Ice Cream and Donut Run Club Sweetening Every Mile in Vancouver

A Conversation That Became a Community

The idea arrived the way the best ones often do: casually, between friends, with no particular ambition attached to it. Sometime in the summer of 2018, Karen, the founder of what would become one of Vancouver's most talked-about running crews, found herself in conversation with a friend about something most people never stop to count. There are a remarkable number of ice cream shops and donut spots scattered across the Vancouver area. The city's neighbourhoods are studded with them, from artisan soft-serve windows to indie donut bakeries that open early and sell out fast. Karen's thought was simple and almost impossibly logical: wouldn't it be fun to get a bunch of friends together, run between those places, and actually try the treats? That question, half-serious and entirely delicious, became the founding premise of the Ice Cream and Donut Run Club. The first run went out in July 2018 with eight people. Karen considered it a huge success. There is something telling in that detail. Eight runners, a handful of friends willing to lace up their shoes in the name of dessert, and a route that ended somewhere worth stopping. It was modest by any measure, but the logic of the concept was sound from day one. You were not just running to run. You were running toward something. That sense of destination, of reward, of purpose baked right into the route itself, turned out to be exactly what a lot of people in Vancouver had been waiting for.

From Eight Runners to Nearly Five Hundred

Growth followed quickly, and it has not stopped. Since that first outing, the Ice Cream and Donut Run Club has expanded to around 450 members across Strava, Instagram, and Facebook. Group runs that once gathered a handful of friends now regularly see between 40 and 60 runners showing up on a given day. By most accounts, it is among the fastest-growing run clubs in Vancouver right now. That kind of trajectory does not happen by accident. It reflects something real about what the crew offers and why people keep coming back, then bring their friends. The membership is genuinely wide-ranging. Boston Marathoners train alongside ultramarathon runners. People who are just finding their stride for the first time run with people who have been at it for decades. The crew does not sort its members by speed or experience or ambition. It sorts them, gently and practically, by route preference. At every run, two distances are on offer: an 8k and a 5k. The 8k group tends to move at a brisker pace and attracts runners who want to work a little harder before the reward arrives. The 5k group operates on an entirely different philosophy. It is casual, unhurried, and governed by a no runner left behind policy. Nobody gets dropped. Nobody feels out of place. The finish line, wherever it happens to be that day, is the same for everyone.

The Geography of Sweet Things

What makes the Ice Cream and Donut Run Club genuinely original is that the route is never arbitrary. Every run is built around a destination: a specific ice creamery or donut shop somewhere in the Vancouver area. This means the crew functions partly as a running group and partly as a guided tour of the city's independent food scene, hitting spots that regulars swear by and newcomers discover for the first time. The act of running to a place, rather than simply through it, changes the relationship you have with a neighbourhood. You notice things. You arrive slightly breathless and very much present. You taste something made by someone local, and you remember it. Vancouver, for its part, is a city that rewards this kind of exploration. Its neighbourhoods each have their own texture and rhythm. A run that starts in one part of the city and finishes at a shop a few kilometres away covers ground that most residents would never cover on foot. The Ice Cream and Donut Run Club has turned that kind of urban wandering into a regular Saturday ritual, one that the crew's growing membership seems genuinely reluctant to skip.

The People Who Keep It Moving

Behind any crew of this size, there are people doing the work of keeping it together. The Ice Cream and Donut Run Club is led by three captains who work alongside Karen to organise runs, scout locations, and make sure the experience stays consistent and welcoming. Melissa brings her own running background to the role, while Kathleen and Mike round out a leadership team that gives the crew the capacity to handle large groups without losing the informal, community-first spirit that defined those original eight-person outings. That spirit matters. A crew this size can easily become anonymous, a moving mass of strangers who share a route but not much else. The Ice Cream and Donut Run Club has avoided that outcome, and the way the team approaches the two-route structure is part of the reason. By keeping the 5k group explicitly casual and explicitly supportive, they preserve a space for newer runners that never feels like a consolation prize. The 8k route, meanwhile, gives faster runners the intensity they are looking for. Both groups converge at the same destination, which means the post-run moment belongs to everyone equally.

Saturday Afternoons and the Long View

The crew's main weekly gathering happens on Saturday afternoons, with the group meeting at 2pm. The location shifts depending on which shop or stretch of the city is on the schedule, which keeps things fresh and gives regular members a genuine reason to keep showing up rather than simply repeating the same loop week after week. There is also history with weekday running, the crew having previously organised alternating Tuesday and Friday evening runs at 7pm, a schedule that speaks to the kind of flexibility that helps a diverse membership actually participate. The simplicity of the concept has always been one of its greatest strengths. There are no complicated sign-up processes, no membership tiers, no qualifying standards. You show up, you choose your distance, and you run somewhere worth going. The community that has grown up around that premise is one of the more unexpected things about the crew. People come for the novelty of it, maybe, the first time. They stay because the runs are genuinely enjoyable, the people are genuinely welcoming, and the stops are genuinely worth the effort.

Running Toward Something Delicious

There is a version of running culture that treats every kilometre as a test, every pace as a benchmark, every run as preparation for something more serious coming later. The Ice Cream and Donut Run Club has never belonged to that version. It has always treated the run as worthwhile on its own terms, as a way to move through the city, to spend time with other people, and to arrive somewhere you actually want to be. The fact that that somewhere happens to serve soft-serve or fresh-glazed donuts is not incidental. It is the point. Karen's original question, the one she asked a friend on a summer afternoon in 2018, turned out to be one that around 450 people in Vancouver had an answer to. The answer was yes. And on any given Saturday at 2pm, you can find them proving it, somewhere in the city, running toward something sweet.