Running alone is fine. Running with people is something else.

I started running after I quit football. For a long time that was enough. Until it wasn’t. I missed the part team sport hands you for free: people expecting you, and somewhere to belong.

So I went looking for a run club. That turned out to be the hard part. I scrolled through hundreds of Strava groups and nearly all of them were dead. Last post, two years ago. The ones that looked alive told me nothing: when they ran, where they met, who’d be there, whether I’d fit. I checked their websites. Still nothing.

When I finally found a group that was actually running, I landed in a WhatsApp group with too much of everything. The start location was a paragraph instead of a pin. Sessions changed and I missed it. And the organiser had the same problem from the other side: no idea, until people turned up, whether it’d be four of them or fourteen.

None of this is a people problem. It’s an admin problem, and it lands on the person already doing the most work for free.

I’m building bende so hosting a run takes two minutes instead of being a second job, and so the next person looking for their Tuesday group can actually find it.