Strava's 2026 community trend update has confirmed what every London or Brooklyn run-club organiser has felt for the past 12 months: club running has become the engine of the platform. The Year in Sport refresh, published this week alongside its annual user statistics, reports that running club creations rose 3.5 times year-on-year through the back end of 2025 and that the platform has now passed one million total clubs across all sports. Hiking edged ahead at 5.8 times growth, but running remains the largest category by a distance and the one with the most consistent in-person turnout.
The headline numbers behind the report are striking. Strava's registered user base has reached 180 million, an annual increase of 35 million, with four billion activities logged in 2025 across more than 190 countries. Running was again the most-recorded sport, although walking grew faster as a category for the third year running. The number of marathons, ultramarathons and 100-mile bike rides logged on the platform climbed about 9 per cent, with the average user now exercising for 4.2 hours each week and totalling 30 billion kilometres globally across 2.2 billion individual activities.
The most interesting cultural signal sits in the Gen-Z section of the report. More than half of users aged 16 to 26 told Strava they planned to use the app more in 2026, while a similar majority said they would use Instagram and TikTok the same amount or less. Strava's framing is that 'doomscrolling is out, movement is in', and the data is consistent with a wider behavioural shift away from algorithmic feeds towards apps with explicit social-fitness mechanics. Club-organised events on the platform rose 1.5 times year-on-year, the company said, providing the infrastructure that turns scrolling habits into actual real-world meetups.
For the running ecosystem the implications are practical. Saucony, On, Hoka and New Balance all confirmed in their spring earnings calls that club partnerships had become the most efficient marketing spend they had access to, displacing some of the traditional digital advertising budget. London and Manchester have both passed 1,000 active clubs on the platform, with parkrun feeder clubs accounting for the largest single subset. In the United States, the figure that has pulled the most attention is from New York City, where club run pace groups are now regularly turning out in numbers that exceed the local Tuesday-night track sessions of the early 2010s.
Strava's chief executive Michael Martin used the launch to argue that the company's strategy of leaning into community over individual analytics had been vindicated, and confirmed that further club-organising tools — including a club-specific events tab, integrated route-sharing for sub-groups and a club-only segment leaderboard — would arrive in the second half of 2026. The 14 billion kudos handed out across the platform last year, up 27 per cent on 2024, sit at the heart of the report's central claim: that running has become the activity people use to find each other again.