Tacoma Run Club Starting from Discomfort and Building Community

Two Guys, One Bad Habit, and a Decision to Change

There is something quietly radical about choosing to do the thing you genuinely dislike. Not the thing you are merely indifferent to, not the thing that just requires a little motivation, but the thing you actively resist. In early 2018, Ejay O'Donnell and his friend Jared found themselves in that exact position. Both were navigating a period of real personal change, absorbing the kind of upheaval that tends to make people reach for comfortable routines rather than uncomfortable ones. They were stuck, and they knew it. So they decided to go on a run, precisely because neither of them wanted to. Running was the thing they both disliked. That was the whole point. You do not break out of a rut by doing what feels easy. You break out of it by doing something that doesn't. That first run was not a grand gesture. There was no finish line, no crowd, no plan beyond getting out the door and moving together through Tacoma's streets. It was just two people choosing discomfort as a form of self-correction. What followed was a second run, and then a third. Weeks passed. A rhythm developed. Something that had started as a private act of willpower began to acquire a quiet gravity. Friends noticed. Coworkers asked questions. People wanted in. The runs that had begun as a two-person experiment started attracting others who recognised something in the premise: that the best reasons to run are often the most honest ones, and that honesty is a lot easier to sustain when someone is running next to you.

From a Logo to a Home Base

As the group grew, it needed shape. Ejay, who brought a designer's eye to the project, created the logo that would come to represent the crew. Clean, considered, and rooted in place, the mark gave the growing group a visual identity that felt intentional rather than improvised. With a name, a logo, and a growing roster of regulars, the next question was where to anchor the whole thing. Ejay reached out to ANTHEM Coffee and Tea at Point Ruston, and the partnership clicked. Tacoma Run Club had a home base. ANTHEM Coffee and Tea is not just a convenient meeting spot. Point Ruston, the mixed-use waterfront development where it sits, offers something genuinely rare for an urban run crew: immediate access to the edge of Commencement Bay, with views across the water toward the Olympic Peninsula on a clear day. The location grounds the crew in one of Tacoma's most compelling geographic features. The city sits at the southern end of Puget Sound, hemmed between the water and the hills, and running here means running with that landscape present in nearly every direction. There is a reason people who move to Tacoma tend to stay.

Sunday Mornings at Point Ruston

The Tacoma Run Club gathers every Sunday morning at 7:30, year-round. Rain, cold, the grey Pacific Northwest winter that stretches well into spring, none of it has stopped the weekly run. The schedule holds across every season, which says something meaningful about what the crew has become. This is not a fair-weather arrangement. It is a standing commitment, a regular slot carved out of the week and protected from the inevitable excuses that accumulate when a run feels optional. The pace is easy and the distances are short, which is a deliberate choice rather than an accident of enthusiasm. Keeping the runs accessible means the conversation can flow, that newer runners are not quietly dropped off the back, and that the goal of the morning is connection as much as mileage. The waterfront setting at Point Ruston lends the runs a particular character. Starting just steps from the bay, with the early light moving across the water and the smell of salt in the air, a Sunday morning run with Tacoma Run Club is less a training session and more a ritual. That distinction matters more than it might seem.

A Crew Built Around One Hundred People and Growing

Tacoma Run Club now counts around 100 members, a remarkable number given that the whole enterprise began with two friends who were not even sure they liked running. The crew is open to everyone, with no membership fees and no requirements beyond showing up. That openness is not incidental. It reflects the founding logic of the crew: that the barrier to entry should be no higher than the one Ejay and Jared cleared themselves, which is to say, just deciding to go. Tacoma is a city that rewards that kind of decision. Long overshadowed by Seattle to the north, it has spent the last decade becoming more fully and confidently itself. Its arts scene, its waterfront, its neighbourhoods with genuine character, the way the mountain appears without warning above the cityline on a clear morning, all of it makes Tacoma a city worth moving through on foot. Running here is a way of reading the place, and Tacoma Run Club is one of the better guided readings available.

What Ejay and Jared Built by Accident

There is a version of this story where Ejay and Jared go on a few runs, find their footing, improve their habits, and quietly move on with their lives. That version did not happen. Instead, the discomfort they chose in March 2018 became the foundation of something that outlasted the rut it was meant to break. The crew they built is, in a sense, the logical extension of the choice they made: if doing something hard is easier with company, then building a community around doing hard things together is not just a nice idea, it is almost structurally inevitable. The Tacoma Run Club on Strava and its active Instagram presence keep the community connected through the week, between the Sunday mornings when people actually gather. But the centre of gravity remains where it has always been: outside, early, on the waterfront at Point Ruston, with people who showed up because they decided to.

Showing Up Is the Whole Philosophy

Ask most running crews what they stand for and you will get some version of community, fitness, inclusivity. Tacoma Run Club stands for all of those things, but the specific texture of its values comes from its founding story. This is a crew that was started by people who did not want to run. The origin is not a moment of passion or athletic ambition. It is a moment of honest self-assessment followed by a decision to act against comfort. That is a harder and more interesting thing to build a running club around, and it gives the crew a particular kind of straightforwardness that is hard to fake. If you are in Tacoma on a Sunday morning and you are looking for a reason to get out the door, the reason is there waiting for you at 7:30 outside ANTHEM Coffee and Tea. The run is short. The pace is easy. The coffee is good. And the people who show up are, by definition, people who decided to show up. That tends to make for pretty good company.