FUN NOT FAST Running Birmingham for Community Coffee and Joy

A Gap in the City, a Name That Says Everything

The name alone tells you what you need to know. FUN NOT FAST does not ask how fast you ran your last 5K or whether you are chasing a personal best. It asks whether you fancy a Saturday morning run through one of Birmingham's finest parks, a proper coffee afterwards, and the kind of easy conversation that makes an hour disappear. That proposition, disarmingly simple on the surface, turned out to be exactly what a segment of Birmingham's running population had been quietly waiting for. When Daniel, the crew's founder, put the idea into the world in June 2020, he was not building a brand or launching a product. He was solving a problem he had personally felt: the absence of a running community in his corner of Birmingham that placed social connection on equal footing with athletic performance. The name came first, almost as a statement of intent, and everything else followed from it. It is worth pausing on that founding moment because it explains so much about how the crew operates today. Daniel did not gather a committee or spend months in planning. He created a logo, opened an Instagram account at funnotfast, and started spreading the word through the channels available to him during a period when public life had effectively paused. Lockdown, for all its difficulties, offered something useful: time, empty streets, and a city full of people quietly missing human contact. Into that gap stepped FUN NOT FAST.

What Lockdown Made Possible

There is a specific kind of restlessness that builds during a lockdown. Routines collapse, social structures dissolve, and the familiar textures of daily life become suddenly unavailable. For runners, however, one thing remained: the ability to head outside, alone or in very small groups, and move. Daniel had been running for several years before June 2020, and his experience of running clubs and crews in various cities around the world had given him a clear picture of what a good running community could look like. He had seen it work elsewhere. He knew the ingredients: accessibility, consistency, a welcoming attitude toward newcomers, and an understanding that running is as much about what happens before and after the miles as it is about the miles themselves. What he had not found in his own neighbourhood was a group that put all of those things together without layering on the competitive pressure that can make running feel exclusionary. So he built one himself. The timing, in retrospect, was both challenging and fortunate. Challenging because gathering people in parks during a public health crisis required careful navigation of rules and restrictions. Fortunate because the appetite for outdoor social activity, even at a small scale, was enormous. People wanted to move, to see familiar faces, to have something to show up for on a Saturday morning. FUN NOT FAST offered exactly that. The group began small, as most honest running crews do, with a handful of people who found each other through Instagram and word of mouth. From those early weeks at Banners Gate Park, a rhythm established itself that has continued ever since.

Banners Gate and the Pull of Sutton Park

The choice of Banners Gate Park as a meeting point is not incidental. Sutton Park, the broader green space that contains the Banners Gate entrance, is one of the largest urban parks in Europe, a fact that surprises many people who have not visited Birmingham or who hold outdated impressions of the city as purely industrial. The park encompasses heathland, woodland, wetland, and open grassland across nearly 2,400 acres, offering the kind of running environment that most city-based crews can only dream of. On a Saturday morning at 8:30 am, before the dog walkers arrive in force and the families spread their blankets across the grass, the park has a particular quiet to it. The light through the trees, the soft give of grass underfoot, the occasional flash of a deer in the distance: these are the conditions in which FUN NOT FAST does its best work. The pace sits at a comfortable conversational level, steady enough to feel like genuine exercise, relaxed enough to hold a full sentence without gasping. For a group built around the idea that running should be enjoyable first and effortful second, Sutton Park provides the ideal backdrop. It is terrain that rewards attention rather than speed, and the routes that Daniel has mapped through and around it reflect that sensibility. The Banners Gate entrance is practical too. It is accessible, recognisable, and carries none of the intimidation that can come with meeting at a running track or a sports facility. You turn up in your kit, someone waves you over, and you run.

Birmingham Through a Different Lens

One of the quieter ambitions behind FUN NOT FAST is to reframe how its members experience Birmingham. The city has a canal network that exceeds Amsterdam's in total length, a fact that local runners quickly discover and visitors almost never expect. Daniel's vision for the crew has always included using those canals, along with the city's parks and green corridors, as connective tissue between different suburbs and neighbourhoods. Running is one of the most efficient ways to understand a city's geography, to feel the gradient between districts, to notice the transition from one kind of architecture to another, to stumble across a courtyard or a mural or a bakery that no map algorithm would have surfaced. FUN NOT FAST approaches Birmingham with that spirit of discovery. The plan to use different cafes as meeting points, rotating through the city's food and drink landscape rather than anchoring permanently to a single venue, adds another layer to this exploration. Birmingham has a genuinely diverse and evolving food culture, and folding that into the post-run ritual transforms the outing from a simple exercise session into something closer to a neighbourhood investigation. You run somewhere new, you find somewhere new to eat, and you come away knowing the city a little better than you did before. For a crew of around ten members, that is a workable format. The group is small enough to fit comfortably around a cafe table, large enough to generate real conversation. There is a pragmatism to that scale that suits the crew's personality.

Giving Back as Part of the Run

From its earliest days, FUN NOT FAST has been interested in doing something useful with the community it was building. The crew's first charitable initiative took the form of collecting donations for a local food bank, a straightforward and direct way of connecting the crew's activities to the needs of the wider neighbourhood. Daniel has spoken about plans to expand on this, introducing further initiatives as the group grows and as its members bring their own ideas and energy to the question of how a small running crew can have an impact beyond its own membership. This orientation toward giving back is worth noting because it sits naturally alongside the crew's broader philosophy rather than feeling bolted on as an afterthought. A group that names itself FUN NOT FAST is already signalling that it measures success by something other than performance metrics. Adding community contribution to that value set is entirely consistent. It suggests that the crew's identity is organised around what running can do for people, both participants and bystanders, rather than around what runners can extract from their training. That framing makes FUN NOT FAST a genuinely social enterprise in the informal sense: a group of people who have found that showing up together regularly, moving through their city, and looking outward as well as inward, is a worthwhile way to spend a Saturday morning. The miles are almost beside the point.

Saturday Morning at Banners Gate

The routine is uncomplicated. Saturdays, 8:30 am, Banners Gate Park. The group assembles, introductions are made for anyone who is new, and the run begins. The pace is forgiving, the atmosphere is relaxed, and the conversation tends to carry itself. What happens after the run, the coffee, the debrief, the gradual dispersal of the group back into their separate Saturdays, is as much a part of the experience as the running itself. FUN NOT FAST does not require a subscription, a minimum pace, or any particular level of experience. It requires only that you show up and that you are prepared to enjoy yourself. The crew's Strava club offers a way to follow along digitally, track shared efforts, and stay connected between runs. For those coming from outside Birmingham or visiting the city on a weekend, the Saturday morning run at Sutton Park offers an immediate point of entry into the local running community, a way of seeing a corner of the city that most tourists never reach, in the company of people who know it well. Daniel built FUN NOT FAST for Birmingham runners who wanted more than a workout. Four years on, the crew is still doing exactly what it promised. Easy running, good coffee, real community. The name says it all.