person in white dress shirt holding brown wooden chopsticks

Runningman Is What Happens When Festival Culture Meets the Wellness Movement

Jesse Itzler and Devon Levesque are calling it the Burning Man of running. It represents more than just a fitness festival, and more about where fitness culture is heading.

Max Stephens

8/16/20264 min read

There's a festival happening in Georgia this September that's coining itself as the Burning Man of running. The name is Runningman, it's taking place September 18th through the 20th at Kingston Downs in Rome, Georgia, and it was founded by Jesse Itzler and Devon Levesque, two entrepreneurs who have spent years building in the endurance and wellness space.

The format is centered around a choose your own distance race set on a one mile track loop, surrounded by guest speakers from the health and fitness world, live music, a full gym, a zen zone with yoga and breathwork classes, an obstacle course, a slip-and-slide, health and wellness focused vendors, and recovery programming including what the organizers are calling the world's largest sauna.

The Burning Man parallel

Burning Man isn't primarily a music festival. It's a temporary community organized around a shared set of values, radical self-expression, self-reliance, communal effort, and a specific aesthetic and philosophical framework that its attendees broadly share. What makes it generate the loyalty and cultural significance it does is that it creates a concentrated, time-limited space where people who care about the same things gather to experience those things together at scale.

Runningman is applying the same structural logic to a different set of values. Movement, health, recovery, and physical challenge rather than art and radical self-expression. The race is the anchor the way the man is the anchor at Burning Man, a shared central experience around which everything else is organized. The surrounding programming creates a multi-day environment where people who care about their health and fitness gather to experience that in community.

The parallel holds because the mechanism is the same. It's not just an event. It's a concentrated experience of a specific set of values shared by a specific community.

Where this fits in a larger pattern

Runningman didn't emerge in isolation. It's an expression of a trend that's been building momentum across multiple formats simultaneously.

We've covered the DJ run club scene spreading through major cities globally. We've covered Diplo's Run Club taking the 5K and music festival combination to 100,000 tickets across ten US cities. We've covered Mission 247, George Heaton's team endurance competition in the UK, and BPMATHON, Eddy Palermo's 50-kilometer DJ run in Miami.

All of it points in the same direction. An increasing number of individuals that built its social infrastructure around bars and nightlife is rebuilding that infrastructure around movement. The social occasion, the shared experience, the community gathered around a common activity, hasn't gone away. The activity at the center of it has changed.

Runningman is that trend operating at festival scale: multi-day, residential, with the full programming depth of a conventional music festival applied to a wellness and fitness context.

The accessibility angle

The choose your own distance format is the design decision that determines who this event is actually for.

Most endurance events have a defined distance requirement that functions as a barrier. You either trained for it or you didn't. The competitive framing around finishing times and placement creates a hierarchy that can make people who aren't serious runners feel out of place regardless of how the event is marketed.

A choose your own distance race removes that barrier entirely. You run as far as you want, at whatever pace you want, on a one mile loop that makes any distance achievable. The race becomes a participatory shared experience rather than a performance test. Combined with the surrounding programming of speakers, recovery activities, yoga, breathwork, and vendor activations, the event becomes accessible to people who are interested in health and wellness but don't identify as endurance athletes.

That's a significantly larger audience than serious runners represent, and it's the audience that makes a multi-day festival format economically viable.

Who's behind it

Jesse Itzler and Devon Levesque bring a combination of endurance credibility and entrepreneurial track record that's unusual in the events space.

Itzler is known for hiring David Goggins to live with him for a month, an experience he documented in his book Living with a Seal. He's completed ultramarathons and built businesses across multiple categories including ZICO coconut water, which he sold to Coca-Cola. His profile in the wellness and endurance community is well established and his network in that space runs deep.

Levesque founded Promix Nutrition, a supplement brand, Rythm Health, which provides at-home blood testing, and Sweet Honey Farm. His background spans both the consumer wellness product space and the natural food and community space, giving him a perspective on health that's broader than pure endurance sport.

The combination of their networks, the speakers they can attract, the brands they can bring in as partners, and the credibility they carry in the wellness community is what makes an event like this viable at the scale they're doing it at. Getting the right people in a field in Georgia for three days is a logistics and credibility challenge. These two are positioned to clear both.

The broader opportunity

There are hundreds of multi-day music festivals around the world, many of which are oriented around a nightlife, drinking, and party culture that a growing segment of the population is moving away from. The multi-day festival format itself is not the thing declining. The specific values and behaviors organized around many of those festivals are.

Taking the format, the camping, the community, the multiple stages of programming, the shared residential experience over several days, and reorienting it around health and fitness makes obvious sense in a cultural moment where wellness has become one of the primary organizing frameworks for how a significant and growing number of people think about their lives.

Runningman is an early and well-resourced attempt to build that version of the format. Whether it becomes a recurring institution in the way the best music festivals have will depend on execution and on whether the community it attracts continues to grow.

The direction it's pointing is already clear though. Fitness culture is building the infrastructure of a social movement. The DJ run clubs, the endurance competitions with music, the events that put movement at the center of a shared community experience, are all expressions of the same underlying shift.

A multi-day festival with a race at its center, the world's largest sauna, and a field full of people who care about how they live is a logical next step in that sequence.

Want articles like this one delivered weekly? Join the newsletter and get a quick recap of everything we cover, straight to your inbox, once a week.