Nike Run Club’s oddly mindful coach

NPR’s Scott Detrow speaks with Chris Bennett about his work as a running coach on the Nike Run Club App.

ADRIAN MA, HOST:

If you’re someone who does a lot of running for exercise, there’s a good chance you’ve got a go-to app for that, right? When it comes to tracking miles and planning routes, there’s Runkeeper fans and Strava heads and MapMyRun devotees. But none of these apps inspire quite the same emotional or maybe even spiritual response as the Nike Run Club app, and to unpack why, I’m handing things off to my colleague, Scott Detrow.

SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: The story starts at a meeting at Nike in 2017. The discussion was all about how hard it is to get people to start running, which is obviously a problem for a company that sells running gear. Chris Bennett, a running coach who works at Nike, was still thinking about it as the meeting ended.

CHRIS BENNETT: And I was with a coworker. And I said, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that hard to get someone to run. And he said, well, what would you do? And I said, I’d go for a run with them. He said, but what do you mean? You can’t go for a run with everyone. And I said, well, if I’m in their ears, I can.

DETROW: They laughed, but they also booked some time at a recording studio in the building.

BENNETT: So two days later, I walked in. I went home. I wrote a couple of scripts – the first run, the next run, the first speedrun and the comeback run – and we recorded them.

DETROW: And this would become the special sauce of the Nike Run Club app. They beta tested these guided runs. People loved them. And pretty soon, Chris Bennett was the voice inside a whole lot of runners’ ears.

All right. So one of those runners is Me. I had had a long stretch where I had stopped running altogether, and these things helped me get back into it. So to get a sense of what it’s like to run with Coach Bennett, we’re going to step outside NPR, and we’re going to go for a run.

BENNETT: You…