Ever since she founded Harlem Run in 2013, Alison Mariella Désir has been building community in the world of running—and uplifting people who are underrepresented in it. She also co-founded the Running Industry Diversity Coalition (RIDC) and wrote the book Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn’t Built for Us.
In August, she led a running retreat exclusively for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in Alaska. This retreat took 12 people of various ethnic backgrounds, 10 of whom were women, to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. The participants’ previous running experience varied, from a D1 collegiate runner to someone who identifies more as a walker than a runner. Together, they ran trails through forests and wildflowers, along shorelines to a river where they watched salmon jumping upstream, and more than 2,200 feet up to the top of a mountain.
On the trails where they ran and hiked, nearly all the other people around were white. “There was no doubt that we were hyper-visible,” Désir said. Sometimes, when a person of color is “the only” in an otherwise white space, they feel…
