Old Man Run Club Proving Age Is Just a Starting Line in New York City

The name was a joke. Three friends, nursing tired legs and bruised egos after a long run through the streets of New York City, started calling themselves old men. It stuck. And then, a few weeks after the 2018 NYC Marathon, Dao-Yi, Eugene, and Ryo did something simple and, as it turned out, consequential: they sent a group email. Nothing fancy, no branding, no website, just a message asking whether anyone wanted to come out for a long run together. The responses came back. People showed up. And the Old Man Run Club was born not from a grand vision but from a straightforward question sent into a contact list after a marathon left three friends feeling their age.

A Group Email That Changed Saturday Mornings

There is something quietly radical about the way the Old Man Run Club came together. No launch event, no logo reveal, no social media countdown. Just three founders who had been joking about feeling old while running, and who decided to find out whether other people felt the same way. The email they sent after the 2018 New York City Marathon was direct and unpretentious, and the community that formed around it has carried those same qualities ever since. Dao-Yi, Eugene, and Ryo are the co-founders of a crew that, from its very first Saturday, made a point of not taking itself too seriously. The name Old Man Run Club was never meant to be exclusive or ironic in a clever, winking way. It was a joke that became an identity, and then became something more useful than that: an open door for runners who might otherwise have felt like they did not belong to the faster, sleeker world of competitive running culture in New York City.

Long Miles Every Saturday Morning

The heartbeat of the Old Man Run Club is Saturday morning. Every week, the crew gathers at Urban Studios and heads out for a long run, and the distance on any given weekend can range anywhere from 9 to 22 miles. That range is not accidental. It reflects one of the founding intentions of the crew: to serve as a platform for runners who want to get more comfortable with longer distances, whatever their current starting point. Some weeks the group pushes deep into double digits. Other weeks, a shorter long run is exactly what people need. The consistency is not in the mileage but in the gathering itself. Saturday at 8:45 in the morning, at Urban Studios, the Old Man Run Club shows up. That reliability over time is what has allowed the crew to grow from a handful of friends responding to a group email into a community of around 50 runners who count on each other week after week.

New York City as the Backdrop and the Challenge

Running long in New York City is its own particular education. The city does not make it easy. There are bridges to climb, boroughs to cross, traffic patterns to navigate, and a general ambient intensity that never fully lets up. But the city also rewards the effort with miles that feel like they contain something: the East River at dawn, the long straight corridors of Central Park at mid-morning, the strange quiet of certain Brooklyn streets before the rest of the neighborhood wakes up. The Old Man Run Club has built its Saturday runs into this landscape, using the city not as a backdrop but as the actual terrain of the experience. Running 15 or 20 miles through New York City with a group of people who are all in it together is a different thing from doing those miles alone. The city becomes more manageable when you are moving through it as a crew, and the distance becomes more approachable when you have company for the long stretches where the mind starts to wander and the legs start to argue.

More Female Than Male, and Nothing Old About It

One of the small pleasures of the Old Man Run Club is explaining the name to people who have not heard of it before. The crew is not a club for old men. It never was. Today, in fact, the membership skews majority female, which makes the name a kind of ongoing gentle absurdity that the founders seem to wear comfortably. The Old Man Run Club is open to everyone, all paces, all experience levels, all ages. The founding energy was never about exclusivity or gatekeeping. It was about the specific camaraderie that comes from feeling like you are not quite keeping up with the world, and finding out that plenty of other people feel the same way, and then going out and running 18 miles together anyway. That openness to all paces is particularly meaningful when it comes to longer distances. Long runs can feel intimidating for runners who have mostly done shorter work, and a crew that genuinely welcomes a wide range of speeds removes one of the main barriers to trying something harder.

A Platform for Going the Distance

The founders have been clear about what they want Old Man Run Club to be: a platform for getting runners more acquainted with longer distances. That framing matters. A platform suggests infrastructure, support, a structure that exists to help people do something they could not as easily do on their own. The long run, which is the cornerstone of marathon and half marathon training, is also one of the lonelier disciplines in running. Most training plans prescribe it for Saturday or Sunday mornings, when the miles stretch out and the clock moves slowly and the silence inside your own head gets very loud. Doing those miles with a group changes the equation entirely. The Old Man Run Club offers runners in New York City a weekly structure for confronting that distance in company, which makes the whole enterprise feel less daunting and considerably more sustainable. For a runner who has been doing 5Ks and 10Ks and wondering whether a half marathon or a marathon is possible, showing up to a Saturday long run with this crew is a concrete and low-stakes way to find out.

The Crew That Kept Showing Up

What makes the Old Man Run Club's story worth telling is not the scale of it but the steadiness. Since January 2018, the Saturday run has happened. Week after week, through New York winters and New York summers, through the particular grind of marathon training season and the quieter off-season weeks, the crew has gathered at Urban Studios and gone out for miles. The three founders, Dao-Yi, Eugene, and Ryo, built something durable by keeping it simple. A group email. A standing meeting time. A commitment to welcoming whoever shows up. The crew now numbers around 50 runners, which is large enough to feel like a real community and small enough for people to actually know each other. In a city as vast and often anonymous as New York, that kind of consistent, human-scale gathering is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the whole point.

If you are in New York City and looking to build your long run mileage in good company, the Old Man Run Club meets every Saturday at 8:45 AM at Urban Studios. Find them on Instagram at oldmanrunclub and come find out what 50 runners who joke about feeling old have built together over the years.