Why Stars Like Diplo, Gunna and Travis Barker Are Hitting the Road — With Their Own Run Clubs

February 11, 2026

Gunna says that, three years ago, he could only run “like, half a mile,” before stopping to catch his breath. At the time, he’d just completed a seven-month jail sentence after pleading guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy; he was “just trying to get my mental together and block out all the mess, all the media and all the life problems.”

Even those half miles helped, though. Ultimately, he “fell in love with” running. “I see the results,” he says. “I feel better. I’m thinking better. My career is starting to move better.”

Cut to the fall of 2025, and Gunna had amped up his mileage significantly. That September, he launched ­Gunna’s Wunna Run Club, a traveling 5K that’s now hosted races in nine cities including New York, Toronto and Johannesburg, where thousands of people turned out in early January to run alongside the rapper himself.

“My fans are not just my music consumers; they’re my life consumers too,” he says. “I had to give them this knowledge. They deserve it.”

Plenty of musicians run; maybe it’s unsurprising that an artist used to plugging away in the studio for hours on end would have the stamina the activity demands. But Gunna is one of several across genres who have now parlayed their favored form of fitness into something bigger: an actual run club.

Travis Barker’s Run Travis Run event launched in late 2025 with 5Ks in Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Palm Desert, Calif. Diplo reports that his ­Diplo’s Run Club — which just hosted 5K run-and-raves in Miami and Phoenix in mid-January — has sold 100,000 tickets across 10 events that began in the fall of 2024. And Jelly Roll has his own Losers Run Club, a primarily online ­community with a mission, its official site states, “to help those who are traditionally underserved in the running community hold each other accountable, with the end goal of changing their life through hard work and moving their body.” (Participants are no doubt inspired by the country-rap star’s own recent 275-pound weight loss.)

For Barker, running is a deeply personal pursuit: It helped him get sober in 2008. “Not being athletic, it was the thing I knew I could do on my own,” the legendary blink-182 drummer says. “I didn’t need any equipment. No excuses.” He can now run a 5K in 19 minutes and says he gets so excited about races that he has trouble sleeping the night before. “It’s so therapeutic,” Barker says. “Like, God gave you running.”

Diplo started running while on his high school wrestling team in Florida, later finding it not only made him feel good but suited the peripatetic lifestyle he follows as a superstar DJ and producer. “No matter what city you’re in, no matter where you live, there’s always a place to run,” he says. “I’ve run in Guatemala; I’ve run in Antarctica. You don’t even really need shoes.”

He sees running as “one thing you can do every day to reduce anxiety and depression, even a tiny bit. There’s so much going on in your world you can’t control. The only thing you really have control over is how your body feels.”

Diplo’s Run Club is, like Gunna’s and Barker’s groups, another platform for both art and business. Barker’s events either bring in local acts to play near the finish line — “I envision it being a mini-music festival and 5K,” he says — or happen the same day he’s performing in town. Wunna Run Club runs happen in the mornings, and Gunna performs that night, while Diplo and a rotation of opening DJs play sets near the finish line of every run club event. “They’re more euphoric than a proper festival, where everybody’s crammed in there and on their last pills, like, drinking vodka out of a CamelBak,” he jokes of these shows, adding that real ravers are typically quite fit anyway, given all the dancing they do.

Good vibes aside, convincing city officials to enact street closures for race routes is a complicated and often political process, and the margins on these events are typically low. So why are these artists making a run for it?

Like Barker and Diplo, Gunna emphasizes that most crucially, Wunna Run Club is a way to share something that’s benefited him with his fans. “I had to tell them, give them that knowledge, build the community,” he says. “As people, we battle with health problems, so I feel like this is me giving them a starter kit to be healthy.” Recently, one fan showed him before and after photos of her 100-pound weight loss, saying he helped inspire the transformation. “It just felt like I was doing something right,” Gunna says.

Likewise, Barker urges that Run Travis Run is not intended to “be discouraging or make people feel like they have to be some superstar athlete to participate. There are a lot of people that show up who’ve never walked or run a 5K in their life.” Diplo says that after he finishes the race, he often circles back to high-five participants who are still out there running and walking. “They try it, do it, and that’s a huge breakthrough for those people.”

The run club model, he says, is also in part a way to bring dance music to people who might never go to the club or who’ve aged out of the scene’s late-night schedule. “Clubbing is a young man’s game,” says Diplo’s longtime agent at Wasserman Music, Sam Hunt. “Going to [Miami nightclub] Space at three in the morning — I can confirm. Providing a place where you can have a few drinks, dance, hang out and party with your friends — but it’s nine or 10 in the morning and there’s a fitness element — unlocks a world of possibilities for thousands of people.” Runs also tend to draw as many running fanatics as music fans, bringing a new demographic into each artist’s orbit. Diplo says he’s also working on new music made expressly for running, calling his run club “a great vehicle to release an album.” Billboard