TikTok to the track Gen Z women are the fashionable force behind running's third great boom

Hear that sound? It is the fingertaps of Gen Z scrolling through Instagram reels and TikToks. The pings of card readers as more stylish gear leaves the shelves. The drumbeat of cushioned soles on pavements up and down the country. But, most of all, it is the noise of the jaws of the smartest people in sport crashing to the floor.

- Sean Ingle

Hear that sound? It is the fingertaps of Gen Z scrolling through Instagram reels and TikToks. The pings of card readers as more stylish gear leaves the shelves. The drumbeat of cushioned soles on pavements up and down the country. But, most of all, it is the noise of the jaws of the smartest people in sport crashing to the floor. Because, suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, we are in the third great running boom, one that almost nobody saw coming and powered almost entirely by Gen Z, particularly women.

"You go back to the first boom in the 1970s and 80s and there was no real diversity; it was all thin, skinny, white guys in very tight shorts," says Hugh Brasher, the event director of the London Marathon. The second boom? That, he says, came after Paula Radcliffe broke the world marathon record in 2003, leading to a jump in women taking up running, before parkrun grew the numbers again. "You look now and it really is all ethnicities and demographics," Brasher says.

"This explosion – and it is an explosion – has been brilliant to see. I wish any of us could say we created it, like Netflix and Drive to Survive, or even saw it coming. But we didn't. It's been an organic explosion."

More than 1.1 million have entered the ballot for the 2026 London Marathon – not only a world record but nearly double the figure from two years ago. Strikingly, for the first time, the male/female split is almost 50/50. The race is also getting younger: more than a third of UK entries are aged from 18 to 29 years old.