Breaking Borders
But one group is using our sport to break down the barriers
Runners are tackling racial divisions in the US city of Baltimore
DEVAN CLAPP STANDS OUTSIDE HIS HOUSE IN THE RAMBLEWOOD NEIGHBOURHOOD OF BALTIMORE.
It’s a transition area between the largest city in the eastern US state of Maryland and the suburbs of Baltimore County, which lie just a few miles north. The quiet streets have postage-stamp lawns.
This neighbourhood, like every other Baltimore neighbourhood where Clapp’s family has lived in the last hundred years, was predominantly white, before it wasn’t. He talks of how, in the 1980s, the skin colour of his mother and father, godmother and brother drove their white neighbours up and over to the what he calls the ‘more-welcoming’ side of the county line.
‘ When I was younger, the neighbourhood was pretty much 50 per cent white and 50 per cent black. As a youngster I didn’t know it was happening, but now I look back and they’re all gone,’ says the 39-year- old.
There are a few other areas in Baltimore with the same low crime rate and enviable housing stability as Clapp’s neighborhood. However, most of those places have seen heavy development and investment – bike lanes, tidy parks, and running paths. Ramblewood looks as it did 30 – maybe even 50 – years ago.
‘ I’m standing outside now and looking at the alley, the streets and the pavement. It just doesn’t scream “I want to go for a run,”’ says Clapp. It’s not that he’s against running those streets around his home – he often logs a few evening miles in the neighbourhood. But in his part of the city, designated running paths are nonexistent and the closest runnable park is three miles away.
Even so, Clapp’s neighbourhood is better than many in the notoriously troubled city. There are neighbourhoods where sedentary lives are bred from childhood; places left in the margins of the city while resources pour into the alreadyaffluent blocks. Those historically overlooked areas are large swaths of the city that are predominantly black and have been torn apart by decades of failed political leadership, corruption and blatant segregation.
To run in them is to find yourself immersed in HBO’S seminal drama series Thewire, to run past addicts and drug-pushing corner boys calling out the street names for their wares. Running past side alleys, you see enormous rats dart out from piles of broken household appliances, soiled clothing and all manner of how-on-earth-did-that-get-there detritus. These are areas where you don’t run up behind someone without announcing yourself – ‘Good morning! Runner coming up behind you’ – or moving into the street; if not for your own safety, then as a courtesy to pedestrians on edge about theirs.
To run in those areas is also to run out of them within just a couple of blocks, through an invisible wall that turns into white Baltimore – a place that is surely separate and distinctly not equal in job opportunities, infrastructure and education.
Running in Baltimore traces the blueprints of divisions that have stood for a century. Here, for now at least, running breaks no boundaries. •
Several miles south of Clapp’s house lie the hottest Strava routes in Baltimore. Almost every one follows the wide brick promenade that curls around the waterfront of the Inner Harbor, the city’s crown jewel. The path winds past the tourist shops and high- end Harbor East, through the historic, cobblestoned Fells Point and down to the Canton Waterfront Park.
The promenade is where Baltimore’s running groups meet, including Clapp’s: a handful of mostly black runners known as RIOT (Running Is Our Therapy) Squad Running. The group started as a response to the ‘trauma and suffering happening in Baltimore in people’s personal lives,’ says founder Rob Jackson, 37. For them, running ‘can be used as a stress reliever and as a way to get healthy, in a city where the life- expectancy difference between blacks and whites is significant [six years]’.
They start at 8am on Sundays with a few miles around the water at an ‘all are welcome’ pace. Most of the runners live more than 20 minutes away and most travel by car to get there. Clapp himself takes a 30-minute bus ride from Ramblewood, but says it’s worth it, if only for the view.
It’s Baltimore’s top spot for runners for good reason. In a city beset by an endless cycle of growth and decay, it exists as an idyllic escape. Uninterrupted, the path hugs seven miles of waterfront, past bobbing yachts, lively patio bars and even a stretch of sandy beach used as a trendy social pop-up.
A tale of two cities
in the city’s THE PROMENADE ROUTE LIES AS A LARGER PUZZLE PIECE running scene, one that few acknowledge. When viewing the Strava heatmap of Baltimore, the most-run routes of the city blend to form the outline of a letter ‘ L’ that glows like neon. It begins in the north and runs straight down the city’s spine, before diverting east along the Inner Harbor and promenade. This area of Baltimore is also a demographic phenomenon known as ‘ the white L’. It’s the area where resources are directed and luxury apartment complexes erected. Its lines are as obvious in real life as they are on the Strava heatmap, and most people who live inside it stay inside it.
Just as obvious are two areas outside of it, segregated to the left and the right. They’re Strava deserts where running seems nonexistent, or if there are runners, they don’t use GPS. These stretch around the Patapsco River and out to the county lines, forming a rough shape of wings. These areas are pocked with vacant homes and there is soaring poverty. It’s another demographic phenomenon – ‘ the black butterfly’.
As a youth, Clapp attended Baltimore City College, a public high school with an active sports programme. ‘A lot of my friends got their running in by way of football or basketball practice,’ says Clapp. But he wasn’t very athletic.
Running wasn’t part of his life until much later into adulthood, when he was able to reflect on the benefits of the sport. For many children in Baltimore, it’s the same. Physical education, much less running, isn’t a priority.
A 2018 report funded by the Baltimore- based sports shoe and apparel company Under Armour and the Aspen Institute found that most schools in rundown East Baltimore provided little more than the minimum requirement for physical education. ‘There are basic fitness issues,’ said one educator in the study.
Outside school, things get even more difficult. Baltimore is experiencing a violent crime wave of unforeseen proportions, even by the city’s standards. In 2017, it recorded 342 murders, giving it the dubious distinction of having the highest per capita murder rate of any city in the US. Less than two-thirds of students in the Under Armour study said there’s a safe place to play in their neighbourhood.
Without areas to run in, exposure to the sport is minimal. This is compounded by the fact that running really is a luxury. Running is more than shoes and an open front door. It is money – to enter races, to buy running shoes, which can cost more than a day’s wages. Running is time. It is selfish to go alone and into your own head when others need that body at home. Even if time and money aren’t obstacles, the safer running routes are more than a mile away and no running groups in the city meet in your neighbourhood.
Every running store in Baltimore sits within the white L. Every major running group not only meets in the white L, but runs almost exclusively within its borders. The only races that go through a predominantly black neighbourhood for more than a mile are the Baltimore Running Festival’s full and half marathon.
‘ People don’t see running happening, so they may not think about starting to run,’ says Clapp.
Another group leading the way for running in Baltimore’s black community is the Black Running Organization (BRO). Led in part by 37-year- old entrepreneur Isa Olufemi, BRO empowers black runners through embracing their heritage and developing unity. In addition to BRO, for three years, Olufemi also led a running club at Dunbar High School, in the heart of East Baltimore, known as the Poet Pride Run Club ( PPRC). With grant funding for coaching
RUNNING IS TIME. IT IS SELFISH TO GO ALONE AND INTO YOUR OWN HEAD WHEN OTHERS NEED THAT BODY AT HOME
and kit, the club met twice a week to run a few miles before the school day started.
When the club took to the streets – almost entirely outside the white L – their joy was infectious, people thanked them for running, a man even flagged down the group and handed them the cash in his pocket because of how impressed he was.
Others outside the community noticed, too. The group was supported by Under Armour, which provided members with running gear and entry into the Baltimore Running Festival.
However, despite the exposure and success, the programme didn’t return for the 2018-2019 school year. The original grant expired and public funding was a no-go in a school district where classroom temperatures dipped to near freezing during a heating crisis last winter.
‘ I don’t think that this system is designed to really invest in everyone,’ says Inte’a Deshields, 38, co-marshal of BRO and English professor at Morgan State University. ‘And so the best teacher for us has been to say ‘ Kujichagulia’ – [the African principle of ] self-determination – you gotta create that shit yourself.’
Olufemi is starting another youth running club in the city, one that doesn’t have to rely on outside funding. And even though the PPRC no longer operates within the walls of Dunbar High School, it continues to run in conjunction with BRO. The students they’ve built relationships with over the last three years still come to group runs; support and community continues. This all falls in line with the Black Running Organization’s foundational goal to restore and empower the black community through running.
Positive steps
been in a bad place ‘ BLACK PEOPLE ARE IN A BAD PLACE RIGHT NOW, for a while. We come to resurrect the spirit of our people, and to do that we have to be separate from other folks first,’ says Olufemi.
Lenny Johnson, 33, another BRO member and a teacher in Baltimore, says, ‘ When I’m running past blocks with nothing but boarded houses and I literally see people decaying on the streets, it’s like I’m running for someone else. Because people need to see that. They need to see someone who’s physically strong, also mentally strong.’
Clapp sees change coming. ‘Right now, running in the city is fragmented, but with more running groups popping up, they’re gonna bring more people into it.’ RIOT plans to start doing more runs throughout the city; possibly a west-to-east run on North Avenue, through the heart of the unrest – 486 arrests over 15 days – that came following the 2015 death of a 25-year-old African American named Freddie Gray, who sustained severe spinal cord injuries while in police custody.
On a larger scale, last year, Under Armour began providing kit for all student athletes in every Baltimore public school. And in terms of physical spaces, they have one UA House in East Baltimore that serves over 100 students daily with academic enrichment, health and physical fitness education, as we all as career development. It also serves adults with career services and entrepreneurial development. And they are working with the TV sports channel ESPN to fund the conversion of vacant lots into play spaces for children.
Additionally, the company has organised several ‘all Baltimore’ runs in the past year, in an attempt to bring the running groups of the city together. Leading up to the 2018 Baltimore Running Festival, the company asked local running crews, including RIOT, to design and host runs throughout different parts of the city, with free gear giveaways to attendees. The runs served as a way to show off parts of the city outside the white L that most runners never see, and gave exposure to the growing diversity that exists within the running scene.
While headway is being made, change comes slowly, as is so often the case in Baltimore. But runners such as Clapp and Olufemi hope that in time, the L will lose its edges, and the butterfly wings will fold into themselves.
‘There’s gonna be more people joining, more people picking up as they see more and more black runners,’ says Clapp.
In late September last year, on the first break from what seemed like months of humidity, Clapp showed up with RIOT to lead one of Under Armour’s runs in northern Baltimore. It was a Sunday recovery run that started in Belvedere Square, outside the typical running zones in the L. It drew around 30 people, mostly black. Aside from the group, there were no other runners on the route. But there were 30 where there were none before, being seen and etching new lines on the heatmap.