Looking for a Third Place? Get Outside

Two summers ago, I went shopping for a mountain bike group ride. I’d just moved to the Lake Tahoe area, and everywhere else I’d lived, races and group rides were how I’d made friends. I knew that if I could find a good weekly ride, I would find my new community.

The first ride I checked out had only three participants, including myself. The next was attended by riders who seemed mostly new to one another. Then I went to a ride hosted Wednesday nights by Rocky Mountain Underground, a bar/restaurant/gear shop in the North Lake Tahoe hub of Truckee. I arrived at 5 p.m. to find thirty or so riders milling around in front of the shop. Everyone seemed to know one another. I was standing alone, wishing for an invisible-’til-now manhole to open beneath my feet and swallow me when a woman walked up, introduced herself, and offered me a ride to the trailhead. Another rider asked if it was my first time. When I said yes, he replied, “Thanks for coming.” An hour and a half later, at the bottom of the descent, I watched the group cheer for the last rider, a gray-haired gentleman they called Ben. I noted once more that everyone seemed to know each other. But this time that didn’t make me want to fall through a trapdoor. It made me want to come back next Wednesday.

A third place is less about where people gather and more about what they do together, says Debbie Rudman…“It’s the doing that becomes the point of connection,” she says. “The relationships, sense of belonging, and community build from that.”

Friendship and community are popular topics these days, and the conversation in recent years has often turned to the notion of the third place. According to the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term, a third place is one that’s outside the home (the first place) and work (second place), where people can meet and socialize with strangers, acquaintances, or friends. Third places are posited as a solution for finding and building community during a time when Americans are increasingly alone. “Do Yourself a Favor,” the Atlantic advised in 2022, “and Go Find a Third Place.”

What always puzzled me was this: Just because you live near the kinds of establishments that are traditionally identified as third places—like bars, coffee shops, parks, and libraries—doesn’t mean you’re going to become friends with your neighbors. My sister and her husband, for example, live two blocks off a charming downtown drag in the Bay Area, but they’ve struggled to make local friends.

Americans who live near amenities like these are more likely to meet new people than those who don’t, according to a 2021 community life survey. But the same survey also found that more than half of Americans who live in “very high-amenity” areas chatted with strangers at most a few times a year.

Outdoor places and spaces like run clubs, group rides, gear shops, trails, ski areas, and others also fit Oldenburg’s criteria for third places. They’re free or low-cost to attend (the cost of gear notwithstanding). They bring people together from different backgrounds and put them on equal footing, an effect called “social leveling.” And they facilitate casual conversations.

But the outdoors may be even better than traditional third places at bringing people together and sparking the lasting connections that form a community.

A third place is less about where people gather and more about what they do together, says Debbie Rudman, a health sciences professor at Toronto’s Western University who is co-leading a four-year study on third places. “It’s the doing that becomes the point of connection,” she says. “The relationships, sense of belonging, and community build from that.”

That’s in part because a key ingredient to community-building, besides a place, is time. This is one of the biggest barriers to community building in our productivity-oriented culture, says Kathy Giuffre, a professor emerita of sociology at Colorado College. “We feel like we can’t waste our time to go to a coffee shop and just sit around for a couple hours and meet the regulars.” At a third space like a run club, however, the activity itself demands spending time together. Participants also return week after week, becoming regulars and forming bonds, because they enjoy running and its health benefits.

It felt like our community was performing acts of kindness like cyclists in a paceline, each member taking a turn at the front and then peeling off to let the next rider through.

Even if someone does find the time to go to a coffee shop, these spaces don’t necessarily encourage interaction. Starbucks bills itself as a third place, historian Bryant Simon noted in 2009, yet “one learns they do not have to talk at Starbucks. Actually one learns not to talk.” Sharing an activity, by comparison, makes it easy to strike up casual gab: You can bitch about the hill you’re climbing, or ask which race someone is training for.

Some argue that run clubs don’t qualify as third places because of their emphasis on exercise, or productivity. The researchers I spoke to disagreed. The guise of productivity may actually work in our favor, says Giuffre. “It almost gives people an excuse to do something that’s actually quite pleasurable, which our society makes us feel really guilty about,” she says. “‘I’m exercising, so it’s OK.’”

Hedman, who studies what makes sports clubs so effective at building communities, prefers the term “shared goal” to productivity. It’s this goal orientation that gives sports clubs such staying power as third places, and even sets them apart from other “doing” spaces like, say, an art class. As members return regularly in pursuit of these goals, relationships develop through friendly interactions and shared experiences, “be they fulfilling, terrifying, or triumphant,” he writes in a 2024 paper. People with these kinds of emotional ties, he says, are more willing to contribute to “collective undertakings.”

I’ve seen the power of outdoor sports to create what I call a community—a diffuse network of people who have bonds both tight and loose, yet nonetheless feel an accountability to one another that supersedes their individual ties. Several years ago, when my then-fiancé was hospitalized after being hit and nearly killed on his bike by a careless driver, we received messages, visits, gift cards, meals, flowers, Venmo transfers, and care packages from not only friends and family, but also near-strangers and acquaintances. At the time, the influx was so steady that it felt like our community was performing acts of kindness like cyclists in a paceline, each member taking a turn at the front and then peeling off to let the next rider through. After we left the ICU, his brother said, “This was probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to us, but it wasn’t a negative experience.”

The notion of third places may be evolving from Oldenburg’s original definition. Considering what people do together, not just where they gather, dispels the idea that third places are static, pre-existing physical spaces that people visit to get their daily dose of connection, Rudman says. “It’s the people who actually create the third place by doing the activity.” We become the regulars, the characters that define a place.

I like this concept of a third place as one you make, not just one you find. I did keep going back to that Wednesday night group ride, and the following summer I started to help lead rides as a shop ambassador. (RMU provides me with a small bar tab and a few items of gear in exchange.) But according to this theory, every rider who comes helps to create the experience I look forward to each Wednesday. Maybe that explains why I often feel compelled to say the same thing whenever I see a new face: “Thanks for coming.”

This piece first appeared in the summer 2025 print issue of Outside Magazine. Subscribe now for early access to our most captivating storytelling, stunning photography, and deeply reported features on the biggest issues facing the outdoor world.