Students Run Philly Style (SRPS) is a free, nonprofit mentoring program that engages young people in distance running. For nine months each year, our student runners sign up to train side-by-side with their volunteer mentors to complete distance races up to and including a full marathon.
On race day, when our school buses pull up and hundreds of teenagers from all over Philadelphia clad in blue and green shirts spill out, it’s hard to miss that Students Run Philly Style has arrived. But when our students—who are mostly Black and Brown youth—spill out of those buses into a sea of hundreds or thousands of runners, it’s hard not to miss that the majority of people there don’t look like them.
We are constantly toeing the line between trying to build the world we want our young people to grow into while simultaneously equipping them to operate in the world that exists. We want them to walk with courage into races and running spaces as runners, having put in the training for any miles ahead. We also respect our students enough to prepare them for environments that weren’t built with them in mind. PDR affords our students an opportunity to walk off the bus to the start line of a race that was built with them in mind.
