Running Los Angeles with Gordon Clark
What does the the running community of Los Angeles have to be proud of? Trail races. That’s what man about town, Gordon Clark says. But he thinks L.A. needs to get serious, and fast.
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Is this a scene report? Maybe. It’s more an extended thought on how a city’s running culture comes to be. A relationship between humans and the place in which they exist. A rumination on what’s been happening with runners in Los Angeles, what is yet to come, and how we might get there.
Today, I speak about L.A. running culture with ultramarathoner and luminary of the the city’s running scene, Gordon Clark. The irony of an Arizonan (him) and an Englishman (me) being the know-it-alls about what is been going on in this sprawling American metropolis is not lost on me.
A Phoenix native via Colorado and New York, Gordon has called L.A. home for almost a decade. He seems settled. A former Koreatown Run Club captain, Gordon also boasts a laundry list of running brands that he has been an ambassador and community builder for.
He peppers our meandering 90-minute conversation with quotes from favorite sportspeople, and cites authors and books with aplomb. We talk about not living in San Francisco and about Chuck Klosterman’s sardonic tone. Our chatter skits around, discussing boxing and basketball - two of Gordon’s other activities of choice - but, ultimately, it always comes back to running and Los Angeles.
For instance, over the past five years, Gordon has transitioned from road running to trail running. He has opinions on it.
“I do think trails are the future, and I think this is where L.A. could stake a flag and find its real traction in being an enjoyable place to be. We have one of the most expansive networks of trails and mountains in the country.”
“California is the home state of the most prestigious trail run. Western States is the Boston Marathon equivalent of trails - a hundred-year-old race.”
“Let's get passionate about our home court.”
“Everyone’s talking about getting diversity on the trail. I live in South Central L.A. I can leave my door and get 14 miles with 1,800 feet of vert [elevation] in Kenneth Hahn. It’s right there.”
Ah, diversity in long-distance running. It’s a problem, and it’s been highlighted widely, but where there is will to solve it, there is surely a way.
“Nike is a damn jogging company, man. Black people don't jog. You ain't gonna catch no black person running 26 miles for no damn reason. Man, the cops probably pull you over thinking you done stole something.”
Chris Tucker’s character Howard White from the movie Air (2023)
Whether the kind of systemic inequity that so many Angelenos suffer can be solved with desire alone is not even up for debate - it’ll take generations to redress the balance of resources alone.
Regardless, Gordon considers himself as something of an elder statesman of the Los Angeles running community and has that desire to improve things in spades.
“I'm such a hard-liner when it comes to making L.A. better. Stop waiting for a brand. Stop saying, ‘If only we had a fraction of the coaches out in Boulder or Flagstaff.’ Just shut up and do it.”
That ethic courses through him. Living in Downtown L.A. a decade ago, he talks about being a night owl finding inspiration when he saw Blacklist “running around at 10 o'clock at night in DTLA. I was like, ‘What is this?’”
He relates his revelation to a moment similar to what Hemingway and Basquiat did for American culture. Seeing a run club like Blacklist in the wild, running at an unorthodox time, made him realize that there was something out there for him. Something exciting. Something that he just had to do.
“You can't be it until you see it. Once you see it, you find inspiration. In L.A., I think there was a deep admiration of other things that were happening elsewhere”
“From an identity standpoint, I started really thinking about running when I saw what Black Roses NYC were doing - the type of people that I can better identify with. The kind of bar life, nighttime, Bukowski people - just burning the candle at both ends.”
Like myself, Gordon Clark didn’t come from a high school or college running background. Blacklist and Black Roses shattered the idea of what running could be for him. And he dove in deep.
“I'm a big by-product of the Nike Run Club wave and effect, which I don't know if people recognize as much as they should. That really was the start in L.A. If Nike was saying, ‘Here's an event,’ 1,000 people would show up.”
He kept seeing the same faces in that dedicated group of runners, and made fast friends left, right and center. Through Nike’s Run Club app, there was a readily-populated list of local runs, larger races, and track days. It was a community, sure enough.
“Then it just went away. People can have whatever knee jerk reaction to the Swoosh™, but I defy you to name people who've done more for the Los Angeles running community than them.”
How does it feel in Los Angeles right now, then?
“It's exciting, because I see a new class of people with the same excitement that I had when I first started running. We’re still 4-5 years behind New York, but that’s where a lot of this culture started.”
“We're now entering our kind of vitriol stage where people are like, ‘F*ck that crew!’ Except in L.A. we don't say it out loud so much. [laughs]”
“People can say what they want but, pound for pound, Venice Run Club is a top three club on this planet. Not hyperbole. F*ck your Instagrams and thousands of followers - they have 500 people that show up to runs. Nobody else out here has that.”
While the whos and the whats are easy to list, the whys are somewhat more difficult to pin down. Is it because they’re on the West Side? Maybe, but Eagle Rock Run Club regularly pulls 200 runners in Northeast L.A. for one.
Gordon’s hot take is the West Side attracts a more elite mindset. A millionaire chef or tech billionaire will be more singular of mind and have more resources (time and money) than your average Angeleno, for instance. Yeah, that’s a callback to that bit about diversity.
It might just be that it’s 20°F/10°C cooler than the East Side and the Valley in the summer. It might just be that Venice Run Club is incredibly well organized and their schedule is dependable, week-in and week-out.
I guess we can continue to speculate about that ad infinitum.
Nike isn’t as forward or open in their community activations these days but still provides hefty support to established run clubs such as Good Vibes Track Club, Social Hour, and Koreatown Run Club, which is holding an unsanctioned relay race from DTLA to Santa Monica this weekend (30 July 2023), and have been very active in running with other clubs of late.
Another category of very solid L.A. run clubs are actually secondary clubs or branches, formed by people who made their name building running communities in other cities. Take The Bridge and Capri Collective, for instance, which are run by New York natives.
Gordon ponders whether the Los Angeles community is perceived as easy prey, ripe for the picking by those coming in from more developed running cultures.
It reminds me of L.A.’s restaurants. We’ve got so much amazing food here - some of the absolute best in the country, in my opinion - but then you get the original Neapolitan pizza opening a branch in Hollywood and it’s immediately in all the lists for the best pizza in L.A. Or a hot shot Japanese sushi chef launches an omakase, and how many people are on a waitlist to pay $400 for it? A lot, and it’s welcomed and never really questioned.
L.A. is not a retirement haven for chefs/athletes or a safe market in which to launch a business, by any means, but those are the first things that come to mind. It is, however, the perfect place for somebody to leverage their existing personality or status as a personal brand. It’s an attractive destination beyond the immaculate sunsets.
What if the running culture of Los Angeles is simply representative of the broader culture of Los Angeles?
In terms of brands, recently it’s been the newer, smaller ones that have been more instrumental in adding to the culture. We talk about the Fubu-style street corner hustle of Ciele’s early days and the collegiate, J.Crew northeastern style of Tracksmith, but it’s ultra-cool French label, Satisfy that gets a “wow” out of Gordon.
“I think the most exciting thing in L.A. - like, hands down - is The Speed Project.”
It was the 2021 edition of TSP where Satisfy put together an all-star team from across the country, including Aric Van Halen, Thai Richards of Rage & Release and Alex Dickinson, among others. With a bold marketing campaign, Satisfy helped put the race on the map for many.
“It was a rad thing. I don't even know what place they got. They didn't win - I know that much - but it doesn't matter.”
Gordon speaks with reverence about the winners of TSP, like Daddy Braddy’s Stallions and Mill City (“They’re taking scalps!”), but he feels like the Los Angeles running community should be doing more. Way more.
“I was getting pissed that other people were winning The Speed Project. I was like, ‘My coach [Blue Benadum] and Nils [Arend] founded this f*cking thing!’ A French team is coming in, using Google Maps, and they're nuking our teams.”
“That, to me, is the ultimate f*ck you for L.A. Get serious! We have a homegrown race here that every year is won by somebody else? There's something about them crossing that divide of coming over here, something about that deliberateness that we don't have. L.A. doesn't even start buzzing about it until the week of.”
But Gordon has a solution. A direction in which to focus efforts, at least. In a race without a set route, it is a battle of orienteering skills as much as physical ability.
“We've got to spend the next seven months running every stretch of it. F*ck your long runs. Our new long runs are going to be to Barstow. If we can save a quarter mile? Lock it up. If you're a 2h19m versus our 2h26m guy? We can't make up that time, but they can't make up 10 miles.”
“Nobody should be beating us in our own backyard.”
It seems that a little bit of civic pride might go a long way when it comes to the running community in Los Angeles.
They say that pride comes before a fall, and if that fall is coming, Gordon Clark wants to make sure that he’s run up the highest trails first.
Further reading:
Outside: Diversity, inclusivity, and the need for change in trail running [LINK]
Canadian Running: Is trail running just for white dudes? [LINK]
Unlimited Women: 48hrs of Fear and Loathing in The Speed Project
Read my feature on The Unlimited Women - the all-women team that ran The Speed Project 2023. It's a great story, a great team, and a great race.
Read Chris Z’s book about the Western States [LINK] and his Substack [LINK]
Read about Sarah Lavender Smith crewing the 2023 Western States [LINK]
You're gonna have to tell me how you do the voiceover. Both in equipment setup and how you read for 16 mins without fucking up. I screwed up 17 times in the first paragraph, but it didn't matter because my audio was shit anyway. Do pray tell.