Dusty Bottoms runners leave a trail of fun times

Dusty Bottoms.

The name, taken from Chevy Chase’s character in the 1986 comedy “Three Amigos,” has turned out to be a fine fit for a Modesto-based club of trail-running enthusiasts. The members tend to have a serious love of running and the outdoors but don’t take the running so seriously that it tramples the good times they have together.

And they’re not worried about falling on their dusty bottoms.

The “welcome” message on their website sums up the group spirit: “We are a lighthearted group of primarily trail runners dedicated to supporting and encouraging like minded runners of all abilities. ... If your primary goal is to talk about PRs, discuss your splits or anything to do with fartleks, we may not be the club for you.”

Yet Dusty Bottoms is a name that almost didn’t happen.

A couple of years ago, a group of trail-running friends decided to form the club. Hector Garcia, who would become its first president, came up with a name, Dusty Bottoms, and logo, a skull wearing a flat-topped sombrero with pompons hanging from its brim.

“Other suggestions were things like Nor Cal Trail Runners,” said founding member and current President Jeff Rowe. “He said, ‘We should be Dusty Bottoms. It’s funny and totally works.’”

The other founding members thought it would be an OK name to start with but figured it wouldn’t stick, Rowe said. It did more than stick – it was a hit. “We’ve almost been a victim of our own marketing success,” Rowe said. “The logo is catchy and we’ve had people want to join just for the shirt.”

But the Dusty Bottoms Trail Runners board isn’t interested in simply increasing the club’s numbers, Rowe said. “We’re a little over 140 members currently,” he said. “Of that 140, we’re most proud of the high percentage who are actively running or actively part of the group. ...

“To join our club and to be a part of it, we really stress you have to run with us. We’re not fans of people joining the club and being a member just in name. Get to know us, let us introduce ourselves. We’re close, we have almost familial relationships.”

Many Dusty Bottomers also belong to the much larger ShadowChase Running Club. Among them is Brian Kasten, who said it’s apples-to-oranges to compare the two groups.

“They serve different purposes and I love them both,” he said. “This is a smaller, closer-knit group. … There’s much more camaraderie here. The trail-running club is more like, ‘Let’s go out and the weekend and do 20 miles.’ We might do some walking, some hiking, and we’ll all go get a beer afterward.

“ShadowChase does a lot more to bring people into running, it really helps people get started who haven’t been runners.”

Rowe also noted that a lot of ShadowChase’s focus is on 5k and 10k races, while Dusty Bottoms is about the trail and ultra-distance running – anything past a marathon.

Going the distance

The longer-distance running is very freeing and comes with different expectations, he said. “If I say I ran a 50-miler, people don’t say, ‘Oh, what was your time?’ But if I run a 5k, they will.”

At the Skyliine 50k race at Lake Chabot in Alameda County on Aug. 8, Dusty Bottoms had about 25 runners – about 13 percent of the overall field, Rowe said.

But even in races where only a handful from the group participate, its supportive, close-knit nature shows, he and Kasten said. “There might only be five people running but there will be another 20 cheering them on,” said Kasten, whose run of choice is the marathon – he ran Boston this year – but who is among five or so Dusty Bottomers currently training for a 100k. The club has about the same number training for a 100-miler.

The club has in-town runs each Monday and Friday morning and Thursday evening, typically along the Virginia Corridor biking/running trail in Modesto. Its schedule also includes weekend runs “somewhere with lots of dirt.”

“We go to Lake Chabot in Castro Valley a lot. I would say that’s kind of our home turf,” said founding member Carlene Olsen, who was among a few dozen Dusty Bottoms members who gathered Thursday at Tenth Street Plaza starting about 6:30 for the evening run.

Olsen has run marathons and ultra-distance but said she favors half marathons. But no matter what she’s up for, she knows fellow members will be there for her. “It’s just a good group of friends with a lot of support,” she said. “Anytime I wanted to do a goal distance, a ton of people were excited to join me in training.”

That friendliness and encouraging nature are part of what drew Keli Turner into the club. She said she met Rowe, Olsen and another founding member, John Swisegood, on a trail during a race. “I liked their shirts so struck up a conversation,” she said. She was excited to learn Modesto had a trail-running club, but as much as anything, “it was their personalities, they were very likable.”

Turner said she enjoys trail running because of “the old-fashioned man-vs.-nature feel of it, getting dirty, the extra challenge of being in the outdoors,” she said. That feeling of communing with nature also means she doesn’t listen to music on her runs. “I grew up no headphones, my father ran no headphones,” she said. “I find other distractions, like, ‘Look, there’s a butterfly I can follow.’”

Bottoms up!

Next up for Dusty Bottoms is this Saturday’s third annual Beer Mile. Participants start by guzzling a beer, then run a quarter mile, down another beer, and so forth until they finish four beers and the mile.

There are just a couple of rules, said Kasten, who won the first year and placed second last year:

▪ No drinking as you run; beers must be consumed at the drinking station.

▪ Runners BYOB, and it must be real – none of that nonalcoholic O’Doul’s-type stuff – and in 12-ounce cans.

Perhaps, surprisingly, it’s not the alcohol that’s the challenge in the Beer Mile, Kasten said, but the carbonation. You’re trying to belch enough to get the carbonation out, but not so much that everything comes up.

The Dusty Bottoms Beer Mile is open to anyone (21 and older, of course). Register at runsignup.com; it closes Wednesday. The race will be held at 11 a.m. at Thomas Park, a private park on Evelyn Way in Modesto.

The race is just another example, Rowe said, of trail running being a little more lighthearted in nature than road running. “Fartleks and tempo runs are really more of a road running phenomenon,” he said. “Trail runners get lost, get dirty, get skinned knees and go have a beer afterward.”

Road runners may wear heart-rate monitors and day-glo shirts, Rowe said, while “for trail runners, at the end of the run, it’s ‘Where’s the nearest pub and who has the Axe body spray so we don’t get kicked out like last time?’”

This story was originally published September 7, 2015 at 2:09 PM with the headline "Dusty Bottoms runners leave a trail of fun times."