The headlines were hard to miss.
“How Marathons Became Fashion Shows.” “Why Running Is The New Career Networking Activity.” “This Running Club Is The Hottest Dating App In NYC.” Whether inspired by a pandemic-era need for socialization (and low airborne transmission rates) or America’s interminable obsession with health and wellness, running had somehow unseated spin classes as the inescapable fitness craze dominating your feed and casual conversations.
Or at least the idea of running, running in the abstract, or an adjacency to those in the act of running. Because while the last running boom in the 1970s seemed to be about, you know, running—I can’t say for sure as I was a baby—the sport’s current moment in the sun can sometimes feel like it’s about anything and everything but the actual act of trying to move quickly under your own power.
In fact, for all the myriad motivations now given for partaking in the sport, there’s one that’s conspicuously absent: setting a PR.
If football is a game of inches, running is a fight against time. Long before any of us knew what “metrics” were, runners lived and died by the measurement of the stopwatch, some times so legendary that they transcended the boundaries of the sport: the 4-minute mile, the 3-hour barrier. Placing and medaling in a race conferred fleeting glory but your time was running culture currency that bought you respect and entry, sometimes in the most literal sense.
Even when marathon running started to attract weekend warriors and the formally sedentary, the PR was still the ultimate goal. But according to an article this summer in the industry trade publication Business of Fashion, entitled “How Running Went High Tech,” the mighty PR has been supplanted by more contemporary, social media friendly metrics.
“It was like a switch had flicked,” said 31-year-old Sonam Shah, quoted in the piece. “All of a sudden it didn’t matter that I didn’t run a 5K in under 30 minutes … now all anybody wanted to speak about was their recovery score and heart rate variability.” Shah was referring to their Whoop, a wearable device that “measures the metrics scientifically proven to make the most significant impact on your health,” according to the company’s website. What exactly are those? Sleep, exertion, recovery, “daily behaviors,” stress, and vitals, like heart rate and blood oxygen. Whoop then aggregates “those and thousands of other data points into digestible ‘scores,’” reported BoF, which apparently are then used to flex on your fellow run club members.
There’s also the Oura, which looks like a club kid’s thumb ring from the ‘90s but is packed with enough tech to provide “the most accurate reading of over 20 biometrics that impact your overall wellbeing,” including sleep, movement, and “heart health,” per the brand’s marketing. Dorothy Kilroy, Oura’s chief commercial officer, crowed to BoF that, “If you go back 10 years, this sort of technology was only reserved for the elite, who’d have to go to a lab and strap into these clunky devices.”
That’s true, and it reminded me of high school when our coach purchased some rudimentary heart monitors. They were supposed to feel like the future but we couldn’t get past the awkwardness of running repeat quarters with what felt like a Nokia 3310 Velcroed to our chests.
The reality is that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it all started to shift. Maybe it was the GPS functionality of Garmin watches and the Map My Run app. Or maybe it was the social shareability of Strava. But somewhere along the line, runners seemed to be less concerned about the clock and more focused on, well, everything else.
“There is a competitive element to these products’ appeal that reflects the shifting ways in which people measure — and show off — their fitness,” concludes the BoF piece. “It’s long been a common practice to post stats from jogs or workouts on social media, showing off metrics like distance, speed or the amount of calories burned. But now it’s just as common to see people posting their sleep or recovery scores.”
Competitive sleep sounds deeply dystopian, if not uniquely American, but perhaps I’m just jealous. As the father of a toddler I know it’s a race I’ll never win. Still, I can’t help but feel that this surfeit of data points is a distraction. That one of running’s many gifts is its ability to focus you on a singular purpose, namely, to traverse a set distance faster than you previously had.
Soon again I’ll lace up and head towards Brooklyn Bridge Park. Along the bike path I’ll pass individual runners, stoic and resolved. As I trace the piers I’ll inevitably encounter the run clubs, clotted together with their hydration vests and joyful countenance. I’ll marvel at how far the sport has come, how many of us are out here despite distractions and responsibilities.
And then I’ll check my time.
