After Dark Tour Mumbai

Women's running was one of the fastest-growing spaces in sport, and Nike revived its legendary women's race series as the After Dark Tour, a global night-race circuit across seven cities. Mumbai was the tour's first stop in India: a market with enormous potential, and a running culture still built mostly by and for men.

In India, running at night is simply not an option for most women. Four in ten women in Indian cities say they don't feel safe, and that sense of safety drops sharply after dark. Lack of safe public spaces, cultural stigma, family responsibilities and few female role models kept women off the streets, and out of the sport. Mumbai had never hosted a night race. The challenge was bigger than filling a start line: we had to make thousands of women feel safe, welcome and ready to run 10K at night, many for the first time in their lives.

I led the digital and membership ecosystem behind the launch. We designed the race as a 10‑week journey, not a one-night event. Two of Mumbai's most respected women coaches led free weekly training sessions, backed by a dedicated Nike Run Club program. For the first time in India, Nike used WhatsApp, the country's most used app, to launch a Run Assistant chatbot delivering training tips and motivation directly to runners. We launched with Indian athletes, female founders and Sisters in Sweat, India's largest women's sport community, and removed every barrier we could: safe rides home through a ride-hailing partnership, sports-bra fittings at the expo, a shakeout run and a closed course from the Gateway of India to the NSCI Dome, ending with a concert.

On 10 May 2025, more than 3,400 women ran through the heart of Mumbai at night, making it the largest women's 10K ever held in India. About one in three ran their first organised race. The training community grew 10x by word of mouth, from 40 to more than 400 runners, with over 60% of them running for the first time. The impact didn't stop at the finish line: Nike turned Mumbai into a permanent stop on the tour, with coach-led training, new community events and an expanded partner roster leading to the 2026 edition, building a lasting platform to bring more women into sport in India.