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Welcome to the home of the Dirt Dog Trail Club. As the title suggests, we are a running group that does... trail running. What makes us different is that we are not a training group focused on training for a specific race. Rather, we are a group of people who like to get off the pavement and run the trails in the East bay. Our members train for races of all distances from 5K to Ultra-Marathons. Have a look around, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to email us.


Please check out the "About Us" page to get a fuller description about how we are organized and operate.

Our group is open to all runners. Since this is not a club or organized event, we do not have annual fee or anything like that. Announcements are E-mailed out on Friday from either Doug or Alex regarding upcoming runs. Please contact them to get on the mailing list which is our primary method of communication.

We strongly recommend you to come to one of our runs and request to be added to the mailing list or contact us via email at contact@dirtdogtrailrunners.com

History of the Dirt Dog Trail Runners

In the spring of 1999, a few of us trail lovers (Doug, Dave, Keith, Terry, Maria and Patrick) who were running with Diablo Road Runners and Forward Motion decided we would like to create a new group on other days of the week that would run strictly on the dirt trails in our wonderful hills in the East Bay. So we did some new courses on our own ranging from 5-8 miles, and liked the prospects of getting it going. We were looking for courses that were challenging and different, yet not so hard that only a few could do them.  We came up with the name "Dirt Dogs", and also created a more informal group model free of structure, dues, and officers - we just wanted to be running trails! We also decided we wanted marked trails so all the runners would stay on course, so we recruited a brigade of flour bottle bearing trail markers who went out about an hour before each run and placed flour arrows at turns. We also really wanted to leave it the way we found it, so we also set up a group of sweepers who came along at the end of the pack with whisk brooms and erased the arrows! The sweepers also checked for stragglers and injured runners for accountability purposes. So we became the only trail group that used the marking/sweeping system.

We rounded up a few more of our friends and interested runners of other running groups that liked "dirt", and started having weekly runs on Monday nights in Spring/Summer and Sunday mornings in Fall/Winter, pretty much matching Daylight and Standard times. We had 12-15 runs through which we alternated to keep it fresh. Just to add another new touch, we created Moonlight Runs on winter weeknights that matched the "just right" position of the moon in the sky to give us enough light to run safely. These have become a nice part of the Dirt Dog offering when mother nature provides a clear sky and not too much mud from the rains! The "Dawgs" as we are sometimes called, also enjoy dinner and refreshments after evening runs, and holiday morning runs, usually with a nice brunch at a member's home for the social aspect. Doug and Alex have been the lead organizers of the Dirt Dogs.