Honour Roll

Sadie Sigfstead

When Dolly Jiang moved to Saskatoon from China in 2017, she didn’t know anyone and didn’t know what people did to make friends in the city. In an effort to get connected to her new home, Jiang helped out with a summer festival and told a fellow volunteer how isolated she felt.

He told her to join the Brainsport Run Club.

Jiang, now 50, vividly remembers her first run with the club on a Wednesday evening in August more than two years ago. She was apprehensive, because she hadn’t run since primary school, when she dreaded running even 800 metres in gym class.

Jiang showed up at the Brainsport running store and joined a group that was alternating between running three minutes and walking one. After the first three-minute run, Jiang was at the back of the pack, red-faced and breathing hard. But the other runners cheered her on, and at the end of the workout, they encouraged her to come again the following week. Jiang did, and she has been a regular member of the Brainsport Run Club ever since. She now runs several times a week, competes in local road races and is friends with many of the people she runs with through the club – including the man who first invited her to join, who is now her boyfriend. “I have a new life here and a new family here. It all started with Brainsport,” she says.

The Brainsport Run Club has run out of Saskatoon’s Brainsport running store since it opened in 1991. Store owner Brian Michasiw said he was inspired to create the free club after travelling to Vancouver for a race in the 1980s and seeing how much fun people were having at a run club offered by the Forerunners store there.

“I thought how incredible that was for both the community and for the store,” Michasiw says. “Just having that constant f low of people coming in, running, talking about running, I thought it was a really important and healthy thing to do if I ever opened my own store.”

The Brainsport Run Club was temporarily suspended this spring as concerns about covid- 19 led to restrictions on large gatherings, but Michasiw still found ways to keep the running community connected.

The store organized a free virtual run clinic, during which a coach shared workouts over Facebook and provide running advice to nearly 500 people. The clinic was popular both with run group members and others.

Today the Brainsport Run Club boasts more than 100 reg ular members, some running for the first time and some who have run for years. Michasiw says Wednesday evenings are the nucleus of the club, when up to 150 people show up at the store and divide into groups based on speed. All runners are encouraged to take turns leading 45-minute workouts, and many participants head to a nearby bar afterward for refreshments. There are also Monday night runs and two daytime groups on Thursdays. Saturday mornings are for long runs.

“Many people have said to me that Run Club is the highlight of their week,” Michasiw says. “They come to the store, they see their friends, they do a workout and then go for dinner and have a coffee or a beer. People really make a lot of connections.”

That was certainly Jiang’s experience, and these days when she hears someone is lonely, she gives them the same advice she was given when she moved to Saskatoon: join the Brainsport Run Club. “You feel just like a big family,” she says.

Andrea Hill is a marathon runner and acting managing editor of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix newspaper