NDG Run Rite Athletics Club Running Wild in Notre-Dame-de-Grace Montreal

A Studio, a Conversation, a Crew

The whole thing started with Jeremy walking up to a handful of people who already understood what running in a city could mean. Jeremy is the co-founder and lead designer of Ciele Athletics, the Montreal-based apparel brand that had quietly become one of the most thoughtful names in running gear. In mid-2017, he had an idea: open the doors of Ciele's studio in Notre-Dame-de-Grace and invite the neighbourhood to run. Not as a marketing exercise. Not as a sponsored event series. Just as a genuine, recurring, free community run with no asterisks attached. So he called some people. And those people said yes. By September 2017, the NDG Run Rite Athletics Club had its first Thursday out the door. The neighbourhood that gives the crew its name, Notre-Dame-de-Grace, sits in the western part of Montreal, a stretch of the island that feels unhurried compared to the downtown core. Tree-lined streets, a mix of longtime Montrealers and newer arrivals, corner cafes that stay full on weekday evenings. It is the kind of place where a free community run can actually take root, because the social fabric is already there. It only needed a thread to pull. NDG Run Rite Athletics Club became that thread, meeting every week out of the Ciele HQ, which serves as both the crew's physical anchor and a reminder of where the whole idea came from.

The Founders Who Made It Real

Jeremy brought the vision, but it took four people to make NDG Run Rite Athletics Club a living thing. Butch and Lecia, who had previously co-captained East Laurier, brought experience and community roots. P-A, Yamajo co-captain, brought another layer of Montreal run culture into the mix. And then there is Martin, described by the crew itself with obvious affection as an ultrarunner and a lunatic, which in running circles is rarely an insult and always a compliment. Together these four co-founders shaped the character of the crew in those early weeks, and that character has held ever since. Each of them carried a different piece of Montreal's run scene into a single Thursday night gathering, and the result was something with more texture than a standard group run. The founding team came from different crews and different corners of the city's running culture, which meant NDG Run Rite Athletics Club never had a single rigid identity imposed on it from the top. It grew sideways, picking up pace groups and personalities from multiple directions. That cross-pollination turned out to be one of its defining features. The crew does not operate like a training program with a director at the front. It operates like a group of friends who happen to run, and who happen to welcome whoever shows up.

Philosophy Built for the Honest Runner

The crew's self-description is refreshingly direct: the pace is all over the place, they drink as hard as they run, and they openly encourage what many would consider bad ideas. That last point deserves a moment of appreciation, because it captures something that gets edited out of most running crew profiles. The best run communities tend to have a streak of cheerful recklessness in them, a willingness to say yes to the long way round, to the extra hill, to the post-run detour that stretches the evening by an hour. NDG Run Rite Athletics Club has made that instinct part of its identity rather than hiding it behind polished language. The deeper philosophy, though, is about what running can mean in a city. The crew frames running explicitly as a cultural activity, not just a fitness habit or a race training tool. That framing matters. It positions every Thursday run as something with social value, as a way of inhabiting and knowing a neighbourhood, of building relationships that exist outside the usual contexts of work and obligation. Running becomes a reason to gather, and gathering becomes a reason to keep running. The two things reinforce each other in a loop that has kept NDG Run Rite Athletics Club going since 2017, through weather, through seasons, through all the turbulence that tends to scatter less committed collectives.

Thirty Runners, One Thursday Night

Around 30 people now count themselves as part of NDG Run Rite Athletics Club, a number that reflects something intentional. This is not a crew chasing scale. It is a crew that has found a size where everyone can actually know each other, where a Thursday night run does not feel like a mass event but like a reunion with people you genuinely want to spend time with. The membership draws from the surrounding neighbourhood and from Montreal's broader run community, the kinds of runners who have already been involved with other crews and who recognise what NDG Run Rite Athletics Club is offering as distinct. The pace truly does vary. Experienced ultrarunners line up beside people who are still figuring out their comfortable rhythm, and neither group is made to feel out of place. That mix is not accidental. It follows from the founding philosophy, from the conscious decision to treat running as a social and cultural act rather than a performance benchmark. When pace becomes secondary to presence, the barrier to showing up drops considerably, and the evenings tend to be richer for it. People talk. People laugh. People occasionally convince each other to do things that probably should not be attempted on a Thursday before work the next morning.

Hills, Trails and the Thursday Loop

The run itself starts at Ciele HQ every Thursday at 7 pm, and it covers somewhere between 8 and 12 kilometres depending on the night. That range is deliberate. It allows for variation in route, in energy, in the mood of whoever shows up. The course takes runners through NDG, which is not entirely flat, and includes a hill section that earns its place in the weekly routine. There is also a small trail stretch tucked into the middle of the run, a detail that sets the route apart from a standard urban loop and gives it a slightly wilder character, a brief reminder that even in the middle of a city, the ground can shift under your feet in interesting ways. The combination of road, hill and trail in a single 8 to 12 km outing speaks to the kind of runners the crew attracts. These are people who find variety more interesting than consistency, who appreciate a route that changes texture as it goes. The Thursday evening timing is well chosen too. It falls in the middle of the week, which means it functions as a social reset, a chance to shake off the accumulated weight of the working week before it has fully compounded. By the time runners return to Ciele HQ, the mood tends to be considerably lighter than when they left.

Come By and Find Out

NDG Run Rite Athletics Club does not charge for participation. The runs are free, the welcome is genuine, and the only real requirement is showing up to Ciele HQ on a Thursday evening at 7 pm. The crew has been doing this since September 2017, which means the format has been tested across years of Montreal winters and summers, across the full range of weather that the city reliably produces. The consistency of that Thursday commitment is its own kind of statement: this is a crew that means what it says. For anyone passing through Montreal, or anyone in the city who has not yet made the trip out to Notre-Dame-de-Grace on a Thursday, the invitation stands. Follow NDG Run Rite Athletics Club on Instagram for updates, then come by and see what a crew built around open-mindedness, a good hill, and a drink afterward actually feels like from the inside. There is a particular honesty to what happens on those Thursday evenings, and that honesty is harder to find than it might seem.