Running can be vital to staying physically fit and mentally strong, and the outdoors can confer additional benefits that can’t be replicated on treadmills—being in nature is a proven mood lifter, for instance.
But for women, those benefits come with risks that men can find difficult to fathom. Police in London advised women “not to go out alone” in 2021 after Sarah Everard, a marketing executive in her 30s, was kidnapped while walking at night, then raped and murdered. “Irving woman attacked while out for a run”; “Woman assaulted while jogging in residential Montgomery County”; “Woman attacked while running on greenway – Nashville”—three different local US news outlets filed those stories within the space of a month in early 2024.
Those cases may be statistical exceptions, but catcalls, threats and thrown objects are the rule. A 2023 study by Adidas of 9,000 women across nine countries found that 92% reported feeling “concerned for their safety” while running—and over half had “received unwanted attention, sexist comments or unwanted sexual attention, been honked at, or followed.”
Kate Tellier, a former college athlete who has run since she was a child, has been photographed by a man she didn’t know, followed by a car while out running, and even followed home on foot to her doorstep—experiences that help explain why she only runs during the day, often with only one headphone in, and shares her live location with her partner. A friend of Tellier’s in London only runs in the middle of the street so it’s harder for her to be surprised; another friend—“a former oil trader, the toughest woman I know,” says Tellier—doesn’t go for a run without her dog. “I find it irritating that we have to deal with these everyday nuisances and harassment,” she says. “It’s a problem I want to solve.”
To do so, Tellier, an American living in the Netherlands, started a new nonprofit: Run Her Way. Many organizations exist to help make women feel safe while running—from a nonprofit that uses running to teach leadership principles to local clubs that hold group runs in the evening—but Tellier’s is distinctive in its focus on “building the blueprint for community-led action on female running safety.”
A 2023 study by Adidas of 9,000 women across nine countries found that 92% reported feeling “concerned for their safety” while running.
The idea emerged from a group assignment Tellier undertook while studying for her Master’s degree in Sports Management at the Johan Cruyff Institute.
The task: identify a problem in sports and come up with a solution. Tellier’s group—in which she was the only woman—eventually settled on the problem of women feeling unsafe while running. But they grappled with, as many have, a solution. “We first came up with new versions of existing products and services—an alarm that’s more discrete, so it looks like a hair tie, for instance. But we got to a stage where those just felt so reactive, and it seemed wrong that women should be the only ones responsible for fixing this.”
Tellier’s background in communications and advocacy—she spent eight years working in public policy for Amazon, and before that had worked at Brunswick’s offices in New York and Belgium—pushed her to focus on the kind of “multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder” campaigns she’d previously led. “It couldn’t just be installing streetlights or CCTV,” says Tellier. “It also had to be: ‘How are we educating people in the community? How are we raising awareness? How are we working with law enforcement, local officials?’ There are a lot of organizations already working on things like street harassment, bystander intervention, male allies—we want to bring that all together and supercharge community action on this issue.”
In practice, Run Her Way looks to focus on three particular steps.
The first is collecting data from female runners. “We have customized a map-based community engagement platform that allows for GIS [geographic information system] surveys and in-depth data analysis and reporting,” Tellier says. “The platform features a continuously accessible map that invites runners to provide ongoing feedback while also allowing us to communicate about the implementation of improvements, solutions, and route accreditation.” That data is anonymized, says Tellier, and the goal of collecting it is to be able to translate that into “actionable insights and recommendations the municipalities can use to implement changes.”
That entails working with female runners in what Tellier calls a “crowd mapping exercise”—establish all the popular routes in a community, and pinpoint where along those routes they have experienced incidents or felt unsafe.
That data helps inform a second aspect of their work: “safe route accreditation.” Run Her Way is developing a framework to certify routes that meet specific safety criteria—and will then partner with cities to improve routes that fail to meet the standards. “We want as many female runners as possible to run more confidently in their communities—not because they’ve got a new self-defense spray or alarm, but because they genuinely feel safe.”
The third step is to build communities in these cities that champion women’s running freedom.
“We want as many female runners as possible to run more confidently in their communities—not because they’ve got a new self-defense spray or alarm, but because they genuinely feel safe.”
In addition to corporate sponsorships and government grants, Run Her Way looks to generate revenue by charging municipalities for their service. “What we can offer them is, essentially, ‘partner with us to solve a critical health and safety issue,’” says Tellier. “We can act as a data-driven bridge between female runners and decision-makers.” Several municipalities, ranging from major cities like Utrecht to smaller ones like Leeuwarden and Kaag en Brassem, have shown preliminary interest, says Tellier. To help overcome the constraints many public budgets face, Run Her Way will fund its pilot projects through a combination of corporate sponsorship and existing public grant schemes. The organization is also exploring providing those services to companies and universities.
Also on the nonprofit’s small team of volunteers is Bob de Jong, a Dutch speed skater who won four Olympic medals, including gold in 2006, and Maikel van Huet, a sports marketing executive. The team’s focus is to develop a successful pilot project in one city in the Netherlands by the end of 2024, then refine and scale that approach nationally—and, eventually, globally.
Tellier is familiar with the skepticism this effort is likely to face. For starters: isn’t the problem too big, too ingrained, too cultural to be solved? And shouldn’t crime data—not something as nebulous as “fear”—shape where public resources go?
Tellier points out that any data should be viewed with an asterisk. It does not factor in crimes that go unreported—which a 2024 study by the University of Manchester suggests could be significant. Researchers there found that nearly seven out of 10 women who regularly ran reported experiencing some form of harassment—and only 5% of those women had reported any incident to the police. Nor does that data account for the harm done to women who stay indoors because they are too afraid to run outside.
“Sometimes people ask me: ‘Why just women, and why just runners?’” says Tellier. “But this isn’t just about women—it’s about safety. If you’re tackling this issue, you’re tackling a lot of other systemic issues. Making places safe for women to run means making places that are safer and better for everyone who lives there.”
