PEAK RUN CLUB

LAST YEAR, AUSTIN'S RAWDAWG RUN CLUB BECAME A PARABLE OF THE JOYS AND CHALLENGES OF THE RUNNING CLUB BOOM. NOW THE RAWDAWGS, AND PROBABLY A RUN CLUB NEAR YOU, ARE GEARING UP FOR ANOTHER SWEATY SUMMER.

- LAUREN LARSON

IF YOU POST it, they will come. Rawdawg Run Club started with a couple of friends in their early 20s running the two miles from their house in Austin, Texas, to Barton Springs, a local pool. The videos they posted on Instagram of those runs—magical, atmospheric summerscapes featuring them jogging shirtless and doing flips into the water—began to draw followers. After the group ran and posted from the Honolulu Marathon in December 2023, each of their videos went viral, and their followings compounded. The men—Darren Belasa, Ian Fonville, Tin Nguyen, and Noah Rolette—decided to start a run club. They had a sponsor, Austin-based agua fresca company Bawi, and they had a name: Rawdawg, after the name of their group chat.

The men told me they had discussed less graphic names;

Fonville in particular disapproved initially. “But to us it was about: We never had a plan, we were always just taking action,” Rolette said.

“Just throwing ourselves into the water,” Belasa added.

“You don’t want to have it all figured out,” said Nguyen.

Victor Guardiola, a cofounder of Bawi and Rawdawg’s early patron, agreed that the name was attention-grabbing and good for marketing, and the men began planning their first Rawdawg run—or rather, not planning it. “We were like, ‘Fuck it,’” said Rolette. “We literally just posted a pin.” About 30 people showed up to the pinned location at 8 a.m. on a Saturday in February 2024. After that, fueled by videos with captions like “another saturday, another opportunity to find the mother of my 5 kids” and “dump him, come to raw dawg run club,” Rawdawg’s attendance doubled every weekend.