{Photograph} by Abby Edwards.
Whereas residing in Navy Yard and dealing in McLean, Jess Hood turned annoyed with the drive to and from her job in company finance. So she determined to ditch the automotive as soon as every week for a much less frequent methodology of transport: working footwear. “I attempted to seek out an progressive approach to each get my exercise in and get to work on time,” she explains.
Each Wednesday, Hood would lace up her New Balances, placed on her Noxgear light-up vest, and head out over Memorial Bridge. She then jumped onto the Metro at Ballston, as a result of in any other case the run would have been greater than half a marathon. And sure—to reply a standard query—her workplace constructing had a bathe and a locker room for contemporary garments, so coworkers have been by no means uncovered to the aftermath of her exertions.
In 2023, Hood started documenting her run-commute experiences on Instagram and TikTok, together with different content material about native working and stuff to do round DC. Her feeds proved unexpectedly standard, turning her into one thing of a spokesperson for jogging to the workplace. “After I was run-commuting,” she says, “folks would acknowledge me and be like, ‘Oh, are you the Instagram woman who runs to work?’ ”
As extra corporations reached out to her with sponsorship and partnership alternatives and her influencer standing grew, Hood realized she may really make a residing that manner—which means she may stop the very job that she’d been run-commuting to. She remembers pondering, “Nicely, I like this company job—it’s not like I’d by no means come again, however let me simply take this opportunity on myself.”
To this point, it’s figuring out: On March 15, Hood might be working her ninth official half marathon, the DC Rock ’n’ Roll Half Marathon—solely this time she’ll be main its ambassador program. She additionally has a facet enterprise as a photographer, and he or she works because the supervisor of social-media accounts for a number of native companies, together with Pacers, the working retailer that additionally organizes the PNC Alexandria and DC half marathons.
Nowadays, Hood’s social feeds are a lot much less targeted on the run-commuting side, partly as a result of she not run-commutes to the workplace and partly as a result of, though that content material proved standard, there’s in all probability a cap on the viewers. As Hood herself places it, “I don’t assume that the everyday individual is run-commuting.”
This text seems within the March 2025 concern of Washingtonian.
