No Tag Runners Chasing Adventures Across Russia Together Since 2014

A Relay Baton That Never Got Put Down

There is a particular clarity to a relay race. You run your leg, you hand off the baton, and someone you trust carries it forward. That handoff, repeated over and over, is essentially the story of No Tag Runners. It began in October 2014 at a Moscow parkrun, where a small group of friends lined up not as individual competitors but as a relay team. The idea was simple and the execution was scrappy, but something clicked that morning. People who might have otherwise run alone, tallied their times quietly, and gone home instead found themselves shouting encouragement at each other, waiting at the finish, making plans for the next race. A crew was born not from a manifesto or a brand strategy, but from the straightforward pleasure of passing a baton between people who genuinely cared whether the other person made it. That founding moment set the tone for everything that followed. No Tag Runners was never structured around a single discipline or a single pace group. From the start, the intention was to show up wherever running was happening: track relays, road races, mountain trails, multi-day ultras. The variety was the point. A crew that only does one thing is a training group. A crew that does everything is a family, and family is the word the No Tag Runners use themselves. It surfaces again and again in how they talk about who they are and what they are doing out there on the roads and trails of Russia. Family values, family vibes, spread freely between people who found each other through running and stayed for something larger.

The Founders and the Spark They Lit

The crew was built by a handful of people whose shared energy made the early days possible. Mikhail, one of the founders, helped lay the foundations of a crew culture that prioritised showing up together over individual results. Sasha co-founded the group alongside him, bringing the kind of commitment that turns a one-off relay into a decade-long project. Anza was there from the beginning too, part of the original circle that turned a parkrun experiment into something with staying power. Sergio rounded out the founding group, and together these four set the crew's direction: adventurous, inclusive, and always pointed toward the next start line. Holding the crew together today is Anna, who serves as both founder and captain, a combination that says everything about the continuity of care that has kept No Tag Runners running for more than a decade. The founders did not set out to build an institution. They set out to run. But the qualities they brought to those early outings, loyalty, warmth, a refusal to take competition more seriously than companionship, created something that outlasted the novelty of a new hobby and became a genuine part of people's lives in Moscow and beyond.

Wednesday Nights at Sports Palace Moscvich

Every crew needs a recurring moment, a fixed point in the week where the habit of running together gets renewed. For No Tag Runners, that moment is Wednesday evening. At 8 p.m., the crew gathers at Sports Palace Moscvich, a meeting point that carries a certain Soviet-era grandeur in its name and a very present-day energy in the people who show up there. The timing is deliberate: midweek running has a different quality to weekend racing. There is less ceremony, more ease. People arrive from work, from errands, from the ordinary texture of a Moscow weekday, and within minutes they are moving together through the city, the conversation and the effort mixing in the way that only a run can produce. What happens at Sports Palace Moscvich on a Wednesday is not a training session in the clinical sense. There are no pace targets announced, no structured intervals, no coaches with stopwatches. There is a group of people who have decided that Wednesday at 8 is worth protecting in their schedule, and that the company of the crew is reason enough to pull on their shoes and get out the door. For runners who have been with No Tag Runners for years, the Wednesday run is ritual. For those who have just found the crew, it is a first taste of what the whole thing is about.

The Ultrabro Group and the 110k That Changed Everything

Trail running arrived in the No Tag Runners story the way many important things do: gradually, then all at once. The crew had always been drawn to adventure, but 2017 marked the moment when that draw became something more serious. A group of No Tag Runners members entered the biggest ultra trail race in Russia and lined up for 110 kilometres of Russian wilderness. They ran it together. They finished together. The effort was immense and the bond it created was immeasurable, and when they came back to Moscow, something had shifted inside the crew. That race gave birth to what the crew calls the ultrabro group, a subset of No Tag Runners who have committed to pushing further into trail and ultra running. The name carries the right amount of self-aware humour, these are people who will freely admit that signing up for a 110k race is a form of collective madness, but it also captures something real. The ultrabro group trains hard, supports each other through the brutal middle sections of long races, and sets the aspirational ceiling for what the crew believes is possible. Their adventures have been inspiring not just to themselves but to the wider No Tag Runners community, pulling people toward distances they might never have considered on their own. Trail running has become the crew's second great love, sitting comfortably alongside the relay racing that started it all.

Running From Home, Planting Birches Across Russia

One of the more distinctive traditions that has grown inside No Tag Runners is the practice of running from teammates' home places. When a crew member's neighbourhood, their hometown, or a place meaningful to them becomes the starting point for a group run, something shifts in the dynamic. The run becomes personal. The streets are narrated rather than simply covered. A place that one person has known their whole life becomes new terrain for the others, and the familiarity of the host becomes a kind of generosity, an opening of a private geography to the group. This tradition has taken No Tag Runners to corners of Russia that a conventional training schedule would never have reached, and it has deepened the crew's sense of itself as something genuinely rooted in the country it runs through. That rootedness finds its most vivid expression in the crew's relationship to birch trees. The birch is inseparable from the Russian landscape and from a certain idea of Russia, its winters, its open spaces, its particular brand of quiet beauty. No Tag Runners have made a practice of planting birches as they travel, leaving what they describe as a green footstep across the country. It is a gesture that is simultaneously ecological and symbolic, a way of saying that the crew's passage through a place leaves something living behind. In a sport where so much is measured in times and distances, the image of a birch growing somewhere because a group of runners passed through carries a different kind of meaning entirely.

Gathering at Val Coffee and Celebrating the Finish

Running is only part of what No Tag Runners does. The post-run gathering is treated with equal seriousness, and the crew's home base at Val Coffee in Moscow provides the setting for the conversations, the recaps, and the laughter that give the runs their full shape. Every effort deserves a proper debrief, and No Tag Runners has always understood that the social layer of crew running is not a bonus feature but a core component of what makes people come back week after week. The post-race party is an institution within the crew. Whether it follows a Wednesday evening run or a hundred-kilometre ultra, the celebration is genuine and it is loud. No Tag Runners does not treat finishing a race as a quiet personal achievement. It treats it as a communal event, something that happened to all of them together and that deserves to be marked accordingly. This instinct toward shared celebration is part of why the crew's culture has stayed consistent across a decade of growth and change. The baton that was passed at a Moscow parkrun in 2014 is still moving. The party at the end is still worth running for.

No Borders No Tags Just the Run

The name No Tag Runners contains a statement of intent. A tag implies categorisation, a label that places you in a box and tells you what kind of runner you are or are not. The crew refuses that. Their runs carry no borders and no restrictions, happening anywhere and everywhere that the members find themselves, in Moscow on a Wednesday night, on a Russian ultra trail at dawn, in a teammate's hometown on a weekend adventure. The only requirement is the willingness to show up and move. Ten years in, that philosophy remains intact. The crew that started as a relay team at a parkrun has become something genuinely difficult to categorise, which is, of course, exactly the point. No Tag Runners is a relay team and a trail crew and a social club and a family. It is a group of people in Moscow who decided that running alone was less interesting than running together, and who have been proving that point, one race, one Wednesday, one planted birch at a time, ever since. Adventures are their destiny. The road ahead is long, and they are in no hurry to put the baton down.