Come for the Run, Stay for the Beer: MRC Reno’s Leaders Share How Mikkeller Running Club Unites Runners Worldwide

While living in Paris, Nick and Camille Malmquist heard about a running event taking place at a local bar. A 30-minute run and a post-run beer? Why not?

That meetup was the inaugural event for the Mikkeller Running Club’s Paris chapter, and one of many the couple would attend.

A year later, Nick and Camille moved back to Reno, Nevada. Missing the community they developed through the Paris run club and seeking to build their own, they started the Mikkeller Running Club Reno chapter in 2016.

Originally founded by craft brewer Mikkel Bjergsø in Copenhagen, Mikkeller Running Club (MRC) has expanded to nearly 100 chapters globally. Its premise is simple: go for a run and chat with friends over beers afterward.

While the first Saturday of every month is the only designated Mikkeller Running Club meetup, many chapters choose to meet more often. Over the years, MRC Reno has added more dates to its calendar, currently meeting three Saturday mornings a month and every Wednesday evening.

Holding to the Mikkeller tradition of enjoying a post-run beer together, the club meets at various beer-centered establishments for their regular runs.

One of its major partners, Piñon Bottle, opened its doors around the same time MRC Reno was getting started. As Piñon Bottle opened more locations around Reno, the club added more monthly runs.

Today, a core of about 100 runners show up for a few runs each month. During peak training season, MRC Reno often has 40 to 50 people at any given run club meetup. But even as it’s grown, it remains a no-drop running group.

“For us, it’s important to be very inclusive,” says Camille. “All paces are welcome. All levels are welcome. We’ll stop to regroup. We’re not going to lose anybody.”

In addition to the monthly group run calendar, MRC Reno meets for occasional park cleanup days and hosts an annual brewery tour run and the McCarrathon full marathon. They also participate in various races together — both local and destination races.

Destination Running and ‘Run Club Tourism’

Several years in a row, MRC Reno has had teams run the annual 178-mile Reno-Tahoe Odyssey relay. And last November, six group members traveled together to run a 50K in Folsom, California.

“We’ve put together some Ragnar teams — Tahoe, Rainier, Oregon, and Arizona,” Nick explains. “Our club team at the Arizona Ragnar ran into the MRC Phoenix team and hung out a little bit.”

When Mikkeller Running Club members travel to a city with a local chapter, they’ll often join for a run. In fact, Nick and Camille attended a club run while on vacation in Tokyo. And just this past May, they traveled to Denmark with a group of other MRC Reno members for the Mikkeller Beer Celebration Copenhagen and coinciding fun runs.

“The MRC tourism is definitely a fun component to the whole thing!” says Camille.

Below, Camille and Nick share more on how the experience of running with MRC Paris inspired them to start the Reno chapter, the annual brewery run, why they adopted a park, and advice for anyone starting a run club.

What was your experience running with MRC Paris?

Nick: From my point of view, the Paris group was just this sort of organic assortment of folks that would show up and go for a bit of a run and then hang out over a beer or two afterwards …. [We had] a neurosurgeon and a bartender and a graphics designer, and on and on and on. A pastry chef and a scientist. So it was just this group of people from all over that had a couple of shared interests.

Camille: I think we clicked pretty quickly. It took maybe three runs. And these were monthly runs. So, I think it was on the third one, we’re like, ‘So when do we turn this into just an all-day drinking event?’ Because we always had a lot of fun hanging out afterwards.

We just did these fun bonding activities. We devised a running brewery tour. We all rode the Metro out to a suburb where there was a brewery. We mapped out that we could run 2 to 3 miles in between each brewery and then stop.

We’d been living in Paris for quite a while, and it wasn’t like we needed new friends or community at that point, but we really found one, and that was really cool.

When we got back to Reno — Nick is from here, so we knew his family and a few high school friends — but [we were] looking to form a community that was our own …. We decided, there’s no chapter in Reno, we should start one.

Are there ways the Mikkeller Running Club chapters align?

Nick: The MRC chapters, they’re all the same and they’re all different. I was in Copenhagen last September …. I showed up, and instead of 20 to 40 people, there were 200 people. They split up into six distances and pace groups. But honestly, it was just a bunch of people getting together and going for a run and then hanging out over a beer afterwards. It was the same thing.

From a scheduling point of view…everybody runs on the first Saturday of the month, most places at 11 a.m., but some places at 1:30 and some at 10. So when you’re traveling, you want to do your homework, just in case you find yourself in San Francisco and you’re an hour late!

MRC Reno’s two annual events are the McCarrathon and the brewery run, which stops at up to 12 breweries. What goes into organizing the brewery run?

Nick: We plot it out. It’s actually kind of a logistical challenge to find out when [the breweries are] all open, and what your pace time is, and how long you stay at them. So, we have a good spreadsheet going on — the distance between them, and then how long it should take to get there at a 12-minute pace, and then a 20-minute beer pace …. We’ve tracked that out, and we put the map up, and people come in and out, and join halfway, or start with us and drop out when they have to.

Camille: After a few years, we refined it to a pretty good formula, where we have people sign up or volunteer to ‘sponsor’ a stop at a brewery. What that means is that person is in charge of letting the brewery know…that we’re planning on coming on this day. Then also, the day of, [they’ll say], ‘Hey, we’re going to be there in half an hour, and there’s 35 of us, or there’s 50 of us.’

Usually, that person will also pick up the tab. And if everybody gets a taster at each one, it keeps it reasonable …. If somebody wants more than a taster, they’re welcome to do that, but that’s on them.

A special initiative by MRC Reno was to adopt a local park for park cleanup days. What inspired that idea?

Camille: The pandemic was an interesting time …. We’d still have a Zoom on Wednesday night. So everybody could go do their run, and then come have a beer [over] Zoom. Then, when things started to be a little bit more okay, we started meeting in a park in town and having a socially distanced beer in our lawn chairs in the park.

That’s actually why we ended up adopting [Crissie Caughlin Park], because that’s where we were during the pandemic. It’s kind of a special place for our club.

When it comes to creating community, what advice can you share with someone starting a run club today?

Nick: Find a niche, and a niche with a need. [Run clubs in Reno]…one of them is more of a trail running thing. One of them is monster-fast people running ultra distances. We’re the 5K and grab a beer afterwards, casual, no-drop [group] …. That’s the sort of niche we fulfill.

Don’t be too specific, but don’t be too broad. You’ll gather the right people. You’ll gather like-minded folks …. They’ll come from all walks of life, and they’ll have that couple of things in common: running and whatever it is. Then, let it grow organically.

Camille: Communicating when and where to be is pretty important …. Whatever it is, communicate it really clearly on a number of channels, whether that’s a Facebook event and an Instagram Story, something on your local Reddit, or an email list. However you want to communicate, make sure that it is easy to access and clear.

Follow MRC Reno on Instagram.

“The MRC tourism is definitely a fun component to the whole thing!” – Camille Malmquist