Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn't Built for Us

by Alison Mariella Désir

Where rights and access are concerned, we’re the first to be negatively impacted and the last to be considered.

What I’d learned, I told the crowd, was that I could focus on the helplessness, or recognize that I could, in fact, do something. We are not powerless in the face of injustice; there is always something you can do. I didn’t have lots of money, political power, or tons of followers on social media, but what I did have were running shoes, two feet to put them on, and enough passion and drive to organize.

I felt familiar anger rise up, an anger captured by Malcolm X in a 1962 speech: “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”

Herman Atkins ran 2:11:52 at the Nike/Oregon Track Club Marathon in 1979, the fastest marathon by a native-born Black American. (Nathan Martin would set a new record by running 2:11:05 at the Marathon Project in 2021.)

Corbitt established a course-measuring system to standardize distances nationwide—before he brought the calibrated bicycle method to the U.S., a marathon could be 25.9 miles or 26.8.

White runners see themselves, not only in mainstream narratives like those of Prefontaine and Switzer, but in everyday advertising, articles, and images. I had to actively work to uncover my history, and every run since then has been a reclaiming of our place in distance running.

The Boston Marathon’s reputation was also a deterrent. The race is viewed as the holy grail of our sport, the most sought-after event. If you’ve run Boston, you’ve somehow “made it” as a runner. But Boston’s “specialness” stems from its exclusivity. The race is open only to those who can run fast enough to earn a spot, unless you run for charity and can fundraise thousands of dollars. Speed makes you “worthy” of Boston.

The qualifying times were arbitrary, made-up times to support the race’s “exclusivity.” The idea that only certain people who “worked hard” deserved to be there is a harmful line of thinking emblematic in our society of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myth of the American Dream. You can work hard in construction, in the service sector, or as a teacher, and you can work hard in upper management, as a CEO, or a stockbroker; but one group’s hard work is rewarded more, both monetarily and in cultural currency, creating a country of haves and have-nots. Those who have, so this line of thinking goes, must have worked harder. Two thirty-year-old women can train equally hard; one will run 3:29 and qualify; the other will never hit 3:30, but that doesn’t mean her effort was any less.

Our participation as sponsored athletes seemed to threaten these runners’ perception of the race’s specialness, and therefore their own specialness. They suggested we’d cheated the system. But the idea that a system is inherently right and we all have to abide by it is problematic.

But as we smiled and laughed our way through the party, the atmosphere rang of entitlement and privilege, and it occurred to me that I was welcomed in this space only because the powers that be had decided I could be. I was the same person I’d always been. The only difference was that the publication now saw me.

I left the party with an acute awareness of how easy it is to fall for the feeling of exclusivity—how good it feels to be included, to think you’re special.

Boston’s stature seems to stem from the fact that it is America’s oldest continuous marathon, founded in 1897 after the running of the marathon at the first modern Olympic Games in Greece. Its qualifying standards were introduced in 1970 to keep the field size down.

People were wearing previous Boston Marathon jackets and talking about past races—“Remember that year the weather was so hot? Remember when it was freezing rain?” The point wasn’t remembering; it was to let you know that they’d been there before, that they were repeat members of the elite Boston club. I wanted to hold a mirror up to them: Can’t you see we are back in high school, when we thought a varsity jacket made us more special?

But I rejected the idea that we should be grateful for being allowed to participate at Boston. This was so salient to me that I skipped the conversation with Boston’s longtime race director Dave McGillivray. The only thing I wanted to ask him was how he reconciled the cognitive dissonance of celebrating the joy of running for everybody when his race was only for a select few.

Groups of white men were drinking beer on their front lawns—a frightening sight for me. One moment you’re a runner, the next you’re a nigger.

At Boston, I had no sense of achievement other than another marathon completed. If Boston truly was the pinnacle of running, then I would have experienced its specialness. But you have to buy into the idea of exclusivity to feel it.

What Boston showed me was just how deeply invested runners—and people in general—are in the idea of privilege. Exclusivity makes people feel good. It makes them feel special, better than others, when what it really means is that you’ve bought into an ideology of exclusion and marginalization.

For me, the issue begs a larger question: Where does your pride come from? Is it in relation to other people, from a position of dominance or being “better”? If you are better, someone else is lesser. If you are above, someone else is below.

Runners talk about the Boston tradition. But a tradition of what? If Boston is the pinnacle, what does that say about what we value? Exclusivity is antithetical to the belief that running is for everyone. A sport open to all cannot elevate faster runners as more deserving of a race, of being more representative of runners. Can we see all runners as deserving of space and place? It comes down to asking, what is it we truly value: inclusion or exclusion?

Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women.

People think economic status is the reason for health disparities, but research points to race as the larger factor. Deaths are linked to institutional racism and the racial bias and stereotyping among medical professionals, who tend to dismiss the concerns of people of color. Black people and other racial minorities receive less accurate diagnoses, less pain management, and fewer treatment options, resulting in higher death rates, notably in heart disease, cancer, and maternal mortality. I worried that if I told the hospital staff I was having pain, they wouldn’t believe me.

The shooting had taken place sixty-three days earlier but was only now making national news. The men who had shot and killed him had not been arrested.

Growing up, grown-ups tell you: don’t be caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. But when you get older, you realize that the wrong place and the wrong time could really be any day of the week, any hour of the day. White supremacy dictates the time; it dictates the lessons we all learn and the rules I will teach Kouri.

But the questions should not have been about Ahmaud, what he was doing, or what he was wearing. That’s like asking a woman what she had on after being harassed or raped, as if a particular kind of clothing “caused” the crime.

are assumed to be acts of an individual, not reflective of the white race. But if a Black person commits a crime, it is used as further “proof” that Black people are prone to such behavior. As one researcher put it, a Black or brown person “seems to be always on trial.”

Our survival depends on our ability to make sense of racialized expectations for us in every environment we enter.

Many runners don’t have that privilege. To move so freely without fear. Or to make a mistake. To just be human.”

Running believes it is a sport that welcomes everyone, when it remains a sport that primarily prioritizes and celebrates white experiences while having no clue that there are other experiences.

It was my responsibility to care for my son, not just at home, but by ensuring the world is a place in which he can thrive. What kind of world did I want my son to grow up in?

Doctors Darroch and Hillsburg analyzed the covers of three North American publications (Runner’s World, Women’s Running, and Canadian Running) over an eleven-year period (2009–2019) and found that yes, the data supported their perception. Of the 284 covers, white people were featured 80 percent of the time. On its own, Runner’s World featured white people 85 percent of the time, a statistic representative of the publication since it began in the late 1960s. To me, the findings were validating. I’d been running for seven years and had rarely seen Black people featured in the media.

In 2020, only one of the eighteen CEOs or COOs at top running brands featured in the story was a person of color. (There might have been two, but how the person identifies was not clear.) Two of the executives were women, both white. Out of the 223 people in executive positions or on the board in those same companies, only five were people of color, or 2 percent.

When everyone sees mostly white runners in the media, Black people are not seen or understood as belonging in that space. A Black person running is not normalized. Instead, the media perpetuates the stereotype that a Black man only runs in public when he is running from trouble; a criminal fleeing a scene—the perception that killed Ahmaud Arbery.

But it quickly became clear that even white people wanting to bring about change in the industry were not prepared for conversations on race. They had little to no racial awareness. They had no idea whiteness even existed, let alone that running itself was steeped in it.

So I explained that white supremacy was not simply extremist views or people, but rather the economic, social, and political structure of our nation. It was the idea that white is the norm and everyone else a deviation from it.

It’s impossible to feel safe sharing experiences of racial harm when the people you’re talking to do not have a historical understanding or awareness to hold space for your experiences.

White ignorance is part of what keeps a white supremacist system in place. If we don’t acknowledge it exists, then there’s nothing to address. White supremacy is the system that allows racism to flourish, and prevents racial diversity from being welcomed and celebrated. I often think of this quote from the hip-hop artist Guante: “White supremacy is not a shark, it is the water.”

importance of both naming the problem and of white people taking responsibility for the present privileges they’d inherited due to historic wrongs.

One study found that previously redlined areas can be five to twenty degrees hotter in the summer than the whiter, wealthier parts of town. More traffic and industry means more pollutants hover over these neighborhoods, leading to declining health. Areas once redlined have higher rates of chronic illnesses like asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity—including the Bronx.

I saw in these lists the structural racism that underlies running—the gap between overwhelmingly white, wealthy communities where people can easily run, and the under-resourced communities of color where running is less safe and less practical. If you have a good place to run, more people will be running, and the data confirm this. I compared maps of previously redlined areas in Harlem and Brooklyn with activity levels for those areas from Strava heat-map data—maps that register activity levels as “heat” from millions of users around the world. The previously redlined areas of Harlem and Brooklyn were nearly dark, signaling little to no activity, while Manhattan was lit up, showing high levels of activity.

A runner is somebody with secure housing, a safe place to train, running infrastructure—parks, paths, trails, well-kept sidewalks—clean air, and the physical, emotional, and psychological safety to run. And the majority of people with those privileges are white, just as it was during the running boom.

In a study conducted by sociologist Rashawn Ray, Ph.D., on why middle-class Black Americans are less active than their white counterparts, Ray found that safety played a primary role. “Black

men are criminalized by the inability of others to separate a Black male from crime,” Ray told Runner’s World in 2013 to explain why Black men tended to avoid running in white neighborhoods.

The likelihood of a person of color being harmed by police has also risen since 2014; in the year following the killing of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, 229 Black people lost their lives at the hands of a police officer. In 2020, Black people accounted for the highest percentage of police-related deaths, as they had for many years. Also: police shot unarmed Black people at a rate of three times higher than white people between 2015 and 2020.

It’s tempting to compartmentalize running into something separate, something somehow detached from the world. But everything is connected: neighborhoods, air quality, bias, violence, safety, running.

When I hear white runners say “keep politics out of running” or that running publications and brands should “stick to running,” and that “race” and “social issues” don’t belong in running, I hear someone denying structural racism, bias, and white supremacy—denying my reality and the reality of millions of others. These comments demonstrate a lack of racial understanding and a narrow view of our nation’s history. And they ignore the fact that running occurs outdoors, in neighborhoods and parks, and on streets and trails. They ignore the fact that politics and racism are embedded in everything—all aspects of American life.

The running collective is “come as you are,” in sweats or sweat-wicking gear. We want to dispel the myth that running is only about getting faster or that it must be about pain and struggle; running can just be about movement, community, and joy.

“What we choose to remember, memorialize, and preserve as a society determines how we understand our present and imagine our future,” wrote the curators of an exhibit on the murder of Emmett Till at the National Museum of American History. “When Black history is suppressed or delegitimized, we lose the ability to reckon with systemic racism, from one generation to the next.”