How Run Clubs are bringing the Netherlands back together

When I started RunClubs.nl, the first question was simple: how many Run Clubs (a.k.a. hardloopclubs) are there in the Netherlands? Nobody could tell me. The clubs were out there, but scattered all over the internet: a handful on Instagram, a few on Strava, some buried in Facebook groups, others with nothing but a poster in a coffee bar window. There was no list, no map, no single place to look. If you wanted to find a club near you, it wasn't an easy search.

That was the gap. On Sunday mornings, groups of runners were suddenly gathering outside the coffee bar where there had been none a year before, but there was nowhere to actually find them. So I built it.

Now I can finally answer that first question. The platform holds hundreds of Run Clubs, spread across cities and towns all over the country, with new runs landing on the calendar every week. And what I see tells the story of the running comeback better than any trend piece could. Here is what it looks like from under the hood.

Where it is growing fastest

The Run Club wave is not a Randstad story alone, but the big cities are leading for sure. Utrecht is the surprise leader, with Amsterdam close behind and Rotterdam and Eindhoven right in the mix. And it is blooming well beyond the big four, from Arnhem to Den Bosch and Wageningen.

What a ranking does not show might be the most interesting part: plenty of cities and towns still have just one active club, or none at all. That is where the opportunity sits. In many places a whole group of would-be runners is waiting for someone to simply pick a day, a time, and a starting point.

Why a run is the new night out

Ask our runners why they take part, and the answer is rarely about their pace. It is about the other people.

We live in a time where contact runs through a screen more and more. Working from home, texting, scrolling, doom-feeds. A Run Club is the antidote, and that is the whole point: it is deliberately offline. For one hour your phone goes in your pocket and stays there. No likes, no notifications, no algorithm deciding who you talk to. Just real people, real streets, and a conversation that happens because you are running next to someone, not because an app suggested it.

You do not have to force anything like you would at a party. You show up, you run five kilometres next to a stranger, and by the time you are sitting down for coffee, you know someone. That coffee (or, at some clubs, the beer) afterwards is not a side note. It is often the whole point. These are friendships made in the real world, the old-fashioned way, which is exactly why they stick.

And the best part: the group is your alarm clock and your excuse to go anyway. A grey, wet Tuesday evening in November you skip on your own. But if you know twenty others are waiting for you, you lace up after all. That is the quiet superpower of running together.

Three runners I see walk in every week

After hundreds of sign-ups, I see roughly three types come back, and there is a kind of club for each:

🌱 The cautious starter

Has never run a full 5K and is afraid of holding the group up. For them the Beginner Friendly clubs are gold: nobody gets left behind, and the pace adapts to the group.

🧳 The newcomer in town

Just moved, knows nobody yet, looking for a way in. A Social run with a fixed coffee afterwards is exactly that. Clubs like the Amsterdam Coffee Run build their whole identity around it.

🏅 The experienced runner who needs some variety

The distances are no problem and the routine is locked in, but running alone has gone stale. For them it is about finding their people: a Performance group that pushes the pace, or a Trail Running club that turns the weekly run into something to look forward to.

And then there is a fourth type that is not a runner looking for a club at all: the organiser who already has one. A lot of sign-ups are people who have been running a club for months or years, scattered across Instagram and Strava, who finally have one place to be found. That is the gap closing in real time.

The point: there is no such thing as "the" runner. And so there is no such thing as "the" Run Club either. The trick is finding the right one.

How to find your club

The hardest part of finding a Run Club used to be that you had to know someone who knew someone. We fixed that. It comes down to three steps: pick your city, filter by the kind of runner you are, and just show up to one run. It takes about five minutes, and I wrote a full step-by-step guide on how to find a Run Club near you.

Nothing in your town yet? Then you might be the one who starts the first club. That is how nearly every club on the platform began: with one person, one message, and one date.

Join the comeback

This is not a finish line, it is the start. Every week new clubs appear, in towns where nobody ran together last year. The list keeps growing, but behind every new club is the same simple thing: people rediscovering their city, their health, and each other, one run at a time.

Whether you are running your very first kilometres or training for your tenth half marathon, there is a group waiting for you. Find a Run Club near you and take your first step this Sunday.

Let's run,
Rick