Your first four weeksA walk-run plan, three days a week
How I'd build the new Run Monks
A home for the philosophy, and a realm where runners are slowly transformed.
Prepared for Kushagra Sharma by Dhrumil Kherde, with IndieFolio. October 2026.
What I understood from our call
Run Monks slows people down, takes them onto trails and into the mountains, and treats running as the base for the whole person: body, breath, mind and spirit.
So the new site needs a real platform behind it. A runner joins, gets a spirit animal, and works through a year of hurdles, ultra trails and their own distractions. Those who finish come out part monk, part samurai, and go on to guide the next group.
What Run Monks replaces
A race ticketA year-long journey
Pace and personal bestsHow much you've changed
City roads, in a crowdTrails, rivers and mountains
Growth through adsOne runner at a time
The finish lineGuiding the next runner
Every runner gets a spirit animal
Picking from 16 animals you don't know yet doesn't work. So a runner answers a few questions about how they run, and is matched by each animal's flow, energy and behaviour. Try the short version.
These four are examples. Your 16 go on the dial.
Answer three questions to meet your animal
Runners can switch once in their first week. After that, their animal shapes the tasks they get.
The year inside the Zen Realm
One climb, nine hurdles, about a year. Each hurdle takes weeks, and some open only when a runner runs one of your events.
Day 1: choose your spirit animal
1–9Hurdles, yours to define
The summit: monk and samurai, who then mentor the next runners
What a runner sees each morning
One screen, opened once a day. No feed to scroll.
6:12Zen Realm
Day 47Snow Leopard
Today's task
Run for 45 minutes. No music, no watch.
Log itAdd a noteSync a run
Holding the line
Doom-scrolling6 days
Late nights2 days
Skipping rest11 days
Hurdle 2
18 of 42 days
Today's task, the distractions, the climb.
6:14Zen Realm
Transformation scoreCompared with you, the day you joined
Day 1Today
This month
Breath and discipline moved the most. Rest is the one to watch.
Measured against yourself only. Dimensions are examples.
Tools for before and after a run
Small practices a runner opens on the way out of the door, and on the way back in.
Breathing
Box breathing before a run, 4-7-8 after, and a rhythm to breathe to while running.
Guided meditation
Five to twenty minutes, with a quiet bell. Some led by your animal.
Silent run timer
Time only. No pace, no distance, no map.
Post-run reflection
Two lines: how the body felt, how the mind felt. It feeds the score.
Mobility routines
Short warm-ups and cool-downs for hips, ankles and back.
Fuel and water planner
How much to eat and drink on a long trail run, by distance and heat.
Ultra kit checklist
Mandatory kit for each Run Monks event, ticked off before race day.
Badges along the way
Earned for real moments on the climb, never for speed. Each one also exists as a patch, a pin and a sticker, handed over in person.
Four finished examples, with the rest of the set below.
Patches, pins and stickers
Patches for packs, pins for straps, stickers for flasks. Handed over at events and by mentors when a hurdle is crossed, so every one is earned in front of someone.
The full set, so far (experiment)
The same badges as carved stamps, pressed into a runner's profile. Earned ones in full ink.
The vice army
Your everyday distractions become named opponents. The realm counts how long a runner holds the line against each. A slip costs points, never progress, so nobody quits over one bad week.
Doom-scrollingThe snooze buttonLate nightsComparing yourselfSkipping rest
Examples. Your list replaces them.
Your events become milestones
Each race becomes a gate on the climb, crossed alongside other runners. Registration lives on the site and links to the runner's journey.
BRUTEBasar, Arunachal Pradesh
Naneghat UltraWestern Ghats
Army and ITBP racesMechuka, Aalo
New eventsAdded by you, any time
From runner to mentor to chapter
Graduates mentor a small group of new runners. Some go on to start a Run Monks chapter in their city. The academy runs alongside, with courses paid for on the site.
The public site
Nine sections on runmonks.com, most of them pages you can update yourself.
runmonks.com
Run MonksPhilosophyZen RealmEventsAcademyChaptersField guideJournalMediaAboutJoin the realm
Film of a trail at dawn. One line on what Run Monks is. One way in.
The philosophy
The spirit animal dial and quiz
Next event, with registration
Find a chapter
From the journal
Academy
Media
A field guide and a journal
Open to everyone, signed in or not. The basics for someone who has never run, and stories for people who already do.
Start here
Seven short reads for a first-time runner.
Your first four weeksA walk-run plan, three days a week
ShoesRoad or trail, and when it matters
Breathing while you runSlow enough to talk, through the nose
FormPosture, cadence, how your foot lands
Fuel and waterWhat to carry once runs pass an hour
Rest and small injuriesSleep, soreness, and when to stop
Your first trailKit, safety and trail manners
How running helped me quit smoking
From 2014: the run that replaced the cigarette, and the reason Run Monks exists.
Your story · 6 min read
Mechuka, the last town before the border
Racing with the Indian Army where the road ends.
Events
Running the Ghats in the monsoon
Mud, cloud and why slow is the only speed.
Trails
Why we don't publish leaderboards
The only runner worth beating is last month's you.
Philosophy- What BRUTE taught me about running slowEvents
- Meet the Snow LeopardOne post per spirit animal
- From a first 5K to the first hurdleRunner stories
Ideas I'd add
Not in the brief, but I think they fit what you're building.
No leaderboards
Runners only ever compare themselves with who they were a month ago.
Silent runs
Time only. No pace, no distance. Two lines afterwards on how the body and mind felt.
A mentor family tree
Who guided you, and who you've guided. Over the years it becomes the history of Run Monks.
One notification a day
At dawn, never at night. A platform that fights doom-scrolling shouldn't add to it.
A year that follows the seasons
Monsoon on the Western Ghats, winter in Arunachal.
Runners make the content
A crossed hurdle becomes a ready-made post, so the community builds your Instagram.
A first idea for the mark
One trail traces its way up in switchbacks and closes into a zen circle at the top, which also reads as a monk sitting still. The climb, the summit and the stillness in one line.
I put this together quickly to show how far we could take the identity. We'd iterate on it together.
How we'd build it
Overlapping phases, so you see working pieces early. About sixteen weeks at four hours a day, four days a week.
Rules of the realmYour IP written down as rules
Public siterunmonks.com live, sign-ups open
Zen Realm, first versionQuiz, climb, tasks, vices, score
Academy, chapters, mentorsCourses, payments, chapter pages
Mobile appOnce real runners are on the platform
Neighbouring phases share a week, so the first version takes about sixteen weeks.
Built to last fifteen years
The short answers to your questions on security, DPDP, scale and recovery.
You own everything
Every account is in Run Monks' name. If we stop working together, nothing breaks.
One provider
Next.js on Cloudflare: hosting, database and file storage in one place, the same Cloudflare already protecting runmonks.com.
Security
Cloudflare in front, database rules so no runner sees another's data, no stored passwords.
DPDP from day one
Clear consent, only the data the journey needs, members can download or delete theirs. Data is encrypted and stored in Asia-Pacific.
Backups and recovery
The database can be restored to any point in the last 30 days, included in the plan, plus a weekly copy kept elsewhere.
Room to grow
Handles thousands of members as built. A mobile app can plug into the same back end later.