What should I consider when searching for a solid running club app?

 So, in the wake of this pandemic, you have chosen to go the path that just about every other walk of life is, getting rid of brick-and-mortar facilities as well as in-person social gatherings as a center for how to do things. We prefer streaming versus cable TV, we prefer e-books and audiobooks over print, nobody uses newspapers or watches the news anymore, very few people even have radios. This transition away from old ways to better digital ways has long been underway, but we have done a multi-decade leap out of necessity from the pandemic. Finally, employers have had to experiment with telecommuting and discovered that people still work, and probably work better than they did and dismal offices they didn’t want to even travel to. Kids do better to, the socializing your kids on a semi regular basis is still a good idea, just perhaps not through the school system which is utterly incapable of mediating bullying and other social problems.

When it comes to things like athleticism, though, it’s very hard to get over the thought that you need a gym, which you really don’t, as very hard to think that you could even train together and build bonds as a team without in-person meet ups. Can an online running club achieve the same results? Well, there is one aspect of it that requires you to be willing to give it a chance, but all of the practical aspects are actually probably better. Let’s talk of brief 2nd about how one of these apps works. An online running club app works in tandem with a phone and, where available, a simple biometric smart watch. It can track movement, speed and various health and biometric bits of information giving coaches a better picture of what’s happening to their athletes while they run, as well as having a precisely-measured recording of the run via data and statistics. This provides better information for coaches, and using assistive algorithms, they can even get suggestions on how to improve their athletes performance and help them be healthier as well.

Virtual races can be arranged in many of these apps, allowing for that level of competition even if people exercising completely different locations at completely different times. Speaking of this, this eliminates conflict of schedule and conflict of preferred venue among teammates, nobody having to travel far to be where everyone wants to meet, nobody having to worry about working their schedule around everyone else’s, when even dedicated athletes still have lives outside of running.

The only real challenge there is getting over that perceived added value to in-person gatherings, something that isn’t mathematically real and is just perceived by our cultural shaping for millennia of it being the only real way to interact with other people. With this social tendency diminishing in subsequent generations anyhow, especially once they realize just what bliss it is to have real privacy while exercising. The only thing you really need to consider is making sure that this thing works with the most standard cheap smart watches and is equally compatible with iOS and android. Trust me, no one in your online running club is going to switch from their preferred phone platform to run your running club app!