Chicago's Shirtless Runner Went Viral A Year Ago Today. Where Is He Now?
By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 13, 2016 3:10PM
Ethan Renoe became Chicago’s Shirtless Runner, as his Facebook page calls him, a year ago today.
It was a rainy, warm December night, and Renoe, 25, was out for a run on the lakefront when he ran (literally) across a news crew, he told Chicagoist. They invited him to join their weather report about the unusually high temperature, since he was running shirtless.
Renoe’s on-camera interview with WGN—in which he noted he was single and made the international “call me” gesture—went viral. It also changed his life. Here’s the clip, which has at this point been viewed more than 4.5 million times:
So this just happened. Enjoying the weather, are you, "Ethan"?
Posted by WGN TV on Sunday, December 13, 2015
Before his weather report cameo, Renoe was blogging and bouncing between part-time jobs. He was, at various points, a nanny, a bouncer and a construction worker—according to his Facebook, “[h]e has lived on 6 out of the 7 continents, had 29 part-time jobs, and done 4 consecutive one-armed pull-ups.” (Editor's note: #goals.)
Once the video came out, though, new opportunities arose for Renoe. Literary agents offered to represent him based on his personal blog, where he writes from a Christian perspective about everything from fitness to Halloween to his virginity. (Renoe is still a virgin; he’s waiting until marriage.) Currently, he’s shopping a proposal for his first book, a nonfiction work tentatively titled The New Lonely. It’s a mix of memoir and cultural criticism; as you’d expect, it’s about loneliness.
“It’s very similar to my blog,” Renoe said, explaining that the book focuses on “how this generation is more lonely than ever before, despite being more connected than before and being more quote-unquote accepting than ever before.” The book covers culture and tech, among other topics. Renoe is “stoked about it.”
The video didn't just get Renoe a literary agent, though. First, he got a tidal wave of fan mail—several thousand messages overall, he said. He read all of them.
“I feel like every single [message] started out with, ‘So I’ve never done this before, and I don’t normally do stuff like this,’” Renoe said. About half the messages were from people who “wanted to encourage me or thank me for my blog,” and the other half were “saying I was attractive and they wanted to meet me.”
He met a few dozen of the people who messaged him, but when we spoke over Thanksgiving weekend, Renoe was still single. “Nothing worked out, for one reason or another,” he said.
One factor in that might be that Renoe has moved around a lot in the past year, spending stretches in Los Angeles, Chicago and Denver. He moved to L.A. immediately after the video came out, invited by a publicist with “connections.” When none of those panned out, Renoe came back to Chicago for the summer, to see friends and explore media opportunities here. Then, in September, he moved back to Denver, where he was living when the video first came out. (He was just in town visiting Chicago when he went on his fateful shirtless run.)
Today, he rents a house in Denver with a roommate. “I feel a little less transient, a little bit more settled down,” he said. “I’m actually on the lease now, so I have to stay.”
His current routine goes something like this: He writes every day, and works occasionally as a personal trainer. He goes to a “great church” in Denver; he’s so committed to his faith that he actually has “Your kingdom come,” from the Lord’s Prayer, tattooed on his chest. You can see it in the video above.
If that all sounds staid, though, don’t be fooled—Renoe had some wacky experiences after his weather report cameo went viral. He got recognized in the streets in Chicago; he got messages from a lot of people from his past, including exes from middle school; and, last but certainly not least, he met Fabio. The latter had nothing to do with the video, particularly, but it did happen during Renoe's time in L.A.
“I used to have really long hair, like down to my chest, so… everyone would call me Fabio,” Renoe explained. “Because I had the long hair and the muscles or whatever. So I was at a sushi restaurant one day in L.A. and Fabio walked in... All my friends were embarrassed because of how much I was freaking out.”
Renoe's had some funny encounters with his own fans, too—if you can even call them encounters. “There’s been a couple people who would apparently recognize me, and then… post on Facebook, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just saw Ethan Renoe in Starbucks or something,’” he said. “Like, instead of just coming up and saying hi to me [they’d tag me in a status]? That was kind of funny. I just always wish people would come say hi, because I’m a big people person.”
That's the moral of this story, really: Say hi to Ethan if you see him around. He’s friendly, he’s single, and he knows a lot about being an internet celebrity. And his name's on his lease!