There’s only one hard rule at Sit Club, scheduled for Saturday at Golden Gate Park after being postponed on account of rain last weekend: BYOC, or bring your own chair.
Sit Club is the brainchild of Danielle Egan, Mackenzie Sharp, and Connie Ye — three San Francisco twentysomethings in tech that grew weary of the run club epidemic. Run clubs, of course, are a gathering of runners under the guise of community building (or in the case of one Diplo, a cash-grabby music festival). They often come with custom club apparel and a mission statement of getting people outside together — and maybe improving your mile time along the way.
“I am not,” Egan exclaimed when I asked if she’d ever been a part of a run club. “That's why we're taking a stand — a sit — against them.”
(A quick aside before any Severance heads ask: Her last name is not spelled like the Lumon founder family surname.)
In particular, the trio has grown weary of the people who were, in their words, joining run clubs to “catch some ass.” Countless articles tout run clubs as a viable replacement for the Tinders and Hinges of the world. They’re wholesome. They’re less uncomfortable than singles’ mixers, if only because you’re too focused on your own physical discomfort to care about social discomfort. At this point, it’s become a cliché among a certain subset of young people to say that run clubs, like pickleball or rock climbing, are where people go to meet and be met. It’s a side effect of dating in 2025: Lonesome single will try anything once, even running a marathon.
Sharp was one of them. She recalled a nightmarish running date she went on with her dentist, of all people — who was a part of a run club.
“After the first mile, I stopped running and I was like, ‘I actually hate this activity,’” Sharp joked. “I just went home. Terrible.”
Sharp added that the men in their friend group “have been joining the worst activities ever to meet women,” as Egan laughed with her.
“They're, like, Googling things like ‘how to talk to women,’ going to those activities, and pretending that we don't know that that's what's happening,” she said.
Inspired by these oddball dating stories — and their own disdain for run clubs, they took action. Egan, 26, is a bit of a prankster impresario, throwing elaborate parties and events with pals, like a fake, headline-grabbing New York City steakhouse that turned into a one-night pop-up, or, more recently, a beachside “Alex Party,” where only people named Alex were allowed to attend.
But this might’ve been their most low-effort endeavor: Egan joked that creating the event took 10 minutes of actual work. “We made jokes about it for, like, 10 minutes,” she said. “And then I wrote a Partiful and then we made a bunch of flyers.”
The flyers drew some attention, but it wasn’t until a Reddit post a couple of weeks ago showing off one of the flyers that it really caught fire. In the lingua franca of techies, “my biggest KPI is, I just want a ridiculous amount of people there,” Egan said. And, if the Partiful holds true, she’ll have met that goal (and then some): As of Monday afternoon, more than 500 people have responded expressing interest, and more than 600 others are a “maybe” on taking a seat.
There will be warm-ups like squats and butterfly stretches, maybe a game of musical chairs. Perhaps some people will meet and be smitten — no running shoes necessary. But aside from that, the only expectation they have is for people to sit and stay a while.
“The most important part is just standing up and sitting down and, you know, I think it's just about it's really about getting people there,” Egan said, half-joking, half-earnest.
