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The Nike Run Club app is a longtime favorite for many runners, and for good reason. 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 leaderboards. But like a lot of polished apps, a handful of its most useful tricks aren’t spelled out anywhere official. Whether you downloaded NRC last week to get into running for the first time, or you’re been logging miles on it for years, these hacks will help you get more out of every run.
Sort your runs to track your progress and challenge yourself
You might be satisfied scrolling through your activity feed in reverse chronological order and never think to sort it differently. But being able to instantly surface your longest run ever (or your fastest mile, or what have you) is a great way to both celebrate progress and benchmark where you are right now.
This one sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly not intuitive on the app. In fact, I found this tip buried in a Reddit comment thread. Here’s how to do it: open NRC, go to Activity → All Activity, then tap the Filter button in the top right corner. From there, select Sort By and choose from options like Longest Distance, Fastest Pace, and more.
Once you know how to find your personal records, you can take it a step further: use those past efforts as competition. One of my favorite ways to stay motivated is revisit a previous run and essentially race against it.
Use the beginner-friendly ‘First Run’ to improve pacing even as a pro
NRC’s “First Run” guided run is ostensibly designed for beginners, which is exactly why most experienced runners skip right past it. Here’s my tip: Don’t! Even as seasoned runner myself, I found real value in it this guided run. It forced me to recalibrate my internal pacing. Plus, it felt like necessary onboarding for the app itself, taking you through how NRC coaching actually works. It covers how the audio cues are timed, how effort-based prompts land mid-run, how to mentally engage with the coaching format rather than just tolerating it as background noise. If you’ve ever zoned out during a guided run or felt like the coaching wasn’t landing, there’s a good chance you’ve been passively receiving it rather than actively running with it.
Maybe you really, truly don’t need to revisit the basics of running slower than you think you should. In this case, think of the ‘first run’ less as a beginner workout, and more as an onboarding session you probably skipped.
Use a minimalist background to protect your privacy when sharing your routes
A few years ago, NRC made it easy to share your route on a stripped-down, street-name-free background. I know I love sharing the shape of my run without broadcasting exactly where I live or train. That option became harder to find over time, and some users are left 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 the three dots → Share → Route (to the left of “Camera Roll”) → More → Remove Background in CapCut. That last step kicks you out of NRC and into CapCut, which I personally don’t feel like using. Sorry!
The easier way: Share → Posters (to the right of “Camera Roll”), then scroll through the poster options until you find the simplest black or gray background available. That gives you a clean, minimal route 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 lost distance 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. That means your total elapsed time and distance are both undercounted by the time the workout ends.
The real workaround is to run a second app simultaneously. Strava works well for this, as does a GPS watch if you have one. When your run is done, you’ll have an accurate total distance from the secondary source. You can then go back into NRC, find the interval run, and manually edit the distance to reflect what you actually covered. It’s an extra step, but if your weekly mileage tracking matters to you—or you’re following a training plan where volume is the point—it’s worth doing.
Get the guidance you want—without all the monologues
You may be a part of Coach Bennett’s cult-like following, but that doesn’t mean every one of your guided runs needs a lengthy motivational monologue. Unfortunately, there’s no in-app setting for you to commit the blasphemous sin that is cutting off a coach’s speech. Instead, use this workaround: Once the speech starts, exit the app. Wait a few seconds, then re-open the app. This cuts off the coach’s speech without pausing your run. You have to do this manually every time you want to skip through your trainer’s words of wisdom, but at least it works.
Otherwise, a certain amount of customization is readily available. Some runners want a check-in every half mile; others find that disruptive and prefer updates every two miles. Some want pace, distance, and time every time; others only care about pace. In you run settings, you can adjust the frequency of audio updates (how often you hear your time, distance, and pace), toggle individual metrics on or off depending on what you actually want to know mid-run, and choose between different voice options for the coaching and cues.
