Running
.
.
4 min read
Aaron Long started an Instagram account called Cowgill in 2018, posting silly, deliberately non-elite trail running content out of Seattle: in-jokes, shenanigans, nothing that resembled a training log. For a few years, that's all it was. In the spring of 2021, Long and two friends, Rachel Dam and Brad Leatherbarrow, turned the account into actual trail runs, meeting up on trails around the city instead of just posting about them. The result, now called Cowgill Trail Collective, has grown into a free trail running group with no fee attached.
4 min read
Braden Kelley manages commute options and transportation planning at the University of Washington. He does not soften it. His subject is the mile of the Burke-Gilman Trail that runs along the east side of campus, from Rainier Vista to NE 47th Street. "A little narrower and darker," he said of the mile. "There are roots coming up through the asphalt." He added that the stretch "doesn't feel as welcoming and it doesn't feel as safe." Kelley raised a second concern. People coming from the north or east side of Seattle, he said, might be less inclined to travel through that area to reach campus at all. That is the assessment from the university's own transportation office, and it now has a fix attached: a $12.3 million construction contract, awarded to Granite Construction with KPFF Civil as design partner, to rebuild the mile before it drives away any more of the people it is supposed to carry.
4 min read
Connor Cox was leaving Seattle in 2018, and on April 21 he and his twin brother Ian ran one last loop between all five Dick's Drive-In counters in the city. How far they went depends on who tells it. The organizers' own history page and a post on Washington's National Park Fund both put the loop at 20 miles, and an older version of that history page, still live on the same domain, gives the same date and the same distance. A syndicated Yahoo News feature on the family calls it roughly 22, and nearly a perfect circle. The two figures have never been squared. Eight years later, on Saturday, October 17, 2026, that same loop runs as the Ian Cox Memorial Dick's-A-Thon, a 26.3-mile event with a $135 entry, a start line at The Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, and aid stations that are still fast-food windows. The distance grew. The reason changed entirely.
4 min read
Natisha Hiedeman plays guard for the Seattle Storm. In August 2026 she started a run club called Run Budz, announcing it first on her Twitch stream. The first run drew about 25 people. The second run, at Green Lake Park, drew nearly 400. That jump landed within two weeks of the first announcement. Run Budz now meets Tuesdays for a 2.8-mile loop of Green Lake, gathering near the Seattle Public Theater before the group sets off around the water. Updates go out on Instagram at @run.budz and on Strava.
5 min read
Every date and price below was checked on August 24, 2026, against the race's own registration platform or official site, not a listing service. That matters this season: several organizers cannot agree with themselves about when their own event happens, and two national aggregators have the marquee race of the fall off by two months. This calendar runs by month, then what expires within days, then what is simply wrong, then what will not happen. Where sources conflict, both figures appear with attribution, since burying one just adds a fourth error to the pile.
4 min read
RunGuides and RaceRaves both list the Seattle Marathon on September 19-20, 2026. The race's own site lists November 29. That is a two-month gap between two widely circulated race-finder listings and the event they are listing. Aggregators pull dates at scale and republish them, which makes them useful right up until they are wrong. This one costs something, because the September weekend they point to is already occupied. Three organized races run in the Puget Sound region that weekend, and none of them is the Seattle Marathon.
4 min read
Ask Cooldown Running how many cities it operates in and the answer changes depending on which of its own channels answers first. A piece covering its partnership with Altra Running puts the number at fifteen. Cooldown's own run-clubs page, checked directly, names seventeen. Fleet Feet's press release announcing its own partnership with Cooldown describes the company as operating in eighteen cities. The company's actual sitemap, the literal list of live city landing pages on its own website, currently holds twenty-one, including three cities, Tampa, Charlotte, and San Diego, that never made it onto that seventeen-city marketing page at all. None of those four numbers is fabricated. Each is real, current, and pulled from a source Cooldown runs itself. A company growing this fast evidently has better things to do than reconcile its own city count, and Seattle's Wednesday-night chapter is proof the growth is real even where the paperwork lags behind it. That chapter, the one Seattle Fitness Magazine has covered before as a loop through South Lake Union, just added four co-leaders. What started as one person's Wednesday run now runs on a five-person team, and that kind of quiet expansion is a better read on where Cooldown actually stands than any single number the company publishes about itself.
4 min read
Brooks Running's flagship store occupies the ground floor of the company's own Fremont headquarters, right on the Burke-Gilman Trail, and this fall it is hosting more than a standing group jog. Trailhead, at 3400 Stone Way N, carries a full calendar of dated runs and community events running between now and Kraken hockey season, each one tied to a specific date, a specific meeting point, and usually a neighbor business filling in the after-party. Tuesday and Thursday runs still anchor the week the way they always have. Three dates matter most this fall. A Seattle company sits behind all of it, headquartered in Fremont since long before the neighborhood got trendy, and the fall lineup leans into that fact instead of hiding it. A pop-up run tied to a local water-bottle brand, a cookout with the Japanese outdoor outfitter that just moved in next door, and packet pickup for the city's newest hockey team's 5K all route through the same front door on Stone Way. None of it requires a plane ticket. Showing up on the right day is the only ask.