Why Zinq exists

Our story.

Zinq exists because the best run is not always the fastest one. Sometimes it is the one where the pace feels natural, the timing feels easy, and you do not spend the first ten minutes adjusting to each other.

“The hard part wasn’t finding runners. It was finding one person whose pace and rhythm matched mine.”

Ivan Founder, Zinq

I moved to a new country and built this to fix a problem I had myself. There was no shortage of runners around me. There was a shortage of one runner whose pace, week and neighbourhood lined up with mine at the same time.

Clubs were the obvious answer and they were not the right one. A club runs at the group’s pace, so somebody is always compromising, and it meets on an evening you did not choose. Tracking apps knew my splits to the second and had no idea that someone two streets away ran the same pace on the same evening.

So Zinq matches on the three things that actually have to overlap, and then gets out of the way. No feed, no score, no swiping. One person, one specific run, agreed in advance.

What it matches on

Running is easier when it feels like a fit.

Not just pace. Not just who is nearby. All three at once, or the run happens once and never repeats.

Your pace

The range you actually hold on an ordinary run, not your best. Where two ranges overlap is the pace you can both keep without one of you hanging on.

Your week

The days and times of day you are genuinely free. A perfect pace match who runs when you cannot is not a match at all.

Your neighbourhood

Where you start from, never your address. Close enough that neither of you has to make a journey to get to the run.

Editorial

Who writes the guides, and how they get checked.

Zinq publishes guides to running in Dutch cities. One person writes all of them, in both languages, and they follow three rules.

I write every guide on this site myself, in English and in Dutch. None of it is outsourced and none of it is produced in bulk. I run, I moved countries, and the problem the guides are about is one I had.

A club appears when it can be checked

A training time, a price or a meeting point goes in when the club’s own site says so, or when two independent sources agree. Otherwise the club is left out, even when I am fairly sure it is real. Several are missing from these guides for exactly that reason.

An aggregator is not a source

Directory sites copy each other, and a membership price copied three times is still one unverified number. Where a figure could not be confirmed on the organisation’s own pages, the guide tells you to go and check it there rather than printing something that will be wrong by spring.

A guide about a city Zinq is not in does not sell you Zinq

Zinq matches in Rotterdam and Maastricht only. There are guides here to Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag and Eindhoven because the information is worth having, and none of them asks you to sign up. An automated test fails the build if one of them starts to.

If something on this site is wrong, tell me and I will fix it: hello@joinzinq.com. Corrections that change a fact get the date they were made.

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