Listen, we get it. Dating today is a nightmare. All those apps? Blegh. All the swiping makes it hard to get to know anyone, sometimes folks on there pose like they’re single and they’re not, and all that getting ghosted. It’s the worst.
Whatever happened to the old ways of meeting someone face to face? Those classic ways of finding your forever person, like being introduced to a friend of a friend? Or sitting at the right counter at the local malt shop? Or leading the Fremen people into a revolution against the Emperor Shaddam IV, and demanding the hand of his daughter Princess Irulan, lest you destroy all spice production on the desert planet of Arrakis? That’s the way our grandparents did it back in the day, so why isn’t it good enough for us now?
Well, a group of intrepid New Yorkers, who are single and very determined to mingle, thought they had lucked in to a new way to meet someone face-to-face, IRL, on the DL. But as it turns out, you can’t outrun the pitfalls of the dating scene, even if you’re literally running.
A Part of Hearst Digital Media NBCNews.com summarizes, “about 1,000 New Yorkers search every week for an antidote to the ills of Tinder and Hinge.” When the group began in May, it had only a few dozen members. But thanks to some viral TikToks (“Running at run clubs until I find my wife,” reads a caption NBCNews pulled from one such video), the membership soon ballooned as more and more New Yorkers figured they could combine running and romance.
Most outings for the Lunge Run Club consist of a three-mile run, ending at a bar in the West Village. Now, this might be the part where somebody might say “That just sounds like going to a bar to meet someone, but with very sweaty extra steps beforehand!” But what you’re not considering is, at least this way, you know for sure the person you’re interested in does actually “like running” as opposed to it simply being listed in a profile on a dating app. Because “into running/fitness” is the dating app equivalent of that “speaks fluent French” you pop on the bottom of your resume just because you took one semester in high school.
The club has created a system to help weed out those looking for love from those just looking to run: “Singles are instructed to wear black and those in relationship colors,” observes NBCNews, “but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in a nonblack outfit in the vast crowd of singles that overtake Greenwich Village each week.”
But, as it turns out, some nefarious folks are indeed donning all black for their runs, even if they’re got a partner on the Peloton back home. One of the pitfalls of app dating, people lying about relationship status, has now made its way to the running clubs of the West Village.
And alas, it’s not the only peril of contemporary coupling that has come to the running clubs of New York. People are also getting ghosted.
“You have to be OK with seeing someone that you’ve gone on a date with show up and talk to someone else,” observed Rachael Lansing, the head of Lunge Run Club. One could suggest that’s perhaps a tall order to ask of the singles population of a city who went a crusade against Marathon Workouts to Get Faster How Mindfulness Boosts Workout Motivation?
“Sometimes someone will ask you for your number, you’ll give it to them, and then you won’t hear from them,” a 29-year-old who works in finance remarked to the NBCNews reporter. Plus, now the club has become so oversaturated with people that it’s hard to even track down somebody you clicked with at all, let alone hold some miscreant flirt accountable.
But apparently, accountability is an issue the club is seeking to rectify...in an interesting way. “Each week,” NBC News writes, “Lansing posts on Lunge’s Instagram story asking runners to spill their gossip about the week before.”
So there you go, folks. If dating apps or bar-hopping seem too intimidating, and you want something that feels far-less vulnerable, we can recommend a place where everybody sees you exhausted and sweaty, some black t-shirts A Part of Hearst Digital Media, and once a week, a bunch of people flock to Instagram to spread gossip. Doesn’t that calm your nerves?
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
