcoming and accessible, even (or perhaps especially) to those of us not athletically inclined.
But surely no social media trend can be spotless. Whilst running can hardly be called a trend, this style of documenting it is. Already it is following the same route as any other online phenomenon. There is a potentially corrosive pipeline down which many influencers flow. It starts with a subject: a hobby, cause or person. Posting about this subject attracts followers. More followers allow the account holder to monetise their posts by advertising products. Eventually, the money from these posts surpasses what the poster was making at their previous job, and social media becomes their main – often only – source of income. Their account becomes financially motivated, leading to more sponsored posts. You might not need to be fast to run with an influencer, but you should really buy, at the very least, a running vest, a Garmin watch, Lululemon shorts and some lurid Hoka trainers.
An Instagram reel can encourage you to ‘get out of your mind and into your body’, but it might also want your mind on the products it’s selling you. This is not necessarily malicious, but it doesn’t seem conducive to the “void” that Murakami talks about. Admittedly, on recent runs I have found myself thinking about these videos. Sometimes they spur me on, but the pervasion of the virtual into the physical is not my aim when I head out for a jog.
However enjoyable and well-intentioned these running videos are, they reflect a potentially harmful way that social media integrates itself into our lives and flattens it.
Trends require homogeneity. It is the sameness of these posts – similar language, clothing and content – that makes them a trend in the first place. But running is an individual act. I used to pass the same elderly man running along the river most days and he would always reach out for a high five. Despite our similar routes, our experiences of that run were undoubtedly different. However enjoyable and well-intentioned these running videos are, they reflect a potentially harmful way that social media integrates itself into our lives and flattens it. If the voices in our heads when we run are gloriously unique, then why do these videos all sound the same?
Joyce Carol Oates wrote that just as a runner’s lungs expand, they also experience “an extension of the imagining self”. When our real-world experiences pass through the prism of an online trend, they are distorted by a collective imagination, rather than our own. In this way we risk losing the singular mental joys that running – and other offline hobbies – can bring. Even when movements on Instagram seem positive, I think it is worth asking whether it is possible for them to remain so within this structure. Maybe I don’t like being asked to go for a run, after all.
