#20: Lunge [Singles] Running Club
I can’t remember how I first heard about Lunge, the run club for singles that meets every Wednesday under the arch in Washington Square Park. Suddenly it was on my radar, being aggressively marketed at me via Instagram reels—though it doesn’t take a great deal of data gathering to discover that I’m both single and a runner.
Friends of mine had heard about it too; the infamous hordes of finance dudes and dudettes wearing all-black running clothes, descending on the West Side Highway in a pheromone-emitting wave of biblical proportions (as per the rules: if you’re single wear black, and if you’re taken wear color—spoiler alert: no one wore color). One such friend who had heard about it was a guy friend—he prefers to remain unnamed for the obvious reason of not wanting to be caught dead at a “singles run club”—who agreed to attend as moral/journalistic support. Plus, I wanted to be a neutral observer, not a target of the least self-aware men you could possibly imagine, and I figured that having a guy hanging around would signal I was off-limits.
I made a last-minute decision to run to Washington Square Park from my home near the south end of Prospect Park, because not only was I full of pent-up energy and a little excitement—what if I locked eyes with the one quality guy there, the needle in a horny haystack, who was dragged there (nearly against his will) by his shittiest friend, and we fell in love at first sight?—but also it would take about the same amount of time for me to subway there, evoking the 50-mile race in Arizona where humans compete against horses.
I found my friend amidst a growing throng of people in their early- to mid-twenties, predominantly living in Manhattan (you can just tell), flowing towards the arch as if drawn there by a magnetic field. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them—over 1,000 in total, according to their Instagram. Don’t believe me? Behold this image my friend took, which captures just a mere section of the madness:
Then a gym-bro-looking guy got on a megaphone to plug the Lunge app, which, according to their website is a dating app used to “Match with compatible singles exclusively at the same exercise location.” In layman’s terms, this is an app you use to date people who go to your specific gym. We live in hell.
(I did discover that they list the NYC Marathon as one of their gyms, so expect updates on that front. Getting cruised while running a literal marathon would be heinous. And yet…..)
The Lunge founder then told us about the walk (1.5 miles) and run (3 miles) routes: the running one was basically just bopping over to the West Side Highway, running south for a bit along the road (not on the promenade by the water, they got in trouble for having bad etiquette/being obstructive), and then running back up to Chelsea, finishing at a bar by the Highline.
The path was littered with professional photographers and fitness influencers filming TikTok content, and though in reality my friend and I covered our faces and sped up, I fantasized that I was an off-duty celeb trying to hide from the paparazzi, rather than a regular person at risk of having their likeness used to promote a “singles run club”.
At first, the group was like a natural disaster, stopping traffic and barreling down pedestrians, flooding entire West Village blocks, and drawing glares from passersby. By the time we reached the highway, the crowd had thinned considerably, but other than exchanging niceties with some sweet boys who seemed to be in their early 20s (and really struggling with the running part), we didn’t talk to anyone, nor were we approached. The run was only 2.84 miles in total, according to my GPS watch, though it was naive of me to assume that the organizers would care about accurately mapping the mileage.
When we saw the scene at the bar, the Standard Biergarten—which if bars were zodiac signs would be the running club’s sun sign—we decided to split. The line was positively massive, and to wait for hours just to get into a packed bar full of sweaty consultants who “know the best spot in town for tacos and tequila” and are “experts in getting back the hoodie you stole from me” is very low on the list of things I want to do.
Ultimately, I am glad I went, if not for the pure, unadulterated joy of being a hater then to simply witness the spectacle—had I not seen it with my own two eyes I genuinely might not have believed the scale—hordes and hordes of singles blanketing the streets of the West Village, like locusts poised to destroy an agrarian community’s livelihood.