Nine Years of r/slowjogging, and Then Korea Showed Up

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I founded r/slowjogging on December 18, 2017, as a home for the running style Professor Hiroaki Tanaka developed in Japan, the one meant to put an end to "no pain, no gain." For most of the nine years since, I've been its most reliable poster, and in some stretches nearly its only one. I posted the original instructional video of Tanaka jogging in his bright yellow shoes. I posted the publisher's page for his book, Slow Jogging by Hiroaki Tanaka and Magdalena Jackowska. I posted a Seattle run club called the Plod Squad, a Santa Rosa doctor who took up being "the slowest jogger you've ever seen" after losing a lung, a Polish article, a Quora thread, and anything else on the internet that said the words slow jogging out loud. I have been shameless about keeping it going.

For years it didn't take. The people who wandered in wanted to talk about slow running, Couch to 5K, MAF heart-rate training, anything with a number attached to it. I kept explaining that slow jogging is its own gait: a stride about the length of your own foot, a soft landing on the front of it, a quick cadence that aims for 180 steps a minute, and a pace easy enough to smile and hold a conversation the whole way. Tanaka called that pace niko niko, the Japanese sound of a smile. A walker can pass you, and that's the idea.

The cover says "with Magdalena Jackowska" in small type, and she deserves far more credit than that line gives her. She's a linguist and translator from Poland who became a slow jogging instructor and a research assistant at Tanaka's institute at Fukuoka University, and she joined his team to carry the method abroad. She's the one in green beside him on the beach at the top of this page. Together they wrote the first English-language book on slow jogging, published in 2016, and she has trained slow jogging instructors in Poland. The book I've pointed every newcomer to for nine years exists in English because of her.

Then Korea found it. Over the summer the Korea Herald reported that the country's running craze had a new pace, and the pace was slow. Korean slow joggers do it in synchronized groups, on gym treadmills, up stairs, and in place in their living rooms. The videos jumped to TikTok, and from TikTok to my sub. A month ago I posted "The Koreans have adopted Slow Jogging so it's going to become super popular! Welcome new visitors!" and it drew more than 30,000 views. "Slow Jogging is NOT normal!" did 124,000 and more than a thousand upvotes. Over the past year the sub has had 409,000 views, 300,000 more than the year before, and 9,400 people joined. It has 17,100 members now and about 12,000 visitors a week.

A crowd that size brings its own weather. The folks at r/RunningCirclejerk, the sub that exists to roast serious runners, came over sure we were a parody of them, so I went over and posted that we were "super duper earnest AF." One of them decided I had to have a commercial angle. I told them they'd made my day, since it made me sound so savvy and together, when the truth is I'd just been running the place for nine years. I also admitted their sub is more entertaining than mine; I was already a member and am now completely obsessed with it. At home I keep order. Under my post marking the sub's nine years, I explained that nobody's running in the first place, since this is a no running zone, and that any running spotted on the subreddit should be reported to the mods. In a thread about form and cadence, I told one commenter that the sub has been jumping the shark for at least nine years.

Answering all those newcomers has made me say out loud what I believe about the thing. Slow jogging is a practice measured in time, and distance hardly matters. You can do it in place in front of the television, back and forth on a patio, around your apartment the way people did all through Covid, or up and down the Seine, which is how I saw Paris, slow enough to stop for a photo and not be the jerk weaving through tourists. When one commenter answered a video of a woman slow jogging on her patio with a resounding no, I wrote back that the patio is the floor and the sky is the ceiling, and that the patio is the reason you never have to miss a day. I don't want slow jogging gatekept at exactly 180 beats per minute, either. I want room in it for slow running, the Cliff Young shuffle, the Airborne shuffle I did in the eighties while singing Jodies, and MAF. I want a big tent.

I'm not the only one holding the poles up anymore. The sub has ten moderators now, and I have a standing policy for recruiting them: anyone who comes onto the sub breathing fire gets invited to be a mod. The invitation stands for the Slow Jogging Association, too. In nine years, nobody from it has posted on the sub or reached out to me. Not once. In February I wrote the eulogy for Jeff Galloway, the Olympian whose run-walk-run method told a generation of slow, scared, late-starting runners that they belonged, and it drew 107 upvotes. Tanaka died in 2018, so he missed all of this: the Koreans, the TikToks, the treadmill gyms full of people smiling at a pace a walker could beat.

I'm still the one posting the slow jogger of the day, and I'll confess how. Korean slow jogging lives on TikTok, and TikTok lets you download a video right in the app, so I steal them. I save the video, upload it to the sub from my own machine, and put a link back to the creator's TikTok post on every one. When I found one woman on day 8 of her slow jogging, she had no viewers and no comments, so I told the sub to go visit her. There's a woman on day 58 of slow jogging around her local track, an Italian teaching his mamma, a Hawaiian on a treadmill to whom I said e komo mai. I've also confessed to the sub that I fell for a TikTok gimmick, an acupressure mat for slow jogging in place, and promised a full report when it arrives from wherever it's coming from around October 20. Nine years in, r/slowjogging is finally doing exactly what it said it would, and I'm still out front at a smile pace, waving people in.

In Memory

Professor Hiroaki Tanaka of Fukuoka University was an exercise physiologist who spent his career proving that running did not have to hurt to work. He built slow jogging out of that research: the short stride, the soft landing, the quick cadence, and the niko niko pace, slow enough to smile through. After reversing his own Type 2 diabetes, he ran a 2:38 marathon past the age of fifty on the same gentle principles he taught to beginners, the elderly, and people coming back from illness, and he never asked anyone to suffer to earn their health. He wrote the English book with Magdalena Jackowska, and together they gave the rest of the world a way in. He died in 2018. Every smiling slow jogger on a Seoul treadmill or a Paris riverbank is moving the way he taught.

John Franks "Jeff" Galloway died on February 25, 2026, in Pensacola, Florida, at eighty. He ran the 10,000 meters for the United States at the 1972 Munich Olympics and won the first Peachtree Road Race in 1970, and then he spent the rest of his life on people who would never be fast. His Run-Walk-Run method made walk breaks a plan instead of a failure, and through more than twenty books, his Runner's World column, and his years as runDisney's official training consultant, starting in 2010, he carried generations of beginners to finish lines they had written off. He measured success by who showed up and kept going. He leaves his wife, Barbara, his family, and a sport that is far kinder to slow people because of him. His memorial page is on Keeper.

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