Why I built Run Love Sprint

I spent a lot of years running alone, and for the most part I enjoyed it. There is something honest about being out on your own with nothing to think about except the next mile. But anyone who has run seriously will know the particular flatness of a long Sunday morning when your legs have gone and there is nobody alongside you to make the time pass. That was where this started. Not with a business plan, and not with any grand idea about building a company, just the fairly ordinary wish that somebody else was there.

From underwriting to over training

My background is not in sport. I spent my early career in insurance, working my way up to become a construction underwriter, which was a good job and a stable one and not remotely what I wanted to be doing for the next thirty years. When the chance came to join an early stage insurtech called Insurercore as its first employee, I took it, and that turned out to be the most useful thing I have ever done professionally. In a small company you end up doing everything, so I found myself running product design, marketing, project management, legal liaison and recruitment, often in the same week. I learned how to build something from nothing and watch it come to life, and I learned some harder lessons too, like how quickly a product gets ruined when you bolt on features because one person asked for them, and how much difference it makes when you are ruthless about what a development team can realistically deliver in a sprint.

Insurercore was eventually acquired, and I stayed on for a year afterwards. It was a fair outcome and I have no complaints about it, but our vision and the acquirer's were never really the same, and we watched the thing we had built get absorbed into a much larger machine. Going from being in charge of your own direction to being one small part of somebody else's is a particular kind of deflating, and it left me with a strong appetite to build something of my own again. I took voluntary redundancy, spent a few months travelling around South East Asia to clear my head, and came back intending to start a software agency with Goran, who I had worked with at Insurercore and trusted completely. He would handle development, I would handle product and find UK clients, and that was the plan.

Then I went for a run, and the idea for Run Love Sprint arrived more or less fully formed. By the time I got home I was sketching database schemas.

The problem is not loneliness, it is plumbing

What struck me, once I started properly looking at it, was not really the loneliness. It was how badly served runners are by the tools available to them. If you want to find a running group, you end up trawling Instagram accounts that have not been updated since last spring. If you want a coach, you are on the fourth page of Google comparing websites. Races live across three different directory sites. Coordinating a single run with two friends means bouncing between WhatsApp groups. All of it exists, none of it is in one place, and almost none of it actually helps you meet anybody. There are platforms that track your runs beautifully and I have no interest in competing with them. What nobody had built was the layer underneath, the part that helps you work out who is running near you this week and whether you might like to join them.

Seven million runners, and nowhere to find each other

The numbers behind this are not small. Around seven million adults in England run regularly, and that figure went up by more than five hundred thousand in a single year. London alone has something like 1.3 million adult runners. Run club participation has grown several times over since 2022, and when people are asked why they join, the most common answer from younger runners is not fitness, it is wanting to meet people. At the same time, more than nine million people in the UK say they feel lonely on a regular basis. Running is one of the cheapest and most accessible things anybody can do about that, provided there is some way of finding other people to do it with. London has never struck me as a lonely city by nature. We simply have not had a decent way of finding each other.

What we built

So Goran and I built it. The app went live on both app stores in July, four months after the company was incorporated, with no agency involved and no outside money. You can post a run and let people join it, or find one happening near you this week. Every neighbourhood and every London university has a community group waiting, so you can join something without knowing a soul in it, and anyone can start their own group in a couple of minutes. You can find a coach or a pacer, browse races, and get something back from the independent shops, physios, studios and cafes that keep runners going. More than thirty of those businesses have come on board already, which has been one of the genuinely heartening parts of this.

What we got wrong

It has not all gone smoothly, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. We exhibited at a running festival in September and set up near the finish line, which taught me that ten thousand runners who have just finished a race want a beer and a sit down rather than a new app to download. We spread our early marketing thinly across the whole of London, which meant no single area ever built up enough activity to feel alive, and that is the thing this product lives or dies on.

We are fixing both, concentrating everything now on South West London, starting in Putney, and working with partners to host run clubs from their own doors. A run that starts outside the cafe you already go to, or the physio you already see, is a much smaller step for a nervous beginner than turning up to an established club where everyone knows each other and nobody knows you.

What I want from it

What I want from this is fairly simple. I want somebody who has just moved to London to be able to find three people to run with on a Saturday morning. I want the local physio who genuinely understands runners to be findable by the runners who need her. I want a beginner who is intimidated by the idea of a running club to have somewhere to start. And selfishly, I would like to stop doing all my long runs on my own.

If that sounds like something you would use, we are on the App Store and Google Play, and the whole thing is free. Come and find a run.