How Runna turned the London Marathon into a content loop

What this clever wrap-up reveals about creating shareable product moments

This is the only deep dive I’ve ever done without testing the product, which made it all the more interesting to see things from the outside 🪟 Read online here or download as PDF here.​

Last Sunday, I stood near my house watching the London Marathon go past — cheering on a lobster, a slinky and someone dressed as Big Ben.

Later, while checking out finish times on Strava, I spotted a post titled:

Curious, I clicked.

What I found was a smart, shareable recap of the 2025 marathon from Runna — the running training app that’s just been acquired by Strava — pulling out stats like:

• Year-on-year average finish times
• Gender splits
• % of people who got PBs (personal bests)
• Most popular running shoes (Asics, it turns out. Sorry, Hoka)

With over 500 likes on Strava and tons of comments, the graphs hit home for a lot of users (both old and new).

That’s when I realised: this is a mini content loop.

And a veeeeery interesting one at that.

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Why is this example so interesting?

Well, two reasons:

1. It shows how a non-viral product can engineer shareable moments
2. It is a rare mix of product-led, content-led, and partnership-led growth, combined with network effects all in one

What’s more, I find it frustrating that much of the growth literature uses common examples that are hard to replicate in reality. For instance:

• Reddit’s SEO-driven content loop: where Q&A content ranks in Google and draws in 223 million+ visitors a month. In reality you need a HUGE web-based community
• Slack’s* explosive product-led growth: where value increases every time you invite a teammate. In 90% of products, however, sharing isn’t essential to a user’s experience. *I know the irony of mentioning Slack when I have literally just written about it…still interesting tho

Fundamentally, most products aren’t built like that.

Especially single-player apps like Calm, Headspace, and Nike Run Club.

They’re not viral. They’re not indexable. Many rely on paid growth (Meta and TikTok ads) to scale.

Which is why Runna’s recap stood out: it is an actionable example of product and content-led growth from an app whose business model doesn’t always lend itself to PLG.

Examples like this aren’t mind-blowing, but they’re often quite actionable and tactical.

As we’ll see, Runna managed to:

✅ Create a shareable moment

✅ With unique, original, and useful content

✅ Created from its feature usage

✅ To attract new users and engage older ones

And — as we’ll see in more detail later — what’s clever is that Runna has two loops fuelling each other:

1. Individual content loop: “I use the app and share my progress”
2. Aggregate content loop: Runna uses anonymised data to create wider reports around key events

The individual loop feeds the aggregate one. More users = more training data = richer aggregate insights.

We’ll take a closer look at the timing, content and UI to work out how you can apply this sort of thinking too.

First up: timing.

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1) Lesson 1: How to time your moment

Runna’s marathon report is similar to Spotify Wrapped in the idea — but arguably better in some ways.

Why?

Well it doesn’t fight for attention in the end-of-year recaps. Now every app under the sun does a ‘wrapped’ (Monzo, Loom, Strava, Duolingo) meaning high competition, some weird ones and a general diluting of the tactic overall.

Runna, however, picked its own moment: right after the London Marathon. At this time, emotions are high, there’s lots of FOMO (if you didn’t get a ballot spot), and a lot of motivation to ‘run it next year.’

This means users are primed to start a new habit, and this timing is a bit fresher than an end-of-year timing.

What’s cool about choosing this timing is that it’s also repeatable; there are multiple marathon moments across the world throughout the year. Bingo.

Next, it’s not only about when you do it, but what’s in it.

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2) Create something new and unique

When I opened the post, I learned a few things. The stats piqued my interest, random titbits like:

• Female participants grew 8.3% YoY
• Women now make up 44% of the field
• The time gap between men and women has shortened by 5 seconds
• 70% of people hit a PB or did their first marathon
• 23% of Runnas raced in Asics
• The fastest age group for finish time was 40–44yrs

This is using aggregated data as a Data Network Effect.

Data is not inherently valuable. But you have to make it valuable.

You have to be creative in how you use it, but also show it in a way that shows your product’s value. In Runna's marathon report, the value proposition is hammered home with:

Clearly communicating the value of the product through their user data, without having a sale-y 'download now'.

The only downside of this execution is the accessibility: some of the copy is super hard to see without a zoom. The blurred image background also makes my eyes hurt and the fine lines hard to see.

With these, it is important to make designs as attractive AND legible as possible, like Strava’s 2023 Year in Sport: bold colours, big numbers, cool graphics.

As well as this content loop, Runna even has a pop-up on their web homepage when a new user joins a training plan. Every. Single. Time.

This creates a nice nudge for users to take action with the social proof that others are doing it too.

Pretty neat.

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3) Make your features shareable

Whilst the UI of the London Marathon report scores a low 3/10 for legibility, the rest of the app features do really well in how great they look when shared.

I’ve not even seen what they look like in the app. But I’ve seen them all over my social channels without actually following Runna. Instead, it's friends, influencers and others sharing Runna features.

Going on Instagram, I see a range of features overlaid onto user-generated content (UGC):

• Estimated marathon times
• Workout lap times and paces
• Run stats

When researching sharing before, I’ve found there’s often friction to share stats caused by user fears, anxieties and hesitations

For instance with running, there are anxieties like:

• I’m not a ‘real’ runner
• My stats aren’t post-worthy, I’m not fast enough
• I don’t want people to see my route
• I don’t want people to see my health stats

So, how do you encourage people to share?

Three things stand out about how Runna’s features are designed:

1. The tone is celebratory and coaching, not judging: the language used in feature copy is affirming, things like “Ahead of the pack” and “Your hard work pays off!” which pumps people up and frames things like a personal win.
2. The UI is clean & screenshot-ready: there’s no clutter. The white space is intentional. Fonts are legible, spacing is generous, and hierarchy is clear. This makes the data easy to understand at a glance and polished enough to post straight to IG Stories.
3. The screens are designed to highlight progress: UI is focused on change and achievement, “Proposed” vs “Current” pace, improvement over time, purple accents on future numbers. This makes the data feel like a story or narrative.

To tackle fear of sharing, UI focuses on progress, not performance — and abstracts away details while still telling a compelling story.

The result is that sharing feels less risky. And therefore it's more likely to happen.

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So, what can we take away?

The lesson here isn’t “go make a Wrapped”. It’s to find your own moment, and make it shareable. Even if your product is a single-player tool, there are still opportunities to spin a content loop.

As we’ve seen from the Runna example, you can create your own assets that are share-worthy and engineer them to be as friction-free as possible. What makes it tick is a combination of good timing, smart design choices, and understanding what makes people feel proud to talk about their progress.

As more single-player products look for low-cost growth channels, organic content loops like this are becoming an advantage.

A few questions for you to brainstorm:

• What moments are your users already excited about?
• How often do those moments happen?
• Do you have sharing visible, front-and-centre in the experience?
• Do features look share-ready - or just functional?
• Are they editable? Can people layer them onto things?
• What are people scared of?
• What would it take to remove share-anxiety altogether?

Let me know what it sparks ⚡️

Seen any other smart “non-Wrapped” wrap-ups? I’d love to collect a few more examples.

Fin

Funny story: I had to re-write this one as the first draft I did hungover and it was terrible :') Curious to know if you could tell it had less structure than usual? More of a winding flow.

Anyhow, see you next week!

Rosie 🕺 🕺 🕺 🕺 🕺 🕺

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