Tim, Dave, Bill, Rich and Brian after the 2007 NYC Marathon
This is the personal site of Vancouver marathoner and ultramarathoner, David Papineau.
The history of the Broadway Run Club dates back to 2004 when I was training for my first marathon out of the Running Room store formerly located on Broadway between Granville and Fir in Vancouver. It was there that I met Rich Widdifield and later Brian Wynhoven and Bill Corsan, and together we formed the core of what would become the Broadway Run Club. All in our mid- to late-thirties and chasing sub-3 marathons, we raced together a lot and in 2007 Bill Corsan casually dubbed our group the Broadway Run Club, a name which stuck and eventually made its way onto t-shirts and singlets. As the original description of the ‘Club’ noted:
The Broadway Run Club is not an official running club, per se, but rather an informal group of runners who train and race together wearing matching singlets much like a real running club.
Other fast guys like Paul Felton, Henry Chan, Aaron Case, Dario Herrera and Tim Wiens joined the group and when I led three of the Running Room’s marathon clinics starting in 2010, a whole new generation of Broadway Run Clubbers including Michael Stockdale, Alan Yu, Greg Burnham, Steve Monteith, Alyson Schmidt, Andrea Malo and Pargol Lakhan joined the mix.
When the Cambie Running Room opened in the summer of 2011, Michael Stockdale carried the torch eastward to lead the new store’s first marathon clinic which included Michelle Ford, Jesse Booi and Cody Callon, who would go on to found the Fraser Street Run Club. You could say that Michael is the grandfather of the FSRC and that I am the great-grandfather.
The Broadway Running Room location closed early in 2015 but the spirit of Broadway lives on.