"Join the movement", reads the bio of Strasbourg's Mercredi Run club. The hyper-successful club, which sometimes welcomes upwards of 1,000 participants a week, recently celebrated its third anniversary.
But this is far from an isolated success story. Run clubs are popping up across Europe, and according to Strava data, the number of new clubs tripled internationally between 2024 and 2025.
So what's driving the boom and what does it tell us about who we are? Louis Moustakas, Professor of Sports Management and Sports Sociology and Head of the Institute for Sport and Sustainable Development at the University of Applied Sciences Kufstein, joins us to explore what this phenomenon reveals about community, society, and whether run clubs are genuine instruments of social cohesion or simply the latest product of modern individualism.
A report by Benjamin Tomlinson.
