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The Nike Run Club app is a longtime favorite for many runners, and for good reason too. It offers GPS tracking, guided runs led by coaches and athletes, structured training plans, and a social layer that lets you cheer on friends and compete on the leaderboards. But like a lot of sophisticated apps, some of its most useful tricks aren’t officially explained anywhere. Whether you downloaded NRC last week to attend a race for the first time, or you’ve been logging miles on it for years, these hacks will help you get the most out of every race.
Sort your runs to track your progress and challenge yourself
You may be satisfied with scrolling through your Activity feed in reverse chronological order and never think of sorting it differently. But being able to quickly pull up your longest run ever (or your fastest mile, or what have you) is a great way to celebrate progress and benchmark where you are now.
It sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly not intuitive on the app. Actually, I found this trick Buried in a Reddit comment thread. Here’s how to do it: Open NRC, go to Activity → All Activitythen tap Filter button in the top right corner. select from there sort by And choose from options like longest distance, fastest speed and others.
Once you know how to find your personal records, you can take it a step further: use those past attempts as a competition. One of my favorite ways to stay motivated is to rewatch a past race and essentially race against it.
Use the beginner-friendly ‘First Run’ to improve speed even as a professional
The NRC’s “First Run” guided run is apparently designed for beginners, which is why most experienced runners skip it. Here’s my advice: don’t! Even as an experienced runner, I found real value in this guided run. It forced me to realign my internal dynamics. Also, it felt like the app required onboarding to walk you through how NRC coaching actually works. This includes how audio cues are timed, how effort-based cues come in mid-race, how to mentally engage with the coaching format rather than tolerating it as background noise. If you’ve ever dropped out during a guided run or felt like the coaching wasn’t forthcoming, there’s a good chance you were passively receiving it rather than actively running with it.
Maybe you don’t actually need to revisit the basics of running slower than you think. In this case, think of ‘first race’ less as a beginner workout and more as an onboarding session that you’ve probably missed.
Use minimal background to protect your privacy when sharing your routes
A few years ago, NRC made it easy to share your route on a separate, street-name-free background. I know I love sharing how I run without broadcasting where I live or train. Over time that option became harder to find, and Some users are missing it.
There are now two ways to get this minimalist background: one annoying, and one easy. The annoying way: After your run uploads, tap Three points → Share → Route (to the left of “Camera Roll”) → More → Remove background in CapCut. That last step takes you out of NRC and into CapCut, which I personally don’t like to use. Apologize!
What do you think so far?
Easy way: Share → Poster (to the right of “Camera Roll”), then scroll through the poster options until you find the simplest black or gray background available. It gives you a clean, minimal root display without leaving the app or involving a third-party editor. If privacy or aesthetics matter to you when posting your runs, this is the move.
Use a companion app to add back distance lost during speed workouts
When you do one of NRC’s interval workouts, the app tracks your hard efforts, but it doesn’t record your recovery laps. This means that your total elapsed time and distance are both underestimated by the time the workout ends.
The real solution is to run another app simultaneously. Strava works well for this, as does if you have a GPS watch. When your run is complete, you will have the exact total distance from the secondary source. You can then go back into the NRC, find the interval run, and manually edit the distances to reflect exactly what you covered. This is an extra step, but if your weekly mileage tracking matters to you – or you’re following a training plan where volume is important – then it’s worth doing.
Get the guidance you want—without all the monologue
You may be part of Coach Bennett’s cult-like following, but that doesn’t mean every one of your guided runs needs to be A long motivational monologue. Unfortunately, there’s no in-app setting for you to commit the venial sin of cutting out a coach’s speech. Instead, use this solution: Once speech starts, exit the app. Wait a few seconds, then open the app again. It cuts off the coach’s speech without stopping your race. You have to do it manually every time you want to drop your instructor’s words of wisdom, but at least it works.
Otherwise, a certain amount of customization is readily available. Some runners want check-ins every half mile; Others find this disruptive and prefer updates every couple of miles. Some people want speed, distance and time all the time; Others only care about speed. In the run settings, you can adjust the frequency of audio updates (how often you hear your time, distance, and pace), you can turn individual metrics on or off depending on what you really want to know mid-run, and choose between different voice options for coaching and prompts.
