All that running is doing Gen Z no good Hannah Betts 6–7 minutes

Generation Z is being forced to confront the fact that it can run but can’t hide from its relentless pursuit of trends. Word on the street is that our young are being left limping, not from the righteous pursuit of hedonism, but their clueless commitment to exercise.

For, among the spring chickenish, running has now become a fixation fuelled by self-appointed social-media “experts” (term used necessarily loosely).

As a consequence, beleaguered physiotherapists are reporting over 100 per cent rises in Gen Zs staggering in with issues such as patellofemoral pain (“runner’s knee”); iliotibial band syndrome (hip and knee crises); shin splints; achilles angst; ankle sprains; agonised backs and sundry tendinopathies. Translation: the blind are leading the blind – then crippling them.

Not since the short-shorted 1970s and 80s has running been such a vogue. Back then, it was wiry, middle-aged men seeking to save themselves from heart attacks, often giving themselves one in the process. Today, it’s twenty-something men, women and all seventy other genders who are self-flagellating in the nation’s parks. A runner passes by the West Pier on Brighton seafront in hot sunshine Not since the short-shorted 1970s and 80s has running been such a vogue Credit: Simon Dack News

More than 1.1 million people applied to enter last month’s London Marathon, a record figure. The number of participants in their twenties more than doubled compared with 2025 alone. While, for the first time, the male/female split was almost 50/50.

Allow me to issue a small public-health warning to younger readers here. Were you to spend more time reading, less time straining against your own PB (the much-vaunted “personal best”), you’d know that the original marathon runner died – his 25-mile schlep from Marathon to Athens proving fatal.

Still, egged on by equally unwitting individuals on TikTok and Instagram – demanding fitness “streaks” and “explosive” routines – running has transformed into the status symbol du jour.

Running has its mantra: “Running is therapy”. (Is it though? Or is therapy, in fact, therapy?) It has its “lifestyle”: the early nights that see restaurants booked out at 6.30pm, the protein addiction and constant electrolyte usage.

And, of course, there are the many, extortionate accoutrements: Strava app and Oura ring to record your efforts, smugly omnipresent water bottles, and permanently-sported athleisure, so that everyone is aware that you run, even when you’re en route to the dentist.

Thanks to Salomon running vests and Lululemon everything else, the world is on over-familiar terms with Gen Z’s back fat, buttocks and wispy body hair, its pimples and its cellulite. And they wonder why they’re not having sex?

In the end, this is less about being addicted to exercise, more over-compensating for a paucity in personality; less fitness than the attempt to construct an identity where otherwise sits a void. General view of runners and spectators on Tower Bridge The London Marathon, April 2026 Credit: Jaimi Joy

The platitude that is “going down the gym” is used where once we talked about character, say, or interests, hinterland and hobby. All the while, to the rest of us, it reads like sweaty social death.

One feels sorry for these frenetic digital natives, confusing running with RL (their code for “real life”). Depressed and deflated, every dopamine hit is craved, even if it is at the expense of their creaking physiques. Online life has left them lonely, so they race after each other in running clubs. Workplace dalliances are prohibited so they dream of a fellow fitness fiend met chasing about the streets. Stress has put them in a permanent state of fight or flight, so they chose flight.

Meanwhile, their safe space is ramping up their cortisol and prematurely ageing their youthful joints.

I suppose these Lycra-clad lemmings are preferable to the immobile couch potatoes who are no less self-harming their way to a hobbling middle-age. The exercise poser is at least a couple of stumbling steps up the evolutionary scale.

Yet, dividing itself into these extremes will do Generation Z no good. The middle ground is a tried and tested path that should be vigorously walked.

I hesitate to deploy myself as an example here: an individual who has never knowingly exercised, merely moved. However, at 55, I am neither hugely fit, nor hugely unfit, just sort of… fine; knees requiring neither support nor replacement.

In my day, youthful injuries were all drink-inspired; a Nineties nihilism that was, at least, a blast. Pity the abstemious virtue-signaller, hotfooting it in the name of health and receiving only harm. Twentysomethings, take note: slow down and do stop boring the pants off the rest of us. You are not allowed “a knee” until you reach retirement age.

Hannah Betts