Shortly after Rhodri Morgan first took up running in his early 30s, he tried going to running clubs. The experience almost made him think pounding the pavement wasn’t for him. “I found them very unwelcoming,” he remembers. “The first time I went, I turned up in a Metallica T-shirt, started chatting to people, but they didn’t want to know. For the hour-and-a-half I was there, nobody really spoke to me.” He found the environment too elitist and competitive, with its members less interested in helping beginners than in what sort of trainers could make them run that second faster. After shaking that negative experience off, in the true spirit of punk, Rhodri decided to do running his own way.
One day, he bumped into his old friend Jimmy Watkins, poetically, while both were out running – Rhodri was doing his first ever marathon, while Jimmy was running a half marathon in the other direction. A former professional athlete, Jimmy had recently rediscovered running as a way of disposing of the unhealthy habits that had crept into his life over the course of a decade. Sick of the discipline and regimentation of athleticism, he joined a band instead, only to fall into an unhealthy and repetitive lifestyle where drinking to excess was a common occurrence.
The old friends reconnected online, bonding over both running and the music they loved, and realised there must be more people like them who didn’t fit the image of the traditional runner, or who didn’t quite have the confidence to lace up their shoes and head outside. Hoping to show these people the countless benefits that running could have, the pair started the online community Running Punks.