• Communities in community •
[2½ MIN READ]
At Black Men Run Wednesdays
Five years ago (virtually to the day), Train Dave and I joined Black Men Run Philadelphia as the inaugural Growlers travel team. We attended a 2nd time in 2020 then went on hiatus while we waited for the Growlers Group Run to grow its home team. Last year it was time to send the travel team back out again to join the men and we developed a pattern: Go down the 5th Wednesday of every month that has 5 Wednesdays. Random it might seem, but it got us down to Lloyd Hall 4 times in 2024. Random it might seem, but in April, one of the men said that he noticed it was a 5th Wednesday so he expected to see us (and there we were). Random it might seem, but when I nearly forgot in July, Jim was able to remind me when he mentioned his plan to attend, as regularized.
Across the years, last week’s run became our 9th coambulation. They just keep getting better. The travelers were 4 in number, equal to our largest representation. One of these days, we’ll have some of the men come up and join us Growlers. I’m pretty sure they’ll want to come up just to be with us as the friends we’ve become, but their captain Lawrence was happy to point out they also like a good beer. And now that going out after our weekly group runs has become a thing, well, its hard to do too much better than that.
Read more about how our involvement came to be: Asian Me and Black Men Run.
At Juneteenth
Last year the traveling team joined BMR’s Juneteenth Freedom Run 5/10K for the first time. With the day of celebration now a federal holiday, the travel team fielded 5 of us in 2024. This year we Growlers were able to field 2.
Read more about the traveling team at Juneteenth: Running Juneteenth (2024)
Due to the heat, 2025 required an audible that made it a sole 5K effort. The run featured stops around Philadelphia Black history sites with an address by a Princeton faculty member that Jim and I met in January. (Interesting that our conversation never reached the commonality of us both being in higher education (iCandybyWangC). We stuck to talk about running.) BMR regularly hosts a picnic for which the food was certainly bountiful and tasty this year. The assumption is that it was equally good other years. Tania joined Jim to represent the Growlers, somewhat unintentionally because she was definitely there to represent Elkins Park Beer Runners, but we’re not fussing about details. Thanks to regular-guy Jim for doing event reporting on the details we are fussing about.
-CtCloser (Calvinthe), “Negative split or positive splat” #dothedue
FINE PRINT ¶Text and photos (unless otherwise stated): Calvin Wang (Wäng), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. ¶Cross-posted: (1) Facebook JRC Growlers Group Run (2025’08’06’W Run Message), (2) GGR email list, (3) Cerebruns by CtCloser. ¶This website posting: Cerebrun with added caption.
iCandybyWangC 