Be More You Running with Openness and Mental Well-Being in London

It started with a conversation neither of them planned to have. After a track session at Mile End Stadium in East London, two friends named Rob and Sha found themselves talking about something runners rarely discuss mid-cooldown: how they were actually feeling. Sha had been quietly carrying anxiety, stress, and depression for some time, and a recent encounter with a breath coach had shifted something in him. Rob opened up too. What followed was not a training plan or a pace target. It was a question: what would it look like if a running crew held space for that kind of honesty? That question became Be More You, and the answer has been unfolding since October 2018.

A Founding Circle Built on Trust

Rob and Sha did not build Be More You alone. They brought in Annabel, Sarah, Lindsay, and Onder as co-founders, forming a core group of six people who each brought their own relationship with running and mental well-being to the table. Together, they created something deliberately unglamorous in the best possible sense: weekly check-in sessions held at Cafe 1001, a beloved gathering spot just off Brick Lane in Shoreditch. The venue matters. Cafe 1001 sits in one of London's most creatively charged neighbourhoods, a place where community has always been the draw rather than the decor. People would arrive, lace up if they were running, but also sit, talk, listen, and share. Mindfulness exercises were woven into the sessions alongside gratitude practices and active listening. The format was loose enough to breathe but intentional enough to hold. Word got around, as it tends to do in a city like London, and runners from all corners of the city began showing up, drawn not by a pace requirement or a distance target, but by the possibility of being understood.

Running as a Vehicle for Something Deeper

Be More You operates from a philosophical position that is straightforward to state but surprisingly rare in practice: running and mental well-being are not separate pursuits. They are the same conversation, approached from different angles. The crew's founding principle, which the team has carried from those first Brick Lane sessions into every event and collaboration since, is that no one belongs here more than you. That phrase is not a tagline. It is a structural commitment. The crew deliberately dismantled the gatekeeping mechanisms that tend to form around running groups, the minimum pace, the prerequisite fitness level, the unspoken hierarchy of the experienced and the newcomer. In their place, Be More You put acceptance, mutuality, and the kind of fun that emerges when people stop performing and start showing up as themselves. The crew draws on the frameworks of positive psychology, not as an academic exercise, but as a practical guide to how people talk to each other on a run, how they respond when someone is struggling, and how they celebrate progress that has nothing to do with a finishing time.

Sha Hussain and the Philosophy of Process

To understand Be More You, it helps to understand Sha. He ran his first marathon in London, finishing in four hours and thirty-five minutes, and that initial experience planted something in him that has been growing ever since. Since 2006, he has completed twenty-five marathons across the world, including the London, New York, Berlin, and Boston majors. He has run the Marathon du Mont Blanc. He has taken on The Speed Project. By 2023, he crossed the finish line in Sevilla in three hours and thirteen minutes, and he has qualified for Boston not once but twice. These are not numbers he leads with, but they matter as context, because they illustrate what his guiding philosophy looks like when applied over time. Sha's approach to running and to the crew he helped build is rooted in a single idea: embrace the joy of the process, and the results will follow. That orientation, patient, curious, process-first, shapes everything about how Be More You engages with its community. Running becomes less about conquest and more about cultivation. Sha works as a running and mindset coach, and that dual lens, the physical and the psychological, runs through the DNA of the crew he co-founded.

Collaboration Over Competition

Be More You has never tried to be the biggest crew in London. Instead, the founders made a deliberate choice to work alongside other crews rather than in parallel to them. They have formed partnerships with like-minded running communities across the city and beyond, showing up at events not to promote themselves but to offer what they do best: holding space for honest conversations about mental health within a running context. Their workshops and talks have taken them to running expos, festivals, and specially organised events where the audience is already primed to think about the relationship between physical effort and emotional experience. These gatherings bring together runners who might never have crossed paths otherwise, and the Be More You team uses those moments to introduce practices like active listening and mindfulness in ways that feel natural rather than prescriptive. The crew's reach has extended internationally, supporting communities and crews beyond the United Kingdom who are working through similar questions about how to make running genuinely inclusive and emotionally sustaining.

Brick Lane and the East London Running Scene

The choice to base the crew's home sessions around Cafe 1001 was never incidental. Brick Lane and the surrounding streets of Shoreditch have long been a gathering point for people who resist easy categorisation, artists, immigrants, entrepreneurs, athletes, and everyone in between. Running through this part of London means passing street art that changes weekly, markets that spill onto the pavement, and community spaces that have been repurposed and reinvented more times than anyone can count. It is an area that understands transformation on a cellular level, which makes it an apt home for a crew that asks its members to transform how they think about their own well-being. The Be More You Strava club connects members across the city and beyond, and the crew's Instagram serves as the primary channel for updates on runs and events. When runs are active, the crew organises shakeouts and easy sessions in various parts of London, taking advantage of the city's extraordinary variety of running terrain, from the Thames Path with its views of Tower Bridge to the wide, tree-lined paths of Hyde Park and the wilder stretches of Richmond Park.

An Open Door, Always

The membership structure at Be More You is, by design, not much of a structure at all. The crew is open to everyone, and there are no fees, no tryouts, and no hierarchy to navigate. What there is, is a community of people who take seriously the idea that running should make you feel more like yourself, not less. For anyone curious about what Be More You looks like in practice, the best starting point is their Instagram, where the team posts updates on upcoming runs and events. The runs themselves are currently on a flexible schedule, so checking in with the crew directly is the way to find out what is happening and when. That openness is intentional. Be More You has always been more interested in meeting people where they are than in maintaining a rigid calendar. If you find yourself in East London, drawn by the smell of coffee near Brick Lane and the sound of a group talking about something real, you may have already arrived.