In late 2019, I visited Los Angeles and high on my list of things to do there was check out Blue Ribbon Sports (BRS), a runner’s clubhouse located in Nike’s first retail location in Santa Monica. A runner I knew from my home in Brooklyn named Knox recommended I catch a group run with the Good Vibes Track Club, which he founded and coached. Good Vibes TC was the west coast version of another club he started called The Black Roses. The members of both clubs, like their founder, were impossibly cool, colorful, and fast. I was both excited and intimidated by the long run I planned to do with Good Vibes TC. Getting dropped is bad enough an ego hit, but it’s doubly so when it happens in front of people I want to impress. My fragile ego maintenance notwithstanding, I showed up to BRS Saturday morning ready to run.
There was a miscommunication about the long run start time and place, and when I showed up to BRS, runners assembling, but they didn’t look like the ones I saw on Good Vibes TC’s Instagram. These runners were still cool and colorful, but they didn’t look like Knox’s cadre of sub-three hour marathoners. For lack of a better word, they looked like normal people.
I learned the group was not Good Vibes TC, but Keep it Run Hundred (KiRH). Texts to Knox and checking Instagram for the correct long run information proved fruitless, so I decided to run with KiRH. A guy named “Butta” did a quick intro to the group, which had swelled to 30-40 people. He outlined the board-flat 5K route around the residential neighborhoods near BRS —neighborhoods that are nothing like the tony beachfront ones most people associate with Santa Monica.
It was quickly evident the good vibes were not limited to Knox’s elite posse. KiRH’s stoke for running was sky high, even if their paces were not. The stoke wasn’t coming from club members’ hitting predefined paces or finely calibrated times spent at limit —the kinds of things that got me stoked at the time —but by pushing their own personal limits, and doing so with their friends’ support.
When everyone finished back at BRS, we huddled up in the parking lot, where Butta said a prayer of gratitude and then led several chants: “Keep it! Run Hundred! Keep it! Run Hundred! Keep it! Run Hundred!” BRS provided a bounty of breakfast sandwiches and coffee for the après-run. People lingered long, catching up, uploading their runs to Strava and pics to Instagram, and so forth.
I am convinced divine intervention led me to run with KiRH and not Good Vibes TC. This is not to diss the latter group, but it’s easy to find inspiration looking at a bunch of fit, trained, and stylish runners ripping a 1:15:00 half-marathon on a training run. But I find it more inspiring to see someone with no or little running background and limited training experience or time pushing themselves to run a 30:00 5K. On a subjective level, the latter runner is likely pushing themselves far harder than an former. The beauty of running is often not in exceeding objective limits like a sub-19:00 5K (a personal goal of mine for a while), but exceeding one’s subjective, personal limits, and using a community to keep exceeding them.
Equally inspiring was witnessing the stoke in people who defied the stereotypical runner. KiRH’s members appeared to be mostly working-class black and Hispanics folks. While running is one of the lowest barrier sports from an economic standpoint, requiring minimal equipment and no facilities, I tend to think of the average runner skewing towards the upper rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Clubs like KiRH and others defy that bourgie stereotype and defy the notion that running is a rarefied domain for the super fast in super shoes . The world needs a lot more of this.
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