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Hannah Pangilinan once struggled with starting her fitness journey, and from her own experience, she knows that all it takes is a small start.
Hannah Pangilinan wakes up before the crack of dawn to meet with her run club, Just One, at least once a week. This is a ritual that has become sacred to her ever since she inaugurated this community alongside well-known running coach Ani de Leon-Brown. On some days, she gets up for a track day with Just One; on other mornings, they do hill sprints on a long uphill stretch to work on speed. But no matter what’s scheduled on their training program, one thing remains consistent: they show up, much like their name, as just one community of like-minded individuals.
This is why Hannah started the run club in the first place. She tells The GAME, “I saw there was something happening with the running community. That people were in search of a place to belong, a place to start…Some people are just afraid to start.”
Hannah, at 25 years old, understands from personal experience what it’s like to be scared of starting. But she is guided by a certain principle — or more specifically, her favorite Bible verse — that reminds her to take the first step.
“Do not despise small beginnings,” she says.
“Every time I talk about Just One, I tell people this: do not despise the small beginnings. They’re the ones that make the big things in life. Little steps. They compile, they compound.”
Inspired by this ideology, Hannah heeded her own advice; she took the first small step in building the Just One community, and now, she is inspiring thousands of others to start.
Small beginnings
Hannah Pangilinan had the idea to start the Just One run club right after she finished the Boston Marathon with her mom. She took that experience of running alongside a big community and, quite literally, ran with it.
But the foundational spirit of Just One hatched long before that. It started during the pandemic, when Hannah needed to start again.
“Starting my fitness journey again was super hard,” she recalls. “I knew myself as an athlete all my life, but when I went to college, I just stopped because I was busy living a new life…It was my first time living alone, I had to cook for myself, I didn’t have time to work out. I was not fit at all.”
She admits to questioning herself: “Am I still an athlete? Can I still work out?” And there was a time when these questions left her feeling discouraged.
However, Hannah is lucky to have loved ones who help push her in the right direction. One individual, in particular, encouraged her to restart her fitness journey in a small way: by simply doing 10 minutes of exercise every day.
“I was like, ‘Fine, anyone can do 10 minutes, right?’ So I started with that,” she shares. “And then in the pandemic, I wanted to do just one pull-up. That was my goal.
“So I would put it as a hashtag on my Instagram: #Just10. I was inspiring my followers on doing just 10 minutes a day. And then I did just 1,000 jumps on the jump rope.”
Eventually, Hannah was able to achieve her one pull-up (if you’ve ever tried to perform a pull-up on a whim, you’d know it’s not easy) and in doing so, she proved to herself that even the smallest of steps can snowball into something bigger. In Hannah’s case, just 10 minutes later evolved into taking on the challenge of a full marathon.
“That was the start of it all,” she says, beaming with pride. “I was trying to recall when I started, what were the things that pulled me out of that rut? And it’s really that concept that it begins with just one.”
Small steps lead to big leaps
Hannah does not discount the power of starting with just 10 minutes of exercise every day, because by starting with those easy, approachable 10-minute workouts, she eventually worked her way to something much longer: marathon running.
“I was just so in awe of that progress,” she shares, looking back at the steps she took to make that jump. “That progress wouldn’t be there if I didn’t start, and sometimes people are just scared to start.”
For everything this mindset gave her, Hannah then wanted to spread the same message to anyone else afraid of starting. Thus, Just One was born — and much to her surprise and delight, its inspirational motive resonated with many.
“It was it was actually just supposed to be a run club, but then we were just having problems with sites because I couldn’t find venues that could accommodate people that wanted to sign up for my run club. And then I was also like, I can’t do this every week because this is how big the group is gonna be.
“So from there, what I did is I did a run club as a private run club with my friends, and then we would just do public runs. I call it an ‘Open Run’ where I do an open call: I’m gonna be here at this time. I’m gonna run a 5K. Whoever wants to join, come. And then a hundred people would show up.”
This was more than Hannah had initially expected — but it was also a welcome surprise. With the number of runners who started to show up for her Open Runs, she realized that maybe people aren’t so afraid of starting out, after all; maybe people are no longer afraid of being beginners.
And this sparked a powerful idea.
She recalls thinking, “Okay wait. Maybe we should just make it a fun run so everyone can join, so I don’t turn people away.”
Hannah hosted her first official fun run, the Just One Fun Run, in September 2024, which brought together over 2,000 runners inspired to start with just one. Now, she is gearing up for the second iteration of the event, happening on July 6, 2025.
“It’s a lot of work for sure,” Hannah admits, touching on all the logistics that have to come together when organizing an event of this size. “But I really want it to be a very different experience.”
Hannah also emphasizes that when coming up with the Just One Fun Run, she wanted to make sure that nobody walked up to the starting line blindly. She wants each and every one of the participants to be ready for whatever they distance they will be taking on, whether it’s 5K or 21K.
“Everybody who signs up has a training plan that’s specific. And then the training plan has different pace groups: you have Lakwatsa, Sakto Lang, Hataw, and Banat. So depending on what level you are, there’s a specific training plan for you,” she explains.
Ultimately, Hannah’s goal is for the runners at Just One to feel like this isn’t just any other fun run they signed up for, but rather, for them to feel the same thing that she feels whenever she gets up in the morning to meet with her run club — that they are a part of a supportive community.
Growing with a community
After every run club session, Hannah and the runners of Just One gather together for some breakfast and coffee at a nearby cafe of restaurant. They sit huddled together, creating happy chatter as they exchange thoughts on the run, on the food, on the coffee — on anything, really.
And this is the best part of the entire experience: the privilege of sharing one’s passion with other equally passionate individuals. As Hannah shares, this is what people come back for.
“What I like to say is the Just One is the perfect place to kickstart or rekindle your running journey,” she notes.
“The good thing about it is that you learn from the other people around you. You learn from the beginners if you’re an elite [runner] because you see how much they love getting into it, so you’re reminded of the joy. Beginners also learn so much from the lites. What are the best shoes to use? What do you do for hydration?”
Though running may be considered an individual sport, something that can easily be done in solitude, Hannah believes that having a supportive community, just like the Just One Run Club, makes the journey a little bit easier, and a whole lot sweeter.
She hopes everyone can get a taste of what that feels like — which is why, countless 10-minute workouts and three marathons later, she is still guided by the same principle: “Do not despise small beginnings.”
“When you tell somebody like, ‘Oh, it’s just one fun run,’ then the person is like, ‘Oh yeah. I can do that. I can do just one. I can do just one run. I can do just one workout.’
“And then it makes it doable. It makes it small enough for somebody to easily start.”
Images taken by Grant Babia.