Running Doesn’t Need Saving

A disclaimer: I don’t like influencers. There you go. We should start our words by saying something positive and constructive; the unwritten rule says we should not embark, especially nowadays, with negativity towards a group (or whatever you want to call them). I just don’t care. They don’t actually add anything of value beyond promoting their (mostly) empty lives. A poorly informed or uninteresting person talking to a group of even more poorly informed and uninterested people does not create an interesting community. It creates a group of uninteresting people, plus one.

Ever since the victory of Frank Shorter in the ’72 Olympics Marathon—an event broadcast live—the running boom exploded. Frank made “us” all believe that we could achieve amazing feats and that those feats were not limited to a few blessed humans. Later, people like Steve Prefontaine created the rebel image; the guy just wanted to crush his opponents. Prefontaine was the rockstar that cemented Nike as the running brand. It was him who once said, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” Prefontaine was the original anti-influencer. He didn’t run to fit a curated aesthetic; he did it at RPE 10. He was the center of gravity, and the trends had no choice but to follow him.

Today’s running isn’t living a boom. Today’s boom is the socialization around running, and that is a completely different thing. This new boom lives entirely on social media. But true running exists outside of the algorithm.

The critical difference between an influencer and an athlete is who adapts to whom. An influencer gets a brief from a marketing department, puts on the clean clothes they received that month, and adapts their personality to fit the brand’s narrative and, ultimately, its purpose. Athletes like Krupicka, Rivs, Versteeg, among a few others, operate with a completely different goal. They are the undeniable, uncompromising product of the roads and the mountains. When Krupicka took a knife to his brand-new shoes, New Balance didn’t tell him to stop; they built a new shoe line around his madness. There were no Dos and Don’ts handed to him by the brand. When these guys run, they are mining the deep, solitary truth of the sport. Brands don’t hire them to push a lifestyle; brands hire them hoping that a little bit of their raw, unapologetic authenticity rubs off on the logo, creating the aspirational moment they crave.

This dynamic is painfully obvious when you look at how mainstream brands are currently manufacturing “run clubs” and events with local digital influencers. Take a recent New Balance activation here in Portugal, for example. I will go out on a limb here without gathering much background info. I know that’s not the best approach, but the stunt itself doesn’t make me want to dig any deeper, so I am perfectly fine just judging it from the outside. They gathered a group of lifestyle influencers for a casual 5k night run, handed them green flares, blasted some music, and had them end up in a traditional tasca to slap brand stickers on the walls. There is no rebellion in handing a t-shirt to a tasca owner! If you know the guy, you know he is laughing at all of them on the inside, just as much as the influencers and the brand are using him as a prop. It was just a sterile, corporate reproduction of the gritty, underground vibe that indie brands like Satisfy pioneered years ago, awkwardly copy-pasted onto the streets of Lisbon. Instead of a genuine cultural activation, it just felt like a massive cliché—a hollow performance of a subculture they don’t actually belong to.

Which brings up a somewhat cynical, yet undeniable thought: is the anti-influencer actually the entity that gives birth to the influencer?

Think of it like industrial waste. A true pioneer—whether it’s Prefontaine bleeding on the track or Dean Karnazes running 100 miles through the night purely on stubbornness—mines the raw, authentic gold of the sport. It’s built on real effort, science, and suffering, all done in solitude. But as soon as that raw authenticity is exposed, the industry rushes in and builds a massive factory around it to bottle it and sell it to the masses. The modern “pop” influencer is just the synthetic byproduct of that commercialization. They are the plastic packaging and the industrial runoff left behind once the true essence, the actual grit of the sport, has been stripped away.

We don’t need to save running; we just need to ignore the noise. The real work is unglamorous. It’s strictly monitoring your RPE when you’d rather be sprinting. It’s the repetitive, often nauseating science of training your gut to absorb 60 to 80 grams of carbs an hour. It’s trusting your coach, your crew, and the brutal reality of the training plan. The next time you feel the FOMO creeping in because of some curated post, remember: the true essence of this sport is found in the lonely miles. And there is absolutely no algorithm for that

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