01AboutMunich · est. 2024
Come for the running.
Stay for the people.
Run and Chill is an independent multi-sport community in Munich. Four free training sessions a week, across running, swimming, and cycling, since September 2024. No fees. No signup. Open to anyone who wants to keep showing up.
Why we exist.
Munich is full of people who just moved here. New job. New city. New apartment, still half-empty. Running is one of the easiest ways to find friends in a city you don't know yet, but most running groups are either elite race teams that intimidate beginners, or unstructured meet-ups that don't really go anywhere.
Run and Chill was built in the middle. We have a real weekly structure with proper sessions: intervals on Wednesday, hill sprints on Thursday, long run on Sunday. There is guidance, there are session leads, there is a sense that you are doing the work. But there is also brunch after, a WhatsApp group with people planning ski weekends and dinner clubs, and an explicit promise: nobody is too slow. The leaderboard tracks how often you show up, not how fast you run.
The community ended up doing what we hoped: it gave the recently-arrived a way to belong, and gave the long-time locals a reason to keep training when motivation dipped. Six months in we had 60+ regulars. A year in, more than a thousand people were in the WhatsApp groups.
What we do.
Four sessions, four corners of the city, every week of the year. Pace groups when needed. No drop-offs.
Once a month on a Saturday morning, a 50 km Bike & Chill from Perlacher Forst Nord. Beyond the weekly cadence, the calendar fills out with the big shared moments: the Munich Marathon takeover in October, the Tirol Training Camp in May, the FITSEVEN-ELEVEN Challenge in April, the Olympia Hill Sprints, plus whatever else the crew is racing or cheering on.
Who shows up.
Pace ranges from absolute beginners running their first 5k to sub-three-hour marathoners. The community is international: members come from across Europe, North America, and Asia. English and German are both spoken at every session. Most of the WhatsApp chats default to English.
What we stand for.
Consistency, not competition. The leaderboard ranks attendance, not pace. The fastest person in the room is not more welcome than the slowest.
Free, forever. No membership fee, no signup fee, no per-session charge. We're not a Verein, not a brand activation, not a chain. Optional merch helps fund community events, but no purchase is required to train with us.
Community-run. Rotating session leads, an open WhatsApp, a calendar anyone can suggest events for. The idea is to be the kind of crew you'd want to be part of, run by the people in it.
Who we build with.
Our long-term partner is Stox Energy Socks, the compression socks you'll spot in most of our photos. Beyond that we work with brands on full event moments rather than logo placements: Huawei, Tirol, Vitamin Well, Ryzon, BE-KIND, Naturata, Sporthunger, and Chimpanzee have all been part of the calendar.
The pitch to brands is simple: we don't sell impressions, we build moments your brand shows up inside. Reach out.
Where we live online.
The fastest way in: look at the schedule, pick a session, show up. No DM required.
Beyond that, we're on Instagram, on Strava, and in a public WhatsApp community. Brand and partnership questions: info@runandchill.de.