Wiz Khalifa Has Started Running. Nike and Strava Noticed Within a Day.

Wiz Khalifa has started running. The rapper, 38, told his 39 million Instagram followers in a post on Wednesday that he ran five miles on Sunday and three miles the day before while on vacation with his family, bought equipment, and then went out for a run after dark.

“Started running recently and i love it,” he wrote.

The running was not the point of the post. Khalifa’s caption ran down a family trip in the order it happened, and the mileage sat between a shopping stop and a note about his daughter getting comfortable in the pool. What runners picked up on was the specificity: he gave the distances, gave the days, and described buying gear before a session in the dark.

“I was questioning my safety for a min but then i said fugg it,” he wrote of the night run.

He is not coming to this from a standing start. Khalifa has trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Los Angeles under Rigan Machado, an eighth-degree red and black belt, since at least 2018, and told Bleacher Report that year that gym work had taken him from 140 to 175 lb. “I was cool with being skinny before. But as a 30-year-old man, I like myself with more weight,” he said at the time.

The brands answered a first week of running as though it were a signing. Strava’s reply drew the most support of any of them, offering, “let’s get you verified and help you track your journey,” a comment that had 1,085 likes by Thursday. Coros told him it needed to get him “in a better running watch ASAP.” Nike Running wrote, “Things we like to see: Wiz running.” Janji had a view on his half tights, the sunglasses brand Blenders said it had sent him a direct message, the Austin Marathon’s account left an approving comment, and a fitness equipment company invited him to Running Man Fest. The thread passed 2,000 comments, many of them from runners inviting him out.

That speed makes sense against the numbers. Strava, which has more than 180 million users, reported in its Year in Sport report in December 2025 that new clubs on the platform nearly quadrupled during 2025, reaching 1 million in total, with running clubs growing 3.5 times over the year. The same report found Gen Z respondents far likelier than Gen X to keep training while traveling, which is the exact behavior Khalifa was describing. Demand for races has moved with it: a record 1,338,544 people applied in the public ballot for the 2027 London Marathon, London Marathon Events said in May, an 18 percent rise year on year and more than double the 578,304 who applied for the 2024 edition.

Plenty of the replies made the obvious joke about lung capacity. The only laboratory study to measure what commercially available cannabis does to a runner’s experience of a workout, published in the journal Sports Medicine in December 2023, followed 42 runners and found that they enjoyed a treadmill session more after using either THC or CBD, while the THC group rated the same intensity of running significantly harder than they did sober.

Famous converts are not new to running, and several have gone on to creditable marathon times. Khalifa has not entered a race, joined a club, or named a distance goal, and a 5K is the conventional first target for a runner at this stage. Strava’s offer to verify his account was still unanswered on Thursday.