If you live in New York, chances are, at one point or another, you’ve seen a hoard of people commanding the sidewalk, arms swinging side-by-side, feet falling in stride, all running together. You can find them in parks, on busy streets, on public tracks and, often, at a pub on a Wednesday night, foreheads still glistening with sweat.
The pandemic was a huge boom for the running community: people had a lot of time on their hands, gyms were closed and unprecedented levels of stress had plagued most of the country. Running offers a respite, it takes you outside and it helps manage stress. Runner’s World reported that a survey of nearly 4 thousand runners in 2021 showed that the nearly 30 percent of those runners began during the pandemic. Now, in-person races are back on and many of those people who wandered out alone are looking to use that same hobby to socialize.
Running clubs are not new, but their popularity has never been more prevalent. And, the space they are offering in people’s lives is not simply a time and location to get your weekly or daily run in. They are social clubs, potential dating hubs, a place to find a new roommate or even a new job. Influencers are starting running clubs in cities large and small. The New York Times published an article in September of 2023 with the headline, “My Running Club, My Everything.” In November of that year, Elle Magazine published a piece titled, “Is Strava the New Dating App?” referencing the gps-tracking app that includes a social feed of your workouts, runs, bike rides and swims for your followers to give likes to (called “Kudos” on the app). Most recently, Strava has also added a direct-message feature.
This map was created as an interactive reference to help anyone interested in joining a run club in New York find their group. Currently, it is set to only include Brooklyn and Queens, but the goal is to expand it to all five boroughs. You can see the full app through the link here.
The core of this map is a database of running clubs that I am building over time. I searched through New York Road Runners official database of registered clubs, as well as researched each borough and groups titled ‘run club.’ Many of these groups I found through social media. To get the point data, I found every day and time that each group met and then located the latitude and longitude points for each. For groups that meet at Grand Army Plaza (the most singularly popular spot in Brooklyn), I used Google Maps to create slightly separate points (if I knew where specifically at the meeting point the group met, I tried to be exact) so that when zoomed out the map would show one point but when looking closer, you could see many individual running groups meeting in that spot. Some points do not fit inside the borough boundaries because those groups have meet-up’s in Manhattan or outside of New York. Those individual points include labels and are still color-coded to the group they belong with.
The dataset is organized with these columns:
| name | meeting_spot | neighborhood | latitude | longitude | run_type | avg_distance | weekday | meetup_time | website | notes | social |
In the map itself, the app is set to first show you the full list of Brooklyn and Queens running clubs. In the layers panel, you can toggle off the full view of each borough and instead toggle on a specific day, and then specific time.
In further iterations, I’d like to organize these groups more by run_type and avg_distance. The majority of information available for each club did not include the type of run or the distance publicly. Most often, if they did include a run_type, the distance was labeled as ‘varied.’ For many groups, this information is given once you’ve paid a membership fee and gotten added to their private Discord, WhatsApp or newsletter. Another distinction that could be important is to have the labels for clubs change depending on whether they are a members-only group. For larger groups, like Prospect Park Track Club, there is no membership requirement to run with the group on their open runs. However, access to their Discord and their training-runs is for members-only. I’ve added this information, when applicable, to the notes section of the pop-up labels.
The coloring of the map will also likely change as boroughs get added. Ideally, only one borough would include color at a time, while the others would be grayed-out. Currently, unless you are already familiar with the branding and color schemes of the clubs themselves, the continuity of color likely only starts to register once you’ve clicked around a fair amount of circles.
I’d also like to build out a better static map. An accordion-panel-style printed sheet with information about the clubs inside or on the back would be a fun, interesting visual display.
And, I’d like to explore hosting the app and it’s functionality somewhere outside of ArcGIS. ArcGIS is a powerful too but the setup of the app builder is limiting and requires the large box of text I’ve included at the beginning of the experience to walk through how to use the app and how to toggle different features. A better developer would figure out how to create those as a pop-up’s on first use with arrows and directional tools. An even better UX/UI would be to host it in a way that required less instruction.
I also experimented with creating this map as a dashboard to see if there was a way to show more about the data of the map: there are 31 run clubs in Brooklyn, 17 in Queens, a breakdown of the labeled workouts (of which there are only a few), but I found this to be too messy and lacked the immediate exploration the app-builder created.
