Running Store Reaches New Start Line

The next chapter for one of country's oldest running shops.

“Movement is healing.”
– Brian Lyons

There’s a rhythm to working a shift at a running store. 

The opening rituals—shuffling in, coffee cup in hand, hair damp and smelling of shampoo from a rushed shower; the metal clatter of the door unlocking. 

The steady bustle of morning—a flitter of sales in the first minutes from folks waiting for the store to open; customers arriving in ones and twos, willing to spend an hour shopping in earnest. 

The erratic afternoon—sometimes dead, sometimes zany as school and workday ends; parents dragging in mumbling teenagers; 9-5ers rushing to restock on energy gels before an evening workout. 

The closing prayer—dusk falling outside the shop windows in a shift’s dying minutes; sing-song good-byes as the doors are locked.

I spent my early twenties working in running shops, cycling through this daily rhythm. Carrying armloads of shoe boxes onto the sales floor. Squatting to fit folks for the right size. Perambulations around clothing racks, searching for the right size of running shorts. Pawing at arcane point-of-sale systems.

Then there was the product, of course. Shoe boxes—my god, so many shoe boxes—each brand’s unique in the way it opened, the texture of the cardboard, how well it stacked. Pop open a box and inhale the sharp plasticine of midsole foam, the smell of pure petroleum possibility.

And the customers! Each one a universe walking in off the street, each one with their own unique aspiration—to train for a half marathon, to start running, to PR, to finish an ultramarathon. Each yearning to make themselves better. To make themselves more. 

Running stores are places where these stories begin. And in a way, they’re where my adult life began. 

The store with the longest influence on my life is Transports, a venerable shop in Oakland, California, where I worked during my first summer in Berkeley and in between grad-school semesters. I’d go on to join their racing team for a few seasons and helped with community runs from the store. Eventually, I became just a customer, a regular in need of a gear refresh and a nostalgic whiff of midsole foam.

I wasn’t the only employee or regular to start their journeys with the help of Transports. Over four decades of business, Transports built relationships with thousands of people. It’s more than a shop—this is something people say, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s a place, one that gathers together humans and relationships. And after 42 years, it will soon change hands to a new generation of ownership. 

When I heard that Transports would be entering its next chapter, I wanted to talk with the people with the deepest relationships to the store. So I spoke with the once and future owners to understand how places like Transports are created, why they last for so long, and what impact they have on local lives and communities.

Here is their story.

Origins

The store that would become Transports was founded in 1982 by Kei Kodani and a business partner under the name High Meadow. In a space above a leafy stretch of College Avenue in the quaint Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, Kodani designed and manufactured backpacking gear, luggage, and other outdoor products.

At the time, the San Francisco East Bay was becoming an epicenter of the outdoor gear world. Brands were emerging that would become household names—The North Face, Powerbar, Timbuk2, GU Energy, Mountain Hardwear. “I wanted to make gear,” Kodani told me in a phone conversation. “And I wanted to have my own brand.” 

After a nearby tennis and running-shoe retailer closed, High Meadow capitalized on the hole in the local market and began carrying running shoes. In another effort to expand, the store started selling swimwear when Bev Nakashima, the current owner, joined the business with Kodani in 1985.

“As another running boom spun up in the late 1980s, we were searching for a different name,” remembered Kodani. “We still made outdoor gear and luggage. But now we carried shoes and swimsuits. So we had this idea that the store ethos centered on human-powered transportation. Hence, the name ‘Transports.’”

Community growth

The store rode a wave of interest in distance running into the 2000s. “In the beginning,” recalls Nakashima, “there was only Nike and Asics, but our shoe wall kept getting bigger and bigger.” As new brands entered the market, the store’s specialized knowledge broadened their customer base to include walkers, hikers, and younger runners. 

“We grew through connections with various local running groups,” said Kodani. “We’d get involved in any running event, providing prizes and t-shirts.”

Even as they hired more staff, the owners kept a high touch, working alongside employees on the sales floor. “Good customer service,” Nakashima told me. “That’s why people came back and why the business lasted.” Frank Monaghan, who joined as a business partner in 1986, agrees: “We truly loved this stuff and were enthusiastic about everything. People recognized that honesty and interest.” 

“The common denominator was fitness, but it felt like family.”
—Bev Nakashima

Eventually Transports drew in elite athletes from nearby UC Berkeley, most notably Richie Boulet, who started working as an employee in 1996 while competing at Cal and later as a professional runner. After missing an Olympic berth in the 2000 Trials, Richie became a partner in the store and a crucial link with the racing scene that blossomed in the Bay Area over the next decade.

The store became a vehicle for sponsorship through Adidas, which offered gear through a Transports retail team. “This attracted fast folks,” Boulet told me. “It was a mechanism to get fast people even faster through gear and a bit of money.”

Scott Bauhs winning the 2008 USATF Club Cross Country championships. Photo: Runnerspace

By 2008, the store team had already won multiple USATF Pacific Association Grand Prix in road racing and cross country. But that year it won the 13-person centipede competition at Bay to Breakers, sent a squad to cross-country club nationals, and qualified 8 people for the 2008 Olympic Marathon Trials. Most notably, at the women’s trials in Boston that year, Magda Boulet would wear a Transports kit when she qualified for the Olympics in the marathon.

Magda at the 2008 Olympic Trials held in Boston.

Despite its pro-running connections, the store had a welcoming atmosphere. “People thought we were elite because so many talented people were associated with the store,” said Monaghan. “But there was never an air of arrogance.” 

That was my impression when I worked at Transports. The vibe was casual and a little unpolished. The sales floor was cramped with clothing racks as employees chatted shoes with customers in a cozy fitting space toward the back of the store. 

Transports College Avenue location, c. 2018.

It was an unpretentious atmosphere that welcomed a wide range of abilities, which was manifest at weekly runs from the store and nearby parks. Monaghan is proud that the store helped so many people get started in the sport: “It was so gratifying to watch folks with different backgrounds become repeat customers.” 

Transports-organized trail run. July, 2016.

Looking forward

In 2018, three of the owners, Kodani, Monaghan, and Boulet, moved on from the business, leaving it in the hands of Bev Nakashima, who will retire this May. Long-time manager Brian Lyons is buying the business. He plans to maintain the store’s ethos of movement. “Movement is healing,” he said. “Spending some time moving makes your day better, and this store can support that.”

“It’s not easy in the Bay where everything is so expensive,” Lyons concedes. His theory for the store’s future is a space where people can explore, inhabit, and interact with others. “The challenge with local businesses is that we want them to be places of connection and art. And instead we get local shops with artisanal light bulbs.” 

It’s not a bad plan.

Here’s the thing we often overlook about small business. They’re rooted in the economics of place, forgoing the burn of quick scale for steady sustainability. Their success isn’t rooted in a rent-seeking business model like online tech platforms, where profits come from a mafia-like cut of business in the form of transaction or service fees, a soft Cosa Nostra for the digital age. 

No, a small business only thrives if the people surrounding it are also thriving. Sure, they want to sell people stuff or services. But they’re incentivized to do right by those people.

This formula was the owners’ favorite part of the business, especially in relation to their employees. “That’s what I’ll miss the most,” Nakashima told me. “The connections made there lasted, even after people moved on from the store. The common denominator was fitness, but it felt like family.”

“The best people,” Richie Boulet said when I chatted with him about the store, “they were the ones moving toward something big. They were in transition or training or just still growing.” 

As Boulet explained how its employees have gone on to become academics, artists, attorneys, physicians, and entrepreneurs, I reflected upon my own relationship with the store. Transports was a place that helped me move through graduate school and beyond. It was indeed a form of human-powered transportation, one that carried people forward both physically and spiritually.

Before we hung up, Boulet added, “We caught people in the interim toward greatness, and that was in itself great.”

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Check out Transports on Instagram, Facebook, and their website. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can find the store on College Avenue in Oakland, California.

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Do you have a favorite running or cycling store? Give them some love in the comments and share why they’re awesome.

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