Steveston Run Crew was founded in 2016 Richmond BC by Paul in partnership with lululemon.
Originally we began as a small group running track workouts in our city. The club name was “iRunRichmond”. A couple of friends of Dean started things up, and due to his work schedule, he was unable to make most workouts.
As the club grew, lululemon continued to support us, with events, gear for runners and some key resourcing including Rachel who became, and remains one of our club leads. She is a certified run coach, excellent organizer and ferociously inclusive.
In early 2018 I was able to become a regular with the crew, and quickly stepped into a leadership role, as Paul (founder) was making a life transition that took him away from leading the club.
In December of 2018, we decided to relaunch, and rebrand the club. Our main goal was to make it more accessible to all levels and to grow our crew by removing common barriers people have to get into running or certainly running in a group.
We committed to becoming the most welcoming, and inclusive club in our city. We opted for road runs that were “out & back” courses, so no one would get lost. We paired new people up with some of our vets, so they would have a pal to run with. We committed to no drop runs, which sometimes meant extra km’s for our front runners as we scooted back to sweep the course and run our people back ‘home’.
We surveyed our crew to get feedback on what they wanted from the crew, their goals, reasons for running. We listened and implemented much of the feedback! We landed a little meet up clubhouse, and provide lots of post run events, from beers, to yoga, to movie nights. And thus, Steveston Run Crew was born.