Hills Krew Bringing Trail Running to Everyone in Innsbruck

A Gap in the Mountains Worth Filling

On a Tuesday evening in Innsbruck, somewhere between fifty and sixty people gather outside a café called Kater Noster before heading uphill into the mountains that ring this Alpine city. They call themselves Hills Kowboys and Ballerinas, and that self-given nickname tells you almost everything you need to know about them. There is a playfulness here, a refusal to take themselves too seriously, that runs through everything Hills Krew does. This is not a crew built around podium finishes or segment records. It is built around the simple, radical idea that the trails above Innsbruck should belong to everyone who wants to run them, regardless of how fast their legs happen to carry them. The story begins in April 2019, with two people and a shared frustration. Patrick and Renè, the co-founders of Hills Krew, had both spent time in Innsbruck's existing running scene and found it wanting. The groups they encountered were performance-oriented, small by design, and often difficult to join. Some were hard to locate in the first place. Others were simply not welcoming to newcomers. Innsbruck is one of the great trail running cities in the world, ringed by dramatic peaks and threaded with routes that can take a runner from cobblestones to alpine meadows in under twenty minutes. And yet, Patrick and Renè felt that access to this landscape, through the social structure of running together, was quietly being rationed. They wanted to change that.

Built for Everyone Who Wants to Move

The founding philosophy of Hills Krew is straightforward enough to fit on a single page, but meaningful enough to shape every decision the crew has made since. The idea was that trail running should be genuinely accessible, not theoretically accessible. Anyone who wanted to join should be able to find the group, show up, and feel immediately welcome. At the same time, the crew had no interest in diluting the experience for more seasoned runners. The solution Patrick and Renè landed on was structural rather than philosophical: instead of pace groups, which can feel clinical and can fragment a crew's social cohesion, they split into two broader groups defined by distance and elevation. The split is simple and friendly. Group A covers around thirteen kilometres with roughly five hundred metres of vertical gain. Group B takes on approximately ten kilometres with around four hundred metres of climbing. Neither group is labelled fast or slow. The terrain does the sorting, naturally and without judgment. This approach has proven quietly transformative. A runner who is relatively new to the trails can choose Group B and still experience a genuine mountain run, a proper climb, a view worth earning. An experienced trail runner who joins Group A will be challenged enough to feel the effort. Both groups start from the same place, move through Innsbruck's surrounding landscape, and eventually return to the same table. The runs are not divided so much as they are branched, and they converge again at the end, which is where much of the real community is built.

Every Tuesday at Kater Noster

The weekly rhythm of Hills Krew has remained consistent since the crew's earliest days. Every Tuesday evening at 18:30, the crew gathers in front of Kater Noster, their regular café and the natural social heart of the operation. The meeting point is not incidental. Kater Noster functions as the crew's living room, the place where pre-run energy gets channelled into conversation and post-run sweat gives way to something slower and more restorative. For a crew of around five hundred members, the Tuesday gathering draws fifty to sixty people on a given week, a number that reflects not disengagement but the healthy reality of a large community with lives and commitments beyond running. Innsbruck itself makes an exceptional backdrop for this weekly ritual. The city sits in the Inn valley, pressed between the Nordkette range to the north and the Patscherkofel massif to the south. The trails begin almost immediately at the city's edges, which means that a crew starting at a café in town can be deep into the mountains within a relatively short time. For Hills Krew, this geography is not just convenient. It is central to what they are. The mountains are why people come, and the mountains are what the crew is, in some fundamental sense, organised around. Running with Hills Krew means running in a place that consistently takes your breath away, sometimes literally.

Community as the Other Half of the Story

From the very beginning, Patrick and Renè understood that running together was only part of what they were building. The community around the runs mattered just as much. Hills Krew has since established a calendar of events that extends well beyond Tuesday evenings on the trails. Lectures bring expertise and perspective into the room, covering topics that matter to people who care about mountains, movement, and the outdoors. Film evenings gather the crew around shared stories, the kind of visual narratives that inspire people to get out and explore. There are organised races, community events, and parties that make no apology for their enthusiasm. The parties, in particular, seem to carry a special place in the Hills Krew identity. A crew that calls its members Kowboys and Ballerinas is a crew that knows how to have a good time, and that spirit of celebration runs through the social calendar as naturally as it runs through the Tuesday routes. This breadth of programming reflects something important about what Hills Krew has become. Around five hundred members is a significant community by any measure, and maintaining genuine connection at that scale requires more than a shared running schedule. It requires recurring reasons to gather, to learn, to celebrate, and to simply be in the same room. Hills Krew has built those reasons deliberately and kept them varied enough that there is something for everyone across the year.

The Landscape That Shapes the Crew

It would be impossible to understand Hills Krew without spending some time with the landscape they run through. Innsbruck is compact and walkable by urban standards, but it lives in the permanent company of enormous mountains. The Nordkette, accessed by the famous Nordkettenbahn cable car or by trail on foot, offers some of the most dramatic terrain in the Eastern Alps. The routes Hills Krew uses on Tuesday evenings tap into this network of paths, taking runners through forest, over rocky terrain, and onto ridgelines that offer views across the Inn valley and deep into the surrounding peaks. This is not groomed parkland running. It is mountain running, with the attendant demands and rewards. For newcomers to trail running, this can feel intimidating at first. Hills Krew accounts for this by being genuinely welcoming in practice rather than just in principle. The group structure means that a first-time trail runner is not dropped at the back of a single-file line and left to struggle alone. They are in a group that moves together, with people around them who remember what it felt like to find the mountain trails challenging. This culture of support is not enforced by rules or policies. It has grown organically from the founding spirit that Patrick and Renè brought to the crew in 2019, and it has been sustained by the community that gathered around that spirit.

Five Years of Kowboys and Ballerinas

By any measure, Hills Krew has grown into something substantial. From two founders with an idea and a gap they wanted to fill, the crew has expanded to around five hundred members spread across Innsbruck and the surrounding region. The Tuesday gatherings remain the core of the crew's weekly life, but the broader programme of events, lectures, film evenings, races, and parties has given the community a richness that extends through all twelve months of the year. The crew's presence on Instagram offers a window into this life, showing the trails, the faces, and the moments that make up the Hills Krew experience across the seasons. What Patrick and Renè built in April 2019 was not just a running group. It was an argument, made in practice rather than in words, that trail running in one of the world's great mountain cities should not be reserved for those who already run fast or already know the right people. Hills Krew is that argument proven out over five years of Tuesday evenings, thousands of vertical metres, and a community that keeps showing up. If you are in Innsbruck and you want to find out what the trails above the city feel like with fifty other people alongside you, Kater Noster at 18:30 on a Tuesday is where you start.