New Fitness Craze Combines Running, Listening to World Around You
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A new fitness trend that began with a single Instagram post has exploded in popularity, Dumb Runner has learned, gaining thousands of adherents.
Running While Listening to the World Around You involves running while listening to the world around you. The phrase is a combination of the English word running, meaning “running,” and the phrase listening to the world around you, translated literally as “listening to the world around you.”
The phenomenon appears to have begun in April, when an Instagram user called Yoga_Boy1990 shared a short video after a 3-mile run.
“Y’all, I gotta say,” Yoga_Boy1990 said to the camera. “I just did a run? And my AirPods were dead? So I went without?”
“I just … WOW,” he continued. “I heard so much stuff.”
In subsequent videos, Yoga_Boy1990 rattled off lists of things he had heard during his runs, including squirrels chattering in trees, someone playing a piano in a nearby home, a stranger greeting him with a friendly “hello,” and a cyclist warning that she was about to pass him on his left.
“This is wild,” he said. “Y’all have to try this.”
Within days, Yoga_Boy1990’s posts had gone viral and runners were sharing their own Running While Listening to the World Around You posts and videos.
“On today’s run, I heard such a tiny little meow,” wrote one Running While Listening to the World Around You enthusiast on Facebook. “I actually paused my run to see what it was, and I found a cat under a bush.”
“I gave her some scritches and she purred so loud, which I also heard,” the runner wrote. “Best part of my run.”
Another Facebook user, who admitted being skeptical of the trend, wrote that he’s now a convert.
“It literally never would have occurred to me to go for a run while, you know, listening to the world around me,” he wrote. “But after reading about it, I decided to give it a shot.”
In addition to the usual ambient noise, such as the wind blowing through the trees, he wrote, he heard a small child laughing, a street musician strumming a guitar, a friend calling to him from across the street, and random snippets of other people’s conversations.
He also encountered something unexpected, he wrote.
“For a good stretch in the park, I heard nothing at all,” he wrote. “Just this peaceful silence.”
“It was weird, at first,” he wrote. “I found my thoughts sort of drifting, and I realized how rare it is for me to have that—a time where there’s no talking, no music, no data, no real stimuli coming at me, like it does the other 98% of my day. Just me, in my environment, being, and soaking everything in.”
“Then I heard a bird singing,” he wrote, “and I smiled.”
As a trend, Running While Listening to the World Around You is expected to last another month or two before runners go back to Running While Listening to Music and Podcasts.
