Lance Woods and Joe Robinson founded the We Run 313 run club in Detroit with a clear mission: connect runners--especially Black runners--with one another; run together; build a community. Since the club's very first two-mile run in May of 2019, they've done all that and more--as captured in the stories, reflections, and race recaps on the pages of We Run 313: The Pulse of Detroit's Run Club. Cowriting with Lynzee Mychael Slappey, Woods and Robinson collect essays and thoughts from more than 40 club members and runners and place them alongside full-color photographs. The careful curation captures the joy, love, and camaraderie that We Run 313 has cultivated: "This isn't just a book about running. It's about what keeps us alive.... It's about Detroit. And it's about us."
Running is an inherently solo sport; no one can run for someone else. But when running as an activity is held collectively, as in We Run 313, it becomes something communal, greater than the sum of its parts. The stories here--of runners who have found themselves on the streets of Detroit, of couples who have found each other at group runs, of individuals who have found community--speak to this transformative power of running as both a physical and mental pursuit. We Run 313, like the club it represents, is "joyful, rhythmic, loud, Black, and proud," a beautiful rendering of the power of possibility and solidarity in the running world and far beyond. --Kerry McHugh, Textus Collective