SOCIAL MOVEMENT
How Ultra Black Running is helping Black women discover the joys of off-road running
DORA ATIM DIDN’T HAVE many followers on TikTok until she posted a short clip of herself doing warm-up drills ahead of a trail race while four white men stared. ‘Take a picture darlin’,’ she wrote. But 900,000 views and 3,000 comments later, she was exhausted from reading other people’s opinions about why they were gawking at her.
‘Not that I’m the only person doing this stuff, but it can be so difficult being among those people that are trying to create change,’ she says. ‘It’s been tiring, but I went from 80 followers to about 2,500, and a lot of them are Black women, so I was like, “Winning!”’
Growing up in west London, Atim, 30, was initially a boxing enthusiast who ran as part of her training. Once she joined running groups, however, the sport took over. She started showing up at the Nike+ Run Club in White City, then the London-based groups Track Mafia and Run Dem Crew. ‘I loved the social aspect of it,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t about getting PBs, though obviously I want to get faster. That isn’t the be all and end all. It became a lifestyle.’
Atim discovered the joys of off-road running when lockdown caused her to move to Hampshire temporarily, but it wasn’t all positive. ‘I was running a lot because there was nothing else to do,’ she says. ‘There weren’t a lot of people who looked like me in that area and I started to feel like I didn’t belong. I’d get stopped. People would ask me what I was doing. There were all these weird interactions.’
So, in June 2020, she launched Ultra Black Running online, to support Black women and gender non-conforming people who wanted to take to the trails. Although Atim gave it that name because she wants to run an ultra, the group is less about the distance and more about the community. There’s no membership fee. You just receive a message telling you where that weekend’s run will be. It’s usually places where Londoners can feel like they’re in the countryside: Richmond Park or Epping Forest, perhaps.
‘When we started meeting regularly, it was the time of Black Lives Matter, this global uprising – everything was just on fire,’ she says. ‘We’d never have been able to have the conversations we were having there with our non-Black friends or at work,
