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It is 10am on a soggy Sunday and I am groping for excuses to stay at home, cocooned from the cold. Eventually, I put on my trainers and rainproof jacket and head out. In Battersea Park, south-west London, I find the Runners High Run Club, a new group of slow runners I’ve arranged to meet, who do a monthly 5km together. I approach two young women — both called c, and both here because they are keen to find peers who will not sneer at them for their lack of speed but rather spur them on. As someone who has only got into a jogging habit since the pandemic, I am keenly aware of my lack of speed. Longtime runners breeze past me (though I did beat a woman who was jogging while taking clippings with a pair of secateurs). I feel embarrassed talking to athletic friends and colleagues who jostle for position on the Strava app and strive for personal bests in marathons. Ultimately, running makes me feel alive. The solitude clears my mind, and the longer I run, the more I space out. But after doing a half-marathon last year — slowly — I felt a bit aimless, with no urgent desire to commit to a full marathon. This was compounded when I sprained my ankle, tripping over on my way to buy bagels (tragically, I was dispatched to hospital before I made it to the shop). In search of motivation, I found a small community on social media of self-styled slow runners. Martinus Evans, aka @300poundsandrunning on Instagram and author of the Slow AF Run Club book, advocates “sexy pace”. After a doctor told him to “lose weight, or you are going to die”, he decided to train for a marathon. On his first day, he came off the treadmill. “I felt hellacious,” he says. “It was not enjoyable.”Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
Nonetheless, he went on to run eight marathons, and has built a virtual community of slow runners. Evans wants anybody and everybody to tap into their running potential, “whatever pace they are”. Typically, he says, the message “is that you have to be fast. And if you’re not fast, you’re not a runner.” It is this desire for inclusiveness that drove Celina Stephenson to create the Runners High run group in Battersea, despite never taking part in a running club before. The 26-year-old, who works for her family’s wine business, says she was “scared” of judgment and of holding everyone back. In July, she decided on a whim to sign up for the London Marathon and posted videos of her progress on social media as a form of accountability: “I was sick of giving up on myself.”
