Vivek Gowri on Doing the Right Thing as the Long Game in Trail Running

The San Francisco Running Company owner on taking a women's trail race to The North Face, making the pie bigger, why trail is having its moment, and betting that community compounds.

I have been wearing the same San Francisco Running Company hat for almost ten years, and I do not live in the Bay Area. I bought it around 2016, wore it out to a film screening on those trails, and never really took it off. People stop me in airports because of it. That is the whole thing about SFRC, and it is why I keep having Vivek Gowri back on. He was on last summer on For The Long Run, then again in January to announce he had bought the store, and now we are making this a quarterly check-in: a state of the industry conversation with one of the most thoughtful operators in running. We recorded coming out of TrailCon in Tahoe, and it turned into a conversation about doing the right thing as an actual business strategy.

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Guest snapshot

Who: Vivek Gowri, owner of San Francisco Running Company (SFRC)

Where: Mill Valley, California, right off the Marin Headlands trails

Day job: Two decades in the computer industry, currently full time at NVIDIA

Runner notes: Longtime trail runner. Fridays for Chai Miles in the Panhandle at 7am, Saturdays for the SFRC loop run.

From a Mill Valley shop to a place people fly in for

Vivek is opening up SFRC’s e-commerce so that nearly everything on the store’s shelves can be bought online, with order pickup and a genuinely seamless experience across in-person and online. He was clear about what this is not. He is not trying to become an online retailer. SFRC is first and foremost a running store off the trails of Mill Valley, and that is what defines it. The online piece just lets people outside the immediate geography buy in, whether that is someone who moved away or someone who has only ever run those trails once and felt the pull.

The store has always leaned into a tight, high-end selection, the limited and small-batch releases alongside its own branded hats and tees. The longer arc, though, is about being a destination. Vivek wants SFRC to be the kind of store where a runner visiting from the Alps thinks, I have heard of that place, I have to go. There are only a handful of shops in the world that carry that “if you know, you know” pull, and he wants SFRC to be one of them.

He is quick to credit the people who built the store into a pillar of West Coast trail running over almost fifteen years: Brett and Larissa, Jorge, Ted, and a long list beyond them. His framing of the job is refreshingly humble. Step one is do not break it. Then grow and elevate the community from there, and give people a reason to come over the bridge.

Taking a women’s trail race to North Face, with a childcare grant attached

SFRC has long partnered with local races on bib pickup and pre-race training runs. During the pandemic it took over a women’s half marathon in San Francisco with a lineage that runs from a Nike road half to a Salomon trail half. For a few years SFRC kept it going as a low-key neighborhood trail race. This year they just opened registration and are elevating it: a name-brand title sponsor in The North Face, a real prize purse, and the goal of building one of the premier short-distance and women’s-only trail races in the country.

What struck me is that he is doing two things at once that look opposite. A large prize purse for the sharp end of the field, and a stack of support for everyone else: a childcare grant to take that barrier off the table, and a free twelve-week training program led by a professional coach so a first-timer, including someone running their first race postpartum, can show up at the store and train with a group.

Having more gender equality on trails, equal participation, equal prize money. Without even getting into the math behind it, it is just the right thing to do.

Vivek Gowri

Doing the right thing as the long game

This is the throughline of everything Vivek does. His starting point is that if you do the right things for the right reasons, the business tends to take care of itself over a long enough horizon. He knows how idealistic that sounds. He believes it anyway.

The nuance he added is key. The commercial argument, that more women on trail means a bigger market to sell shoes and nutrition to, is real, but he treats it as the answer to how you fund the work, not why you do it. The why is that it is right. The funding case is how you get brands to pay for it. Aligning the incentives with the end zone you are actually trying to reach is the good stuff.

If you do the right things for the right end zones, everything else will take care of itself.

Vivek Gowri

Getting brands to fund the work: green flags and the pipeline pitch

Because a lot of you reading this are race directors and community builders, we spent real time here. His conversation with The North Face conversation went smoothly because leadership got the vision immediately, and once a brand gets it, the rest is logistics: contract length, activation budget versus product in kind. The green flag is simple. When someone gets your vision, you can feel it, and you stop selling and start building together.

When they do not get it, you have two moves. You reframe to something cheaper and specific: maybe they cannot fund the whole race, but they can fund a summit for BIPOC community leaders, or a women’s trail night, or a grassroots regional activation that never needs to go up to a big exec level. And you push the time horizon. You are not buying one community engagement, you are building a customer pipeline over six months, twelve months, five years. Most brand marketers are planning to the edge of their fiscal year, so part of the job is selling them on the pipeline their budget cycle cannot see.

Making the pie bigger

Coming out of TrailCon, a lot of the conversation, prodded by Ian at Skratch, was about how the industry keeps fighting over slices instead of growing the pie. Vivek is squarely on the grow-the-pie side. He wants more women and more people of color on trail, and he is honest that it does not happen on its own. It takes intention and money pointed in the right direction.

He pointed to Broken Arrow as the most diverse trail race he has been to, and gave real credit to Brendan and that team for putting money where their mouth is, seeding bibs and building a program that has since taken on a life of its own as friends bring friends. He also talked about his own role, texting friends to just show up at SFRC because he is there now, and how quickly that changes who you see in the photos and on the start line.

We got personal here too. I told him about a conversation with Tommie at TrailCon, who said so much of why he is there is to show other people they can be there too. I did not fully understand that until I felt it myself as a Jewish person, the specific relief of another person who just gets where your head is. Vivek described the same thing: wanting to see more of his people on trail, the cultural continuity, and the safety and energy that comes with not being the only one in the room.

The outdoors are really open to all of us. I want to keep making that more visible and more normalized.

Vivek Gowri

Why trail is having its moment

We could not not talk about the boom. Vivek’s read: trail is built on genuinely compelling feats of human endurance, and the storytelling around them has finally broken into the mainstream, look at the coverage after Rachel and Cocodona. Add road runners discovering they actually like the dirt, plus a strange new overlap with high fashion, trail brands showing up at Paris Fashion Week, the real one and not an offshoot, and you get an industry-wide swell.

I wrote more about this after Tahoe, of course.

He is not naive about the downside. He is wary of the clout-chasing and the influencer wave, and would rather see people run the races that actually interest them. On the majors putting influencers on start lines, his read was blunt: more eyeballs, more they can charge sponsors. He does not think trail is there yet, and we both hope it holds onto the thing that makes a trail start line feel like nobody is checking whether you belong. Everyone is too busy suffering up the same hill.

The rest of what he is building

A few more threads worth flagging. SFRC just went through a rebrand, a cleaner logo system built around the layers in the name, and a palette of bright yellow and dark green that anyone who knows Vivek can feel his fingerprints on. A store remodel is coming to open the space up and keep it a community hangout. And he has been angel investing at the intersection of tech and running, including Laurel on race timing (which he’s using for his races) and a connected shoe (Avelo Running*) he is truly excited about. He keeps the store and the investing mentally separate, even as the use cases keep bumping into each other.

On motivation, his answer was the most Vivek thing possible. He chases what he is into, all the way down. A friend once told him, when you are into something, you are really into it. He has been into computers since he was a kid and into running shoes for about as long, and at some point the question stops being what motivates you and becomes just doing the stuff that interests you until it turns into something other people find valuable.

Takeaways

• Right thing, long game. For The Long Run, indeed. Doing the right thing and building a good business are not in tension over a long enough horizon. The commercial case is how you fund the work, not why you do it.

• Sell the pipeline, not the activation. Brands plan to the edge of their fiscal year. Your job is to show them the six-month, twelve-month, five-year customer pipeline their budget cycle cannot see.

• Green flag: they get it. When a partner gets your vision, you can feel it, and the conversation shifts from convincing to building. When they do not, reframe to something cheaper and specific.

• Access is a design choice. A prize purse for the front and a childcare grant plus a free training plan for everyone else is how you make a race matter at both ends of the field.

• Growth does not come for free. More women and more people of color on trail takes intention and funding pointed the right way. It does not happen organically without the push.

Listen & follow

Vivek and SFRC: sfrun.co (formerly sfrco.com) · Vivek on Instagram Long Run Labs: Instagram · X · YouTube · Threads

See you out there.

PS: registration is open

SFRC just opened registration for their women’s trail race in the Marin Headlands, now with North Face as title sponsor, a real prize purse, a childcare grant, and a free 12-week training program in the lead-up. If you have a first-timer or a postpartum runner in your life, this is the one to point them toward. Registration link

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Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.

*Disclaimer: I am also personally involved in both of these brands