Growing up, I heard the same line at nearly every cookout, beach trip or outdoor activity and it was always some version of “Black people don’t need sunscreen.” It took me years, a lot of breakouts and more than a few stubborn dark spots to unlearn that way of thinking. (Spoiler alert: Black people absolutely need sunscreen, and so does everybody else.) A dermatologist finally helped me make sense of my skin a couple of years ago, and since then I’ve built a routine I’m honestly a little too proud of.
That was, of course, until I started training for my first half marathon. Months of long runs in the D.C. heat brought back breakouts along my hairline, cheeks and chin as well as raw patches where my sports bra rubs. I also picked up new dark spots on top of the ones I’d spent years fading, which is just great (author’s note: this is said sarcastically). My race is October 24, when I’ll run 13.1 miles through Los Angeles at ,and while I had only been mentally preparing for tight hamstrings and those dreaded early alarms ahead of the race, what I didn’t expect was my skin to need a dedicated training plan of its own (do you hear that, Runna?).
Sun is only one piece of it, since sweat clogs pores and friction wears down the skin barrier on every run. For those of us with melanin-rich skin, nearly every one of those problems can leave behind dark marks that take months to fade.
Then there’s the sun itself. The sunscreen I put on at 7 a.m. is mostly sweated off by mile five of a long run, and I’m someone who actually wears it. National health data shows only about so plenty of us are logging these miles with even less protection than I had. That cookout advice clearly stuck with a lot more people than just me.
Plenty of other folks are learning this the hard way right now. Running is having a real boom, and Running USA which was .
Brands are chasing first-timers like me, too. Nike built its After Dark Tour specifically for women, and it drew across five continents in 2025. The company says a third of them had never run a race before, and in Los Angeles, where I’m racing, almost half the field last year was running a first half marathon. All of those new runners are getting training plans that spell out pace charts and fueling down to the gel, and I’ve yet to find one that says a word about sunscreen or chafe balm.
What Months Of Outdoor Miles Do To Skin
Board-certified dermatologist Dr. Rachel Westbay of explained over email that the changes from training outside tend to creep up on runners. “Repeated UV exposure can break down collagen, leading to fine lines, uneven tone, and hyperpigmentation, while heat and sweat can contribute to clogged pores and irritation,” she explains. “Over months, these effects can add up.”
found that endurance athletes who spend long stretches outside can reach unsafe UV exposure in under 20 minutes. That’s shorter than most of my easy runs, and the researchers also flagged sweat, dehydration and skimpy recovery as extra stress on top of the sun.
Researchers at the Medical University of Graz in Austria were looking at this , long before run clubs took over our Instagram timelines. They examined 210 marathon runners and compared them with non-runners of the same age and sex. The runners had more atypical moles and more of the flat brown spots dermatologists call solar lentigines and most people call liver spots. Runners logging more than 43.5 miles a week were referred for suspicious lesions most often, and only 56% of the whole group said they wore sunscreen regularly.
What Melanin Does And Doesn’t Cover
Every runner in that Graz study was white. When it came out, that nobody knew whether the findings would apply to Black runners like me. To be fair, that tracks with most of the skin research I’ve come across over the years.
So what does melanin actually protect us from? It does lower our odds of melanoma, and the disease is far less common in Black Americans than in white Americans. When Black patients do get it, though, the outcomes look very different. put the five-year survival rate for Black melanoma patients at 66%. For non-Hispanic white patients , and researchers have tied much of that gap to diagnoses that come too late.
The sun may not even be the main culprit in those cases. Some dermatologists argue that melanoma in darker skin usually isn’t driven by UV at all, and Dr. Adewole Adamson, a Black dermatologist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School, These cancers tend to turn up on the palms, the soles of the feet and under the nails. My feet are currently a mess of blisters and one very bruised toenail (that’s nearly close to falling off altogether), so I’ll be looking at them a lot more closely from now on.
What melanin can’t do is keep dark spots away, and darker skin is actually more prone to them. Post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation and uneven pigmentation is one of the most common reasons we end up in a dermatologist’s office.
Most of us don’t connect those spots to the sun, though . 80.1% didn’t link the sun to hyperpigmentation and only 20.5% said they used sunscreen. I’ll raise my hand here, because I spent most of my 20s convinced my dark spots came from stress and fried food.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that the numbers are moving. Federal health survey data showed sunscreen use among Black participants climbing from 4.4% in 2003–2004 to 11.4% in 2021–2023. That’s progress, sure, but at that rate I’ll be finishing an ultramarathon before most of my cousins own a bottle of SPF.
Still, I’m not a perfect student. On the hottest days, when I’ve got a hat on and know I’ll sweat everything off by mile two anyway, I’ve been known to skip it (sorry to my derm), and I’ve got the dark spots along my cheekbones to show for it.
The Breakouts Nobody Mentions
Keara Smith is 38 and training for the , and breakouts caught her off guard. “I’m way more prone to breakouts now,” she told Forbes during a phone interview. She blames some mix of extra products, heavier sweating and the hats she wears on her runs. “Between using more products to protect and needing to be better at keeping up with my skincare routine, my skin has definitely been challenged by the outside terrain brought on by my running,” she says.
is a board-certified physician assistant and the aesthetic director at in D.C., and she says almost anything that inflames darker skin can leave a dark spot behind, whether it’s a breakout, chafing, a scratch or even a bug bite.
It comes down to melanocytes. Those are the cells that give skin its color, and they also help the body calm inflammation, so they cluster wherever skin gets irritated. “The inflammation usually calms, however the dark spot stays around for longer than the inflammation does,” German explained over email. “It’s the blessing and the curse of having skin of color.”
Newer marks can fade in roughly eight to 12 weeks, according to German, but the timeline depends on how deep the pigment sits and how long it’s been there. The bigger issue is that new marks keep showing up as long as the breakouts do. “If you continue to break out, you continue to get inflamed, which will continue to cause the hyperpigmentation cycle,” she says.
Mine popped up along my hairline, right where my headband sits on long runs, and the bumps themselves cleared up in a week or two. The marks they left are still there.
Chafing Leaves More Than A Sting
Smith’s thighs take the worst of her chafing, and Vaseline has become her go-to fix. She didn’t land on it until well into her training, though. “I learned that late in the game,” she says.
Westbay says the damage goes deeper than the sting. “Repeated friction can damage the skin’s protective barrier, leading to dryness, sensitivity and inflammation,” she says. “When chafing happens regularly, the barrier has less time to recover, which can leave skin more vulnerable to irritation and environmental stress.”
Mine shows up under my sports bra band and along my inner thighs, usually after anything longer than eight miles. My first fix was whatever lotion happened to be in my gym bag, and it did absolutely nothing. A couple of those spots healed darker than the skin around them.
German handles chafing marks in stages. First the chafing has to stop, and she suggests breathable fabrics, anti-chafe balm and anything else that cuts down on skin-on-skin friction. Once that’s under control, she works on calming and repairing the skin with ceramides, or with hydrocortisone to bring the inflammation down. Only after the skin has healed does she go after the dark marks themselves. She recommends treating the body the way you’d treat your face, with gentle acids like glycolic acid, a retinol to speed up cell turnover or azelaic acid to brighten. “We don’t want to necessarily do this treatment on irritated skin because it can further the irritation,” she says.
Knowing that would have saved me a few weeks of putting brightening serum on skin that was still raw.
What I’m Doing Differently Before Race Day
Most of what Westbay recommends happens before a run starts, with SPF on every outdoor run and breathable clothes that pull sweat away from the skin. After the run, she says to cleanse gently and soon. The Graz researchers said much the same thing back in 2006, and they added that runners should train when the sun is lower and use water-resistant sunscreen.
My race starts after sunset, so race day itself will be easy on my skin. The hundreds of miles I’ve run to get there happened in daylight, though. I’ve stopped skipping sunscreen on the hot days, and now I put on a sweat-friendly one right before I head out instead of counting on whatever I applied that morning. I also carry a small tube for anything longer than an hour. I don’t start a run over six miles without anti-chafe balm, and there’s a gentle cleanser in my gym bag so I can wash my face before the drive home. The old dark marks are still fading, but new ones have mostly stopped showing up.
Finding a sunscreen that could keep up with a run took more trial and error than I expected, even for someone with a bathroom shelf full of them. A lot of the formulas I tried left a gray film on my face, and others stung the second I started sweating before sliding right into my eyes. Three made the cut: is a lightweight chemical formula that disappears into my skin, and is the cheapest of the bunch. I didn’t expect much from , since zinc oxide is one of its filters and zinc tends to go chalky on darker skin. It melts right in on me anyway. All three hold up once I’m sweating, and none of them burn, run into my eyes or leave a white cast.
If someone at my running club told me they’d just signed up for their first half marathon, I wouldn’t start with pacing or fueling. I’d ask what they’re putting on their face before those Saturday long runs, and whether they’ve found an anti-chafe balm yet.