The Public Run Club
nobody asked me to become A
Run Coach
Who I am, why I care about this oddly specific thing, and how it became a personal & collective practice.
No. 01
the
point
You can build a consistent running practice without losing yourself in the process (there I said it).
Your relationship with running mirrors your relationship with yourself, and both can shift inside your running practice. The Public Run Club is here to help you move from self-discipline to self-trust, from rigidity to ritual, using your once-complicated runs as the exact site where you learn to lead yourself with confidence, ease, and kindness.
No. 02
the practice
I work at the intersection of somatic healing and athletic development (because when running feels like walking a tightrope between "too much" and "not enough" you need more than a coach who knows pacing. You need someone who gets the whole picture with you.)
I combine the artistic (runs as a body of work), the athletic (pacing strategies, effort ranges, skill building), and the somatic (using modalities like breathwork, tapping/EFT, body awareness practices). My coaching weaves Parts Work, somatic practices, trauma-informed movement, and creative process work so you can work with your internal resistance instead of bulldozing through it. The result? Consistency from self-trust, not self-discipline (zing!)
No. 03
the
process
The Intuitive Athlete Cycle is my 6-step cyclical framework that eliminates the exhausting internal negotiations before every run. You'll recognize the parts managing your running, quiet the mental chatter, and make decisions from your centered, grounded self (instead of fear).
Instead of forcing yourself through predetermined plans or floating in the "just be gentle" void, you'll build both athletic competencies and the ability to stay regulated when running brings up big feelings.
The outcome is running that feels consistent without being compulsive & challenging without being punishing—a practice where "just lace up and go" becomes your new normal, and where you have the skills to be with yourself on the days when it definitely does not feel that easy.
IT ALL BEGAN WHEN THEY TOLD ME no.
THE ORIGIN
STORY
founder of The Public Run Club and Intuitive Athleticism.
But how I got here wasn't through any moment of sunrise-run genius bliss.
It felt stabilizing in what otherwise felt like the nebulous, anxiety-inducing landscape caught between "honor your soft" anti-diet messaging and "here's your 16-week plan, just execute it no matter what" running culture.
So my season became a series of creative outputs instead of linear progress that forever goes up and up and up.
And the work of establishing a new relationship with running became a process of untangling the generational, systemic, interpersonal, and inner-personal beliefs I'd absorbed about what I was allowed to want, need, and trust about my own body.
In 2015, I started a running streak. One mile a day, with "Always we begin again" as my very public affirmation (goofy feet pictures posted to Instagram everyday if you want to see my dedication to the project) I wanted to practice showing up without needing to GO BIG. And I did it! I was doing it! The streak lasted 295 days before I tore my ACL in a soccer game. (Whomp whomp.)
What I haven't shared yet is that I grew up running. My mom is a runner. When we moved to England in elementary school, she started the Women's Running Network by passing out business cards to other women she saw on runs. As a ten-year-old, I ran alongside women who were running for the first time and for the fun of it. We'd start and end weekly runs at The Apple Tree or The Jolly Farmer, two pubs down the street (and the group still exists today !).vI've always been drawn to the practice of running, the personal and communal rituals of it.
For as messy as its felt in the past, a part of me has always loved running.
After serving as the director of a coding school that folded, I knew what I wanted to do next: start coaching runners.
When I posted on Facebook asking if anyone needed running help, 30 people raised their hands. They let me clumsily coach them toward running regularly. Then I helped folks with race goals. Then I noticed I was being asked questions about motivation and self-discipline—not just pacing and mileage.
So after getting my running coach certification, I dove deep into trainings in Somatic Parts Work, Transformational Embodiment, Internal Family Systems, Intuitive Eating, the Trauma of Money (yes, it's all connected!)—all the psychology traditional running coaches skip. Because women with complicated histories to running don't just need to hear "go gentler" or "be kinder to yourself." We need tools to navigate the internal negotiations. We need to learn how to actually trust ourselves in the rest, ease, and rigor (not just perform self-compassion).
After coaching hundreds of women through this exact untangling, I realized: I have a framework! And! Having a framework didn’t feel restrictive or rigid to my runners!
I began thinking of my runs as contributing to a seasonal body of work—each run didn't have to carry the burden of responsibility for the whole training cycle.
That internal negotiation kept me frozen.
I wasn't even in a full-blown relapse. I was in that murky, subclinical space where you're "fine" but also... not. Where old patterns whisper (albeit like Gollum) but don't scream. Where you don't fully identify as "disordered" anymore (???), but you also can't just lace up and go without a full internal committee meeting about your motives.
Once I started running after beginning recovery, I couldn't even picture what "normal" running looked like. I just knew I wanted less tension, less friction, and less distressing mental chatter. (And I was just ~so~ convinced that that peace would come once I had a natural groove of X miles per week.)
Eventually, I stopped asking "How do I fix my running?" and started asking: "What would running look like if I wasn't managing myself with it?"
And that's when I stopped asking "What's wrong with me?" and started asking "Where did I learn this?"
My degree is in English Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing (emphasis very much by me-- I took the Creative Writing class multiple times in college) and I'm an avid journaler with a die-hard love for creative processes.
I'd spent years processing my relationship with practice and ritual (hellooo Artist's Way), and I started applying those same artist questions to my athletic life.
Every time I felt guilty for resting, I'd trace it back (the same way I'd learned to trace writer's block back to fear, not laziness.)
Every time I questioned my motives for running, I'd get curious instead of critical (asking "What's this trying to protect?" the way I'd ask "What's underneath this resistance to the blank page?")
When I caught myself comparing my pace to other runners, I'd remember what I knew about creative work: comparison is the thief of joy, and someone else's output has nothing to do with the validity of mine.
The fear of doing too much was just as paralyzing as the fear of never making progress at all.
Rewind to 2009.
(Yes, all the way back to when Taylor Swift was still country and 30 Rock was appointment television. I tried to condense 15 years of fumbling into three neat paragraphs, but it turns out the path from "banned from running" to "teaching others to run" doesn't do short and tidy. Grab a coffee--this one's worth it.)
I'm a college sophomore sitting in a therapist's office (wearing what I can only assume were some truly regrettable jeggings), surrounded by motivational pillows about "being enough." She tells me I need to stop exercising. Cold turkey. I was in eating disorder recovery, using running to manage everything I couldn't feel. She was right.
In hindsight, here's what gutted me about the process: I got endless support for rebuilding my relationship with food. But zero support for rebuilding my relationship with movement.
When I was finally cleared to run again, I stood there thinking, Wait—can I trust myself with this? What if I spiral out of control with needing control again? What if "wanting to run" means something's "wrong" with me again?
I built The Public Run Club in 2018 as the container I needed when I was 22—not another place to optimize yourself, but a place to practice trusting yourself (which diffuses that dual fear of doing too much and not doing enough that often manages our relationship with running). Running taught me that the relationship you have with movement mirrors the relationship you have with yourself. And when that relationship shifts from negotiation to trust? Everything opens up (inside of running and out).
I'm so glad you're here.
If you're still reading this (omg well done) and you’re also someone who has spent too much time negotiated with yourself about a run, I recommend starting with the quiz– let's figure out what's really going on.
I'm Karly,
the story behind our name
Running shouldn't feel like a private battle with yourself
I was coaching a woman who kept apologizing for ~existing as a runner~. Her pace, her form, the audacity of being visible while breathing hard (!). She bravely admitted to me, "I feel insecure about folks seeing me like this." And I thought: Of course you do.
Most of us have spent decades being told our struggles are personal failures to hide in private, not human experiences that deserve witness.
Running became a performance of worthiness, where you're only allowed to be seen if you look effortless, fast, thin, white, able-bodied, or at minimum, not actively suffering. (In fact, you're only allowed to look like you're suffering if your pace and distance are ~objectively impressive.~)
The Public Run Club exists because some of us needed an alternative to those standards, and to all the ways we learned to quash our body's knowing trying to meet them.
We keep coming back to a few core questions: What if the very act of running alongside others (imperfect, inconsistent, complicated, as you are on any given day) is what breaks the shame-cycle swing of all-all-all-then-nothing? What if refusing to hide until I'm fast enough/fit enough/"healed enough"/etc is how I learn to trust myself again?
The name isn't so much about exposure. (I might be the most hermit-y, introverted running coach you'll ever meet, so I'm not suggesting you perform your healing journey on Instagram or make your Strava public.)
The name is more about refusing to let shame dictate where and how we move your body. It's more about making "I'm still figuring this out" a completely legitimate way to show up (because "I don't want anyone to see me like this" is exactly what shame needs you to believe to keep you stuck).