‘No Fee, No Aid, No Course Marking, No Wimps’

A blue-hued fog hangs over the strip mall parking lot near the bottom of North Vancouver’s Mount Seymour. Shielded from the predawn darkness outside and distanced from the other coffee shop customers inside, Mike Wardas and Paul Baker down hits of caffeine, waiting for other runners to arrive.

It’s Nov. 28, a chilly Saturday morning, and the 8 a.m. start time for the Club Fat Ass Seymour Super Fun Run, for which Wardas is the organizer, is fast approaching. He glances at his watch.

Participants start to trickle in, but aside from the chest-hugging hydration vests they wear you’d never know a trail-running half-marathon was about to begin. There’s no pop-up registration table, no branded sponsorship hawking the latest high-tech trail running merch, no barrels of Gatorade. There’s no music, no timing system, not even a formal start line.

And that’s the point. This won’t be a regular trail running event, because Club Fat Ass isn’t your regular running club.

“It’s not really about racing. And it’s about having fun in the outdoors,” said club founder Ean Jackson. With more than 120 trail ultramarathons under his belt, Jackson knows a thing or two about the running in the woods.

Unless your idea of running involves a lot of mud, rocks and serious elevation gains, you may not have heard about Club Fat Ass. Or, if you have, you may well have been intimidated.

Jackson himself converted to trail running after years competing in road marathons and ultras when he first moved to the North Shore in 1990. (An ultramarathon is any run exceeding the marathon distance of 42 kilometres.)

In 2004, he was part of a four-man effort to run the entire 180-kilometre Sunshine Coast Trail in one go, setting the first "Fastest Known Time" at 43 hours and 50 minutes.

The club has an equally eyebrow-raising creed for its events: No Fee, No Aid, No Course Marking, No Wimps…

But Jackson is quick to note that although many of the club’s “big dogs” can be found challenging record times at North American ultrarunning events like the Western States Endurance Run, the spirit of Club Fat Ass is much more laid back.

“I was a national team guy, and I was really pushing the ultrarunning thing,” Jackson said. “So Club Fat Ass ended up starting out with this bad reputation of being impossibly difficult. But in reality, it is super inclusive… you know, most people don’t die,” he said, with a chuckle.

He extended an invitation. “Come on out and be a part of it and run with the big dogs if you want, but if you don’t, learn from the big dogs or the more experienced people and go to the pub afterwards and get to know one another.”

Jackson founded the club sort of by accident in 1993. The original idea was born of a desire to have a reliable hangover cure on New Year’s Day. After all, what better way to sweep out the cobwebs than a casual ultramarathon to kick off the next year?

Jackson called the race the “New Year’s Day Fat Ass 50” in homage to California runner Joe Oakes, who in ultrarunning lore is credited with creating the first “Fat Ass” style event in 1979.

“Fat Ass” events appeal to experienced, self-sufficient runners because of their no-frills approach, Jackson said. With low-to-no cost and little organizational overhead, events can be arranged and staged very easily. Just pick a course (or even simply a start and end point), publish the co-ordinates, and invite people to show up.

After the first Vancouver Fat Ass 50, Jackson said the idea for the club just happened. “It kind of became a tradition,” he said. A few years later, he and his wife decided to host a night run through the North Shore mountains from their home. An early adopter of the internet and HTML, Jackson set up a basic webpage to co-ordinate hosting events, and the club was born.

To join Club Fat Ass, members have to fill out a waiver, pledge to uphold the creed and pay a one-time fee of $25, which pales in comparison to the $80 to $100 fees that organized road races can cost.

While ultramarathons are still foremost for many Club Fat Ass members, the club events themselves offer more reasonable distances as well. The Seymour Super Fun Run included a 13-kilometre option and, as Jackson explains, at all events participants are free to essentially run as much or as little as they want.

While most club events aren’t recommended for first-time runners, Jackson said beginners are definitely welcome. The club maintains a competitive points system, with prizes awarded at the end of each season — but not for the results you’d expect.

At an event, “somebody is going to be first for sure,” Jackson said. “But we never recognize the first person.” Instead, points are awarded to the runner who gets lost, or who spends the most time on course.

Helping other runners earns you bonus points, as does picking up trash along the way. One of the creed commandments is to always leave the course in better shape than you found it.

“We have the Purple Heart award for the person who gets a booboo, or gets all torn up in the woods,” Jackson said. When you consider some of the club’s more popular events (like the 24-hour E-Duro RICE (Running In Circle Endlessly), or the Vancouver Vertical Kilometre (which climbs 1,000 metres from sea level over just 6.8 kilometres), it’s easy to see why.

There are points for the person who travelled the farthest to participate and perhaps most crucially, points awarded for hosting events. Technically, it could be possible to win the overall points race by simply volunteering to run the most events, even if you never actually lace up running shoes yourself, Jackson said.

As the clock ticks down to start time for the Seymour Super Fun Run, Mike Wardas and Paul Baker head out into the forest alone. Just as it has across the world this year, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many Club Fat Ass events. Some have been cancelled outright, and others adapted.

A popular innovation is “tee off” times, which Wardas used for the Seymour event. Runners sign up for an individual start time and run alone, against the clock or with small ‘pods’ of people from within their existing social bubbles.

Jackson said a similar strategy was used for the Vancouver 100 earlier this summer, where runners were given a week within which to complete their 100-kilometre run along the Baden Powell trail. For Halloween, instead of a trail run the club hosted a trail-based candy scavenger hunt, with hidden caches marked on a map, but no set course so families remained spread out.

The changes in event format proved popular enough that Club Fat Ass is considering making some of them permanent, Jackson said.

For this year’s marquee event, the New Year’s Day Fat Ass 50, Jackson hopes it will go ahead as planned. He’s going to be demo-ing another new approach: having separate start and finish lines for each competitor spread along a circular course.

At the end of the day, everything about Club Fat Ass is “just an excuse to get off your duff and go for a run,” Jackson said.