Running alone by the Han River needs nothing — at five people, rules appear

Visitors to Seoul keep describing the same scene. After dark, groups in matching kit run in single file along the Han River paths. It looks like a club, or an event, and it happens every night.

The boom is usually explained with "running only needs shoes." But what has actually happened in Korea over the past two years runs the other way. As the number of runners grew, the requirements started stacking up — and they stack by group size.

At a glance

What the table does not show is the order of events. None of these rules predate the boom; they appeared one by one from late 2024 because of friction the boom created. The cost of running in Korea is not a fixed number — it is still going up.

Marathon entries went from 9,000 to a million in four years

Data the National Police Agency submitted to the National Assembly's culture and sports committee in October 2025 shows that Korea held 254 marathon events in 2024, with 1,008,122 total entrants. That is about 4,000 people per event, and it means a race somewhere almost every weekend.

The interesting part is the four years before it.

The 9,000 figure for 2020 does not mean nobody ran. It is the number for a year in which races could not be held. So any "a hundredfold in five years" framing is inflated by a baseline that sits at the bottom of the pandemic.

The stretch from 320,000 in 2022 to a million in 2024 has nothing to do with restrictions, though. That two-year climb is what produces the scene you now see on the river, and more than 60% of entrants are in their twenties and thirties — the opposite of the assumption that marathons are a middle-aged pursuit.

Over the same period, the share of Koreans who said they jog or run rose from 23% in 2021 to 32% in 2023, and the running population was estimated at over 10 million in 2025. In a country of 51 million, that is roughly one person in five.

"Zero cost of entry" is only true when you run alone

The problem is that running here is also a way of socialising. As the "running crew" culture spread, the default image stopped being one person and became ten people abreast.

A complaint filed in Seocho-gu in September 2024 is specific about it: crews running as a team were occupying four or five lanes of the track and shouting at walkers to get off. From 1 October that year, Seocho-gu banned group running by five or more people at the Banpo Sports Complex and required at least 2 m between people on the track.

Seokchon Lake in Songpa-gu put up banners asking groups of three or more not to run. Yeouido Park posted a separate notice listing prohibited behaviour aimed at running crews.

Not every district made the same choice. Seoul Children's Grand Park in Gwangjin-gu received similar complaints and refused to introduce restrictions, saying it would rely on on-site guidance and announcements instead. Rules exist in some places and not others, so the answer changes with the course you pick.

For reference, Article 17 of Seoul's Han River Park ordinance prohibits damaging trees, excessive noise, unauthorised camping and littering. Running shirtless — a recurring flashpoint in the crew debate — is not on the list of finable offences. The list of written rules and the list of things people find irritating are not the same list.

A 1,500-person race stopped two days before the start

The 4th Seoul Han River Ultramarathon, scheduled for 16 May 2026, was postponed on 14 May — two days out. It had over 1,500 entrants, 100 km and 50 km distances, and entry fees of 80,000–100,000 won.

The organisers said they had received formal approval from Dongdaemun-gu in early March. The course ran from Jangan 1 Waterside Park in Dongdaemun-gu through the Ttukseom Han River Park area in Gwangjin-gu.

The Seoul Han River Authority saw it differently. Holding a marathon of 500 or more people in a Han River Park requires separate use approval, which had not been obtained, and the authority said it would file a criminal complaint for an unauthorised event under Article 33(1) of the River Act. Dongdaemun-gu, which had initially reviewed only its own jurisdiction, later clarified that approval is needed from every district and every managing body along the course.

The Han River looks like a single park, but it has more than one manager. A course running along the water passes through several districts, and the Han River Park zones sit on top of that under the city's own authority. One stamp does not open the whole route.

For an entrant, the lesson is short. Paying the entry fee is not a guarantee that the race will happen.

The money went into clothing and entry fees as much as shoes

Market figures show the boom from another angle. The athletic shoe market grew from 2.77 trillion won in 2021 to an estimated 4 trillion-plus in 2024, and running shoes alone passed 1 trillion won. Skechers' Korean athletic shoe revenue reached about 320 billion won in 2024, up 29% year on year.

But apparel grew faster than footwear. Andar posted 89.1 billion won in revenue and 13.3 billion won in operating profit in Q2 2025 — up 33% and 27%, both records. Xexymix's RX running line passed 10 billion won within a year of launch, and Kolon FnC's running range was up 145% year on year as of September–October 2025.

Then there are entry fees. The ultramarathon above charged 80,000–100,000 won, and ordinary races charge too. A million entries in a year means a substantial sum flowing into this market separately from retail. Regional effects get estimated as well: the Chuncheon Marathon at 15 billion won, the Gyeongju Cherry Blossom Marathon at 9 billion.

The footwear market is splitting in two directions worth watching together. The trend of heels disappearing from Korean men's shoes and the trillion-won running shoe category are two different things happening on the same shelf.

What this means where you are

Leaving one early morning or late evening open in your itinerary is still a good idea. The Han River paths are living space rather than a sight, and that time slot shows you a face of the city no tour route covers. Walking is enough.

If you want to join a crew, check the course before the cost. Many crews recruit on social media and charge nothing, but if a restricted stretch like the Banpo track is on the route you can be stopped on the spot. The older advice still applies too: joining a group faster than your pace ruins the rest of your day.

Where registration fails is usually not payment but identity. The gate that stops visitors at Korean services is almost always Korean phone number verification, and race sign-up pages are no exception.

If running is not your thing, the same time slot has an alternative. The outdoor activity with a far longer history of mass participation here is hiking, and nobody is arguing about group size limits on the mountains yet.

While rules keep arriving more slowly than people do, what will the next number in that table be?

Read next

• Heels are disappearing from Korean men's shoes — the same shoe market splitting two ways
• Why do Koreans go up mountains so much? — the default outdoor activity here, long before running
• The app installs but the sign-up fails — the real reason race registration stops
• A 3,000-won card, unlimited travel for 5,000 won a day — getting to the start of the course

Sources

• Seoul Shinmun — 1,500 runners warned their Han River race was "illegal"
• Newsis — The running crew dispute that produced a "five-person limit" rule
• Women's Times — Marathon entrants pass one million, a tenfold rise in five years
• SEN TV — The running era: the industry is running too