A study of participants in a virtual race platform in Korea determined that participation in a nine-day virtual race boosted participants’ social connection by 64% versus non participants. And participants were 8.7% more active than people who exercised alone.
The study found that while people are hard to engage in fitness or mental health programs, adding a virtual race layer vastly increases long term engagement.
BTW, if you’re into exploring social connections, check out our team’s new beta tool for analyzing networks on Bluesky. You can use Skyangles to find an account’s biggest followers (for example, Rachel Maddow’s) are OR you can pinpoint which accounts are followed by two accounts, which a great way to drill into local networks, for example, this network of librarians. The tool grows out of Twiangulate, a tool we built 15 years ago for Twitter, unfortunately now mothballed because Twitter’s API became useless.