How the modern NYC running scene got its stripes
Jessie Zapo has been an integral part of 21st century running culture, pushing the concept of community forward again and again.
Having been one of the very earliest protagonists of urban running crew culture in New York to creating one of the first women-only spaces in running, Jessie Zapo has been an essential part of 21st century running culture.
Back in the early 2000s, Jessie was deep in NYC’s “robust nightlife.” She was juggling grad school with bartending, and liked to go clubbing after her shift. New York was filled with creatives of all kinds, and she frequently saw Bridgerunners founder Mike Saes around town, in her bar, at the nightclubs and, in pre-social-media times, he personally invited her to run with him each time. The story goes that she said no for six months. When Jessie finally went, it was just her and three others, but it was great.
“It really opened my eyes. We ran four miles, and that was further than I’d ever ran before. And they were all so nice to me, which sounds weird because New Yorkers are just not that nice. I felt really welcome and I never stopped going.”
Jessie waxes lyrical about the rag-tag bunch of non-runners that ran across New York’s bridges together every Wednesday. She talks about running with people from disparate communities who never would’ve crossed paths otherwise. It was the perfect confluence of shared activity blended with curiosity. These atypical runners did not come from D1 college athletics programmes, or from the traditional clubs. It was a fresh, exciting, and young injection of street culture to a sport that was viewed as staid, if not stale.
“The whole point of Bridgerunners was to say, ‘Hey, you can be a runner if you want to. Just show up. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever ran before. We’ll take you on this journey, and you’ll see for yourself.’”
It was a running group modeled on their leader: a graffiti artist who hung out in nightclubs. While their operations and personnel seemed very unconventional in the running world – often pointedly so with so many of its members used to railing against the establishment – that journey did eventually “develop more of the cultural norms of the sport.” As they ran week after week, they all saw improvements in themselves, so wanted to “get better, whatever that means.” They started signing up for races, and wearing more conventional running attire, and adhering to training plans.
It was at a race that one of the most enduring parts of Jessie Zapo’s legacy was formulated. By 2011, she was the reliable, organized right hand to Saes’s lovably free-spirited leadership. After Run Dem Crew’s Charlie Dark flew from London to NYC to connect with the other runners he identified with, they all met again at a half-marathon in San Francisco that Jessie had been training a few women for.
Here they were, two pioneering run clubs connected again on neutral ground, and they wanted more of that. When Jessie hear Charlie’s plans to take a big group to run the Berlin half-marathon in a few months, Jessie sprang to action, getting a dozen others to sign up. They would meet up. They would call it Bridge The Gap.
Back in 2011, Facebook was the communication platform, so they set about searching for other like-minded run clubs, and they found them. Paris Run Club. NBRO from Copenhagen. Patta from Amsterdam. And the Berlin Braves, of course. Jessie and Charlie connected all the dots, and they all agreed to meet up before the race. The enduring success of Bridge The Gap came from that nightclub culture that helped form Bridgerunners.
“We all had matching jackets, and I remember landing in Berlin and everyone was asking us, ‘Are you guys musicians?’ We were like, ‘No, we’re runners.’”
But they took that prompt and ran with it. The New Yorkers threw their bags in their rented accommodation, and hit Berlin’s nightclubs with all their new friends straight away.
“The energy was so electric. People were immediately drawn to each other because we were all doing this thing simultaneously in our ways, in our own cities, with our own cultures, and our own languages. There was nothing like it. It made such a huge impact that there was immediately a Bridge The Gap London within months, and then a BTG Amsterdam.”
It was the start of an historic way for run clubs to connect all around the world. Parkdale Road Runners just celebrated their 15th anniversary, and Jessie was there to Bridge The Gap. There are other second generation crews from Japan, Korea, Los Angeles, all sharing their unique cultures, validating one another’s value systems, bridging the gap.
It’s like indigenous tribe leaders meeting. It’s cultural preservation and community-building. It’s knowledge-sharing and advocacy. It’s relationship-strengthening so that future challenges can be shared. It’s another beautiful level of community.
It wasn’t always like that, of course. Jessie’s introduction to running was both typical, and not. She ran track from age 12 and “was built for sprinting,” but went jogging alone between seasons to get out of the house she shared with five brothers and two sisters – all younger – and clear her head. The idea of a one-mile jog for mental health wasn’t as normalized as it is today, but as a way to blow off steam, it made sense to her. Despite this consistent training regime from a young age, she didn’t think of herself as a runner.
“I didn’t think I was good enough to run cross-country or distance because a mile felt really hard to me. I saw my friends running a five-minute mile so I thought I wasn’t good at it, so instead I’ll just jog. I was a jogger.”
Jessie moved to New York when she went all in on a Fine Arts degree (“I’ve always just done what I wanted to do… which is a theme.”), and while she still didn’t consider herself a runner, she kept jogging alone, with the three-mile loop around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park a significant milestone for her. During that degree, she got involved with the Prison Creative Arts Project where she, at aged 19, was working with teenagers and then adults to show them the power of art as both “a therapeutic tool, but also as a means of expression for what [they] were going through.”
An unpleasant by-product of that important work is secondary trauma as a caregiver AKA vicarious trauma or compassion fatigue. Just like those one-mile jogs to get out of the ten-person household she grew up in, running was the outlet that helped Jessie balance her work.
We talk about being of the generation that grew up before (or without) therapy, and how the generations after us are so lucky to have grown up with a huge increase in mental health professionals, even becoming involved from the school level. Things like going for a run to clear one’s head are seen as normal now – encouraged, even – and people know when to self-administer such solutions. It’s a good thing.
A similar trajectory has been seen in female coaches in the same time. Just as Jessie used her passions of arts and helping people to build a practice in art therapy, she also saw a need for improved experiences for women in running. She’d run a couple of marathons with no formal training, and we know she was coaching a group of women for that race back in 2011. That all led to conversations with Saes about forming a separate branch of Bridgerunners, but he instead encouraged her to go and create her own thing. She was ready.
The first attempt to get people to commit to a training schedule was by forming Black Roses with Knox Robinson, but it wasn’t that perfect bowl of porridge. She wanted her project to be fully open to newcomers, and the Black Roses training made people become really good, which made them competitive. Too competitive for some.
“There was no entry point beyond people who felt they were already really good at running and wanted to train harder. I wanted a place for brand new people to show up and learn how to train. One that feels safe and approachable.”
Enter Girls Run NYC, which has now been going for eleven years, and is as “popular as ever. People keep coming!”
“I really could not count on two hands the women coaches or women groups in the urban running community I was in back then. I just wanted to create a space where women could come together.”
That space was immediately so in demand that Jessie was pressed to make it legitimate. She got her coaching certification, and decided on making Girls Run NYC a track workout, because it could easily accommodate eight different experience levels.
It’s been almost 60 years since Kathrine Switzer became the first officially registered woman to run the Boston Marathon, and we’re now seeing equal representation at races, with the gender split of entrants to the London Marathon almost 50/50, but there’s still not real equity. Violence against women is still as high as ever, and an Adidas survey found that over 90% of women feel unsafe while running. There’s an argument that spaces like those provided by Girls Run and Hot Boys Athletics, the women-only London-based branch of Black Roses, are still necessary, but it’s not the goal.
“Adidas Runners women captains came together to figure it out and we came up [with the idea] that it’s not a women’s issue, it’s a human issue. I don’t think gender-specific spaces are the answer, but they’re a piece. The next pieces are allyship, and there have to be co-ed spaces. In order for real change to happen, we have to have non-women allies in this fight.”
Jessie shares the importance of how supportive the Bridgerunners community has been, from that first run, to the encouragement to create a running space that’s true to her visions, to celebrating what she’s created on Girls Run’s tenth anniversary run last year.
“There are some women who will never go to a co-ed group, and will stay in that [women-only] space, but also so many of the women love having Girls Run as their touchpoint, but run with all these other groups. In many ways, we’re giving women the confidence to start this journey of running and helping guide them to spaces that are safe and supportive.”
As ever, Jessie’s career is metamorphosing dependent on what feels the most right to her. Right now, Jessie is currently 52 days into logging 100 days of training for a 100-mile race, publicly highlighting the rigors of the training. In a fascinating life that seems equally dedicated to both personal and community fulfillment, it’s another new chapter that harks back to her past, and one she’s determined to embrace correctly.
“I knew I never wanted to stop running – that I want it to be something that I always have. When I had that realization, it made me have to think sustainably. I had a couple of years where I trained really hard to go after personal bests and then I was like I need to do this in a way where I don’t lose running by burning out or overdoing it or getting injured.”
Jessie talks about enjoying the adventure of running 20 miles and ending up somewhere completely different. The trails remind her of hiking as a kid, and that meandering curiosity has never diminished in her.
Indeed, those two decades on the frontlines of the New York City running space saw Jessie Zapo use her creativity and determination to help light the touchpaper of these running booms, then pour fuel on the fire of the entire genesis of modern running with her direct community-oriented action. With the adjusted, gentler outlook that she’s embracing today, Jessie is ensuring that she will continue to build on her rich legacy.
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Raz x