Strava's 12th annual Year in Sport trend report — the most-cited single dataset in mainstream running journalism — was published in late 2025 and is finally being chewed over by sports-science researchers, federation policy teams and run-club organisers in the way that this year's spring marathon entry data demands. The headline finding has been celebrated everywhere: running is once again the top-logged sport on the platform, and the number of new clubs created on Strava nearly quadrupled across 2025 to one million worldwide, with running clubs growing 3.5x year-on-year and hiking clubs 5.8x. Less attention has been paid to the report's two-line note on the female safety gap, but it is arguably the more consequential trend running's organisers will need to act on through 2026.
The number that has now been widely repeated is this: women in the United States are 70% more likely than men to say that lack of a safe space to exercise is a barrier to working out. Globally the gap is narrower, with 9% of women citing that barrier compared with closer parity in cycling and gym usage, but the US figure is far enough outside the global pattern that researchers at the University of Bath and at Loughborough are already designing follow-up work. Both groups have separately concluded that the headline gap is a participation tax, not a preference difference: women who run still log slightly more weekly volume than men in the same age band on Strava, but they do so during a narrower window of safe daylight hours and on a smaller subset of routes.
That same Strava dataset captured a quieter offsetting trend. Female cycling activity logged on Strava is up nearly 20% since 2019, and women were 21% more likely than men to record weight-training sessions in 2025. Run-club participation is the other piece of the puzzle. The quadrupling of new running clubs is being driven, on the platform's own analysis, by women aged 25–39 — the cohort most likely to cite safety as a barrier, and the cohort that joining a club most directly addresses. Strava reports that 27% of women say run clubs feel "exclusive or intimidating" but that, when surveyed afterwards, women who joined a club reported the highest year-on-year increase in weekly mileage of any demographic the platform tracked. The clubs are, in effect, the workaround.
For race directors and parkrun coordinators reading the report, the operational implications are stacking up quickly. Routes that pass through poorly lit park stretches between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. and again between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. are, on the Strava heat maps, used roughly 60% by men in 2025 — even where the same routes show 50/50 use during midday hours. parkrun's own internal data, shared with Running Lookout last month, shows a 14-percentage-point shift toward women joining cohort runs (5+ runners walking or running together) compared with 2023. The Year in Sport's most useful contribution may turn out to be the social-policy framing: safety is not principally an equipment or training-content problem, it is an environment problem, and it is most efficiently solved by groups.
None of which detracts from the upbeat top line. Running on Strava in 2025 was as healthy as it has ever been, racing entries surged across every distance from parkrun to ultra, and the platform's Heatmap layer shows new corridors of activity in cities that, ten years ago, were largely empty after dark. But the report is, on a careful read, two stories — one about a sport in expansion, the other about who is and is not getting to share equally in that expansion. The clubs Strava measured quadrupling are the clearest signal that runners, and especially women runners, are not waiting for institutions to close the gap on their behalf. They are forming the workarounds themselves, and Strava's data is the first place that work is showing up at scale.