At Zappos, we're endlessly fascinated by what moves people, and over the past five or so years, we've been especially interested in the running boom taking shape. People are lacing up left and right, and increasingly, they're not doing it alone. To be clear, run groups are nothing new, but their recent resurgence has felt less concerned with accountability vis-à-vis fitness goals and more motivated by a post-pandemic hunger for consistent human connection.
Anecdotally, we’ve heard all about the club sign-ups that fill up fast, the crack-of-dawn meet-ups that become cherished rituals, and the genuine friendships that form along the way. But being the data people that we are, we were compelled to complement these heart-warming stories with some cold hard facts.
Enter: the 2026 Run Down—our survey of 100+ runners that tells a rich picture of the running landscape today, from the gear people swear by to the states leading the charge. Most notable were the figures that spoke to community. A snapshot of our findings:
These insights came to life in participants like Mallory Kilmer, founder of No More Lonely Runs, one of New York's most beloved running groups.
Community has been part of Mallory’s relationship with running since she first laced up in middle school, long before run clubs popped into our social feeds and long before anyone thought to put numbers behind them.
Basically, Mallory is the Run Down report in human form, and graciously, she offered to share her story below.
Finding community on the track
Mallory didn’t come to running with a training plan or a race goal. She was 12 years old, had just quit the school play, and her dad said she needed to fill her time with another activity. Why not track? she thought, and signed up.
What surprised her wasn’t the discipline or the competition. It was discovering what she was actually capable of. Despite being, as she’ll tell you herself, “on the shorter side,” she took on the 200-meter hurdles and the triple jump. She was fast. And she was, without quite realizing it, in love with the sense of belonging.
“It’s a team sport, but at the same time, there are so many individual events,” she says, “so you feel a lot less pressure to perform, especially in the beginning.” That low-stakes entry point, she believes, is what makes track such a powerful on-ramp for kids. It holds space for you to figure out what you’re good at before asking you to prove it.
Throughout high school, Mallory stayed close to running while she spent more and more time playing softball, filling the off-seasons with easy miles—nothing serious.
What happens when the team disappears
Running had always been the background music to Mallory’s athletic life, with softball taking center stage. She’d planned to keep it that way and was set to play in a Division III college program. But when she decided not to go, the whole structure disappeared overnight.
To stay active, she continued hitting the gym, going on leisurely jogs outside. Her favorite past time was now solitary in a way it hadn’t been before. “It felt really weird and isolating, no longer being part of a team,” she says. Her identity as an athlete was still there, but the community wasn’t.
In 2013, she moved to Florida looking for a fresh start and quickly got a job working at Orangetheory. “I wasn’t looking for a community,” she says. “I was looking for a job, but lucky for me, I ended up with both.”
Orangetheory gave her the camaraderie she’d been craving, and around the same time, she got back into racing. She fell hard for it but identified another gap almost immediately: run clubs were scarce where she lived, and the ones that existed skewed too fast, too competitive to feel welcoming. So, Mallory trained alone. She got better, she kept going, and then, she moved to New York City.
The city where everything clicked
New York was the catalyst. Mallory had always known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she would start a run club one day. She just hadn’t figured out the how or the when. Soon after her arrival, both questions answered themselves.
New York is a city built on proximity—millions of people sharing sidewalks, subway cars, and apartment buildings—and with that density comes a natural sense of connection. For Mallory, it was tangible, and almost as an invitation, she started sharing her runs on social media. The DMs flooded her inbox, mostly from women who wanted to join in. One day, she put up an Instagram Story telling people where she’d be posting up pre-run on Saturday. Six people showed. By week three, there were over 100 runners.
And that’s how No More Lonely Runs, began, not from a business plan, but from a spur-of-the-moment call to action.
Building a place where everyone belongs
“I’ve realized it’s not about how many people show up or about being the biggest run club,” Mallory says. “It’s about making the biggest positive impact.”
What No More Lonely Runs became, in practice, is a pace-inclusive community that is now made up of sub-groups running anywhere from 7-minute miles to 11-minute miles. That range wasn’t planned, though. It evolved because the people kept coming, and because Mallory understood, early on, that pace transparency isn’t just a logistical detail. It’s the thing that makes someone feel like they fit in before they’ve even laced up.
“I fear runners think they won’t be able to keep up with others,” she says. “That’s why it’s so important to be transparent and intentional about pace.” When a new member shows up for the first time, Mallory has one hope for what they feel: “Comfortable. Like they found a place where they belong.”
The ones who keep you coming back
No More Lonely Runs has grown into something Mallory couldn’t have predicted, but in another sense, it’s the most logical ending to her story that started on the middle school track. Mallory fell in love with running for its consistency, its ability to always be there when your life is filled with unknowns.
Her relationship with gear has followed a similar arc. “I’m very much the same girl I was when I was younger,” she says. “When I find something I like, I buy it in every color.” Her daily trainer of choice? The Nike Pegasus (she owns every version since 2015).
Running, shoes, people—for Mallory, the instinct is the same across all three: when you find something that works, you hold onto it. She realized that earlier than most, and the data caught up to her eventually.
The Zappos Run Down Report:
