Unleashing the Rawdawgs: The Wild Saga of America’s Sexiest Run Club

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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 rawdawg run club,” Rawdawg’s attendance doubled every weekend.

“They had a name: RAWDAWG, after the name of their group chat. We never had a plan, we were always just TAKING ACTION. You DON’T WANT to have it all figured out.”Running clubs have existed in Austin and across the country for decades, but Rawdawg had arrived on the scene as a new wave was swelling. A 2024 survey by Strava found a 59 percent increase in participation in running clubs compared to the previous year and heightened interest in social fitness in general. Likely catalyzed by Instagram (many run clubs post photos and videos of participants; some in Austin even have designated photographers along routes) and by frustration with dating apps (one in five Gen Z–age participants in the Strava survey said they’d gone on a date with someone they met through exercise), running clubs exploded. The clubs drew seasoned runners trying to revitalize their routines and new runners seeking buddies to hold them accountable as they trained. There are fitness benefits too: People tend to run farther and be more consistent when in a group. By summertime, Rawdawg’s founders estimate, 800 people were showing up to their runs. “It was very chaotic,” a young woman named Sam recalled, “but, like, so much fun. There were 10 million things going on at once, and it was great. I loved it.”

In major cities, there are now run clubs not just for different paces but for different identities, ethnicities, and niches. (In Austin, one club caters to service industry workers; another, Pitch and Run ATX, holds runs where “founders, investors, and operators connect.”) Rawdawg’s niche was cool kids. Their approach, Nguyen explained in the home in Austin that he shares with Belasa and Rolette, was to keep the group social and fun—a relaxed alternative to other run clubs in the city, which they saw as more spartan. Their group was an antidote to “locking in” culture, which mandates militant routines and, often, solitude. Rawdawg’s founders weren’t trying to brand themselves as serious athletes, though they’ve each run marathons; they were aesthetic runners, showing up every Saturday after posting photos of themselves going out the night before.

Hanish ReddyRawdawg founders Tin Nguyen, Noah Rolette, Ian Fonville, and Darren Belasa.

In February, the Friday before the Austin Marathon, I met the men at their house. Belasa, Nguyen, and Rolette were all running the half-marathon, and the following day they would host a “shakeout run,” a short run meant to ease pre-marathon jitters and loosen muscles. “There may be a mechanical bull,” Rolette said—shakeout indeed.

When I arrived, the house was full of people in town for the race. An ottoman-like Australian shepherd (regular dawg) named Bulgogi meandered among the visitors, who were all in various stages of repose—one was sinking to the floor on a rapidly deflating air mattress. Belasa, Nguyen, and Rolette took seats in Breuer-style chairs at a round table at the front of the house, each jangling an iced coffee. (Fonville had amicably separated from the group to start his own venture and would announce his departure at the event the following day.) The men were all wearing dark neutrals. A neck tattoo rose from beneath Rolette’s gray waffle-print shirt like a tendril of smoke, and tattoos swirled up one of Belasa’s arms. Each of the three had a couple of silver earrings. As they recounted the events of the past year, the conversation pinged easily from person to person, nobody talking over or interrupting anyone else.

“There are FITNESS BENEFITS too: People tend to RUN FARTHER and be MORE CONSISTENT when in a group.”As Rawdawg’s numbers grew, hostility toward the group simmered, online and off. They had been gathering runners at Zilker Park and then guiding them in one thunderous horde along Austin’s most popular path, the Hike-and-Bike Trail at Lady Bird Lake. The men acknowledged that this became problematic. “Running 800 people at Zilker, it’s a snake for, like, five minutes straight,” Rolette said. “Obviously the city came to us and they were like, ‘Yo, you can’t do that.’ ”

Online, complaints centered on the club’s etiquette (they “forced numerous members of the public off the trail to let them by, including mothers with strollers, dog walkers, non-affiliated cyclists, and older walkers”), parking issues (“hundreds if not a thousand people parking all over our neighborhood”), and the founders’ ethos: When word spread that they had run the Austin Marathon without paying, called “banditing,” their infamy solidified. Their name—“their branding isn’t necessarily respectful or wholesome”—didn’t help either.

The four men were learning how to manage a large group through trial and error, with hundreds of attendees in the balance. To avoid the Hike-and-Bike Trail, they began planning routes through Austin neighborhoods, earning new complaints from residents. After the city told them they would need to pay for a permit to give away sponsored goods on city property, they moved their muster points to bars and restaurants (complainants expressed their disapproval to those establishments). They introduced pace groups, appointing pacers from among the club’s early members and organizing the crowd into groups of less than 50.

Henry SelisBy July 2024, Rawdawg’s ranks swelled to more than 500 people for an average Saturday morning run.

“Something that I want to just, like, stress the importance of is that at the end of the day, we’re 23-year-old dudes just figuring this out,” Nguyen said in a YouTube video in July, titled “Rawdawg is in TROUBLE.…” They had just learned that the pizza place where they had previously been assembling runners would no longer host them, and they were scrambling for an alternative. They found a new location, a bar called Cabana Club, and all went well until Saturday, July 13, when police arrived. The four men all received citations, which are now framed in their kitchen. “Too tan tatted & sexy apparently,” Rolette commented the next day on a Rawdawg Instagram post in which the men pose with their tickets.

The incident put the run club on hiatus in Austin, but the men had a partnership with the apparel company Gymshark and joined forces with run clubs in other cities to organize events across the nation (they estimate that 1,200 people showed up at one event in Chicago) and beyond. In the winter, they began organizing occasional runs in Austin again. Attendance was smaller—“Rawdawg is more of a summer vibe,” Nguyen said—and complaints were fewer. They hope to continue holding runs in Austin on a monthly basis.

As more running clubs emerge, so have best practices. Pace groups are standard. Club leaders plan routes through less heavily traveled areas. Attendees are encouraged to carpool. Many clubs require participants to sign digital waivers before joining; for some clubs, a membership fee keeps the numbers in check. But charging for access is not the Rawdawg way. “We wanted people to come and get so much value that they were like, How is this a thing?” Rolette said. “Rawdawg will always be free.”

“We wanted people to COME and get so much VALUE that they were like, How is this a thing? Rawdawg will always BE FREE.”He, Belasa, and Nguyen are also still figuring out how Rawdawg is a thing, and the shakeout run they held before the marathon felt like a test. Before 8 a.m. on that Saturday, runners streamed toward a sports club, Other Racquet Social Club. It was a cold, drizzly morning, but a DJ was performing and—after a slight mishap when Rolette gave the mechanical bull company the wrong address—a bull was taking shape on one side of the back patio. The assembled runners, in sweatshirts and trucker hats rather than the neon tactical gear common among the city’s runners, chatted amongst themselves. Most of them appeared to be in their 20s; they were strikingly diverse for Austin, whose residents are 47 percent white, and there were as many women as men. One duo tried to remember how they’d first become aware of the group last summer. The woman, with long blonde braids under her baseball cap, recalled seeing Rawdawg T-shirts, then Instagram posts. “Noah just made cool edits,” the man said of Rolette’s posts.

“I remember he did a round-off backflip,” chimed in another man, who had been staying in the house with the founders for a while. He explained that he enjoys freestyle cliff jumping and had met Rolette and the other founders on a cliff in Hawaii.

Hanish ReddyScenes from Rawdawg’s Austin runs, which draw hundreds of runners and offer different pace groups.

Hanish Reddy

Many attendees had been running with Rawdawg since its early days. “Everyone that I’ve met in a run club is just so uplifting and happy to be here,” a woman named Caroline said over the din; she had met the founders last May at Barton Springs. “Everyone wants to come back and make friends every week.”

The music stopped, and the crowd turned toward an elevated patio, where the founders made a few announcements, Fonville sharing news of his departure. Then the runners drifted toward the other side of the bar. The pacers intermittently departed for the run, about a minute apart, with somewhat arbitrary clusters of runners following. About 15 minutes later, most of them had returned, and the four founders stood on top of a trailer—“They’re always standing up on something,” one Rawdawger observed—hurling T-shirts into the crowd below. By now the buffer around the mechanical bull had been inflated, and one by one the runners hopped on. One man rode with his phone in his raised arm, filming himself.

When I left, suddenly feeling acutely 34, Belasa and Nguyen were chatting with friends in the crowd, and Rolette was whirling around on the bull in obvious ecstasy. Love them or loathe them, the Rawdawgs—and run clubs across America—ride on.

This story originally appears in the May-June 2025 issue of Men’s Health.

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Lauren Larson is a writer and editor based in Austin and her work also appears in GQ, Texas Monthly, and The New York Times.