On Feb. 28 of 2020, J.C. Lippold looked at the front page of this newspaper and smiled. At the top was a banner that read, "Running Conversation" with a picture of he and his fellow runners jumping in the air.
The story was about Lippold's brainchild, which he called "5K Everyday Conversations." The idea was simple: Strangers would meet up, run 5 kilometers together and talk. This would help connect people in our disconnected age, and combat the tidal wave of loneliness.
Two months in, the project was going well. Lippold planned to run and talk for all 366 days of 2020. But just below the banner was another headline: "Stocks' worst day as fears go viral." COVID-19 was on its way.
Looking at the front page, Lippold felt a sliver of doubt about whether his project would go as planned. But strangers kept running and talking until March 25, when Gov. Tim Walz ordered a two-week lockdown.
Being is a creative person, Lippold is not one to let something like a global pandemic keep him down. He pivoted.
"The second the lockdown started happening, I found a treadmill, and was running on it on Facebook Live. But I thought, 'This doesn't seem like something that's going to be either interesting or manageable.' "
Broadcasting himself to people on social media wasn't why he started this project. In fact, it was the opposite. Yet to his surprise, other runners wanted to keep it going. It had only been a few months, but connections had been made.
So Lippold kept up the daily Facebook Live conversations, and soon others stepped up to lead the videos, with the online group expanding to Florida, New Mexico and Canada, with nearly 1,000 members today.