Nat Long WAY BACK WHEN I WAS YOUNG I DON’T THINK I KNEW HOW BIG RUNNING WOULD GET IN MY LIFE, BUT I DEFINITELY HAD A LOVE FOR IT STRAIGHT AWAY
Nat Long is an ultra runner and successful Instagrammer, as well as having a demanding job in cancer research. We caught up with her a day or so before she took on the Thames Path 100, an ultra that goes from Richmond to Oxford, and possibly her biggest challenge yet
Words: Rachel Ifans
f you’re on Insta and you’ve got your running algorithms sorted, you probably know Nat Long. She posts hugely entertaining and popular Run Until videos and she’s got 264,000 followers, which is one of the biggest audiences – if not the biggest – for any sole running account in the UK.
Nat, a Senior Neurosurgical Research Coordinator, has been posting about running for a few years but it was only when she was approached by Sports Direct in 2022 and asked to make a Run Until video that she found her niche. She explains: “I was still fairly small then compared to now and I didn’t really know what they were asking me to do. Basically, they said they wanted me to go out on a run and find something and film myself doing it!”
Despite her initial confusion, Nat really loved the brief because it wasn’t very product focused; it was just about her enjoyment of running. “So that’s when my whole Run Until thing started,” she continues. “I just went until I found a statue, videoed it, posted it and it blew up from there really.”
Dogs in coats
Nat’s followers started suggesting things she could find during her runs so she carried on doing it. She says: “I try and do at least four or five videos a week. I’ll do a bit of my normal run as a warm-up and then I'll look through the comments, choose one of the requests and then weave my filming into the run.
“The comments I get through are so random but I do enjoy it and some of the weirder requests have gone really massive over the last six months,” she laughs. “I had to run until I saw an octopus one day and although I was actually at the beach, in the end I found it on a poster. And another fun one was a dog in a coat. I ran past so many dogs, and it was raining that day, but none of them had coats on!”
Young runner
Nat comes from a close-knit family, one where both parents are keen runners. It was her dad who suggested she join an athletics club when she was young and it suited her down to the ground. “I wasn’t that social when I was a kid,” she explains. “We were just quite family orientated when I was growing up and I loved running. It was only as I got older that I realised there were so many more bene
