Black Girls Run! brings together ‘sole sisters’ – Newsday

When Andree Johnson hit mile 22 of the 2019 New York City Marathon in November, she suddenly sprouted more legs, like a spider.

Two legs on her left. Two more legs on her right. Legs behind her. She was surrounded by them.

The legs belonged to runners from a Long Island group called Black Girls Run!, and they’d joined Johnson to run the last four miles with the 69-year-old lawyer from Old Westbury who was attempting a marathon for the first time. The women, who weren’t competing themselves, had already cheered on Johnson from the sidelines at several mile markers, and then waited for her at mile 22 even though it took Johnson seven hours to run the course, even though the last four miles they all ran in the dark. “They were there to support me and make sure that I finished,” Johnson says. “I wouldn’t do this without them.”

Tamra Walker, a 39-year-old lawyer from Valley Stream, even went on Facebook Live using her smartphone while they were running so other group members could watch and cheer Johnson from afar. Because one member’s victory is every member’s victory. “Watching her cross the finish line, it was like we all crossed together,” Walker says.

THEY’RE ‘SOLE SISTERS’

Black Girls Run is a nationwide, grassroots organization founded in 2009 by college friends Toni Carey and Ashley Hicks. It began as a blog, its first meetups were in Atlanta, and the group now has 75 groups in 33 states. Long Island has 80 to 100 active members, and its Facebook group has close to 2,000 followers. 

“The group started because of the harrowing statistics regarding black women and their health,” says Jennean Rogers, 49, a lawyer from Lynbrook and the co-ambassador who coordinates the Nassau contingent of Black Girls Run Long Island. Black women have higher rates of undetected diseases, illness and chronic conditions, as well as shorter life expectancy, than other groups, according to the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Research on Women’s Health. And African-American women have the highest rates of being overweight or obese compared with other groups in the United States, according to the national Black Girls Run website. The group aims to lower the number of women with chronic diseases associated with an unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle.

Active members meet in smaller gatherings nearly every day to run at 6 a.m. in area parks or in the evenings at Long Island high school tracks, all year round. On Saturdays, members from both counties come together to run.

“The mission of the organization was to make sure that black women, because we have so many illnesses, so may diseases, the idea was for us to move, to keep moving,” Johnson says. “Some people can run, they can run fast. They are self-starters.

“I need the group because sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think, ‘Do I have to keep doing this?’ And then I remember that they are waiting for me and I get up and go. Without knowing they were waiting for me, I probably would stay in bed.”

Black Girls Run Long Island members refer to each other as “sole sisters” — to incorporate soul sisters and their running shoes. “It’s a play on words. I don’t know who started it, but it’s great,” says member Tonja McClain, 50, a construction project manager from Central Islip.

GOALS BIG AND SMALL

The women all have different abilities and goals. Some members start out just walking, Rogers says, and that’s fine.

“We really just want to encourage people to get off the couch,” she says. For women who want to do more, the group encourages new runners to first run a 5k (about three miles), then a 10k, then 15k, a half marathon and later a full marathon. Some active members, like McClain, earned run coach certifications so they could help others train for events.

“They said, ‘Give yourself a goal so you’re working toward something,’” says member Shirel Johnson, 50, of Elmont, a retired NYPD transit police officer and Nassau co-ambassador. “When you have your mind set on a goal, you will be consistent with it.”

Some group members are striving to complete a 50-state challenge, running 50 half marathons in every state. A group of women tackled, for instance, the Bear Lake Trifecta, which included three half marathons in three days in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.

Brigid Turner, an actress and dance teacher from Valley Stream, has been working on the 50-state challenge for more than three years. “I am up to state 23,” she says. “You get to see places you’ve never been before or never would have thought to get to.”

Other women are traveling together to other states — and even other countries — to do run full marathons. Five women went to Chicago for that city’s marathon, Walker says. She is now training for the Paris Marathon in April. 

GROUP PRIDE

Whenever they run, they wear their Black Girls Run logo, and that draws the attention of other women of color. One recent Saturday, during a Nassau/Suffolk morning run at Massapequa Preserve, about 20 women were dressed in black and pink Black Girls Run sweatshirts, leggings, hats and visors as they stretched together before taking off down the trail.

The clothing is how Walker discovered the group. She’d taken up running alone to try to lose baby weight after having her second child in 2014. She ran the Divas 5k race in East Meadow’s Eisenhower Park that year and saw a group of women in Black Girls Run accessories. “Everyone looked so happy and friendly,” she says. “I wanted to wear that shirt. I wanted to be part of the crew.”

Cigale Brown, 39, of Copiague, a Verizon network operations manager, discovered the group when a co-worker told her about the Facebook page. “I would just basically stalk the page,” she says. Then one day she saw a post that the group needed one more person to compete on a team for Long Island’s Ocean to Sound Relay. She decided to tentatively volunteer, not thinking she was fast enough to be a team member for the 50-mile course from Jones Beach to Oyster Bay. She’d always been a sprint runner, and her leg of the relay would be just under six miles, the longest she’d ever run.

“It was like a cult, they all jumped on me,” Brown jokes. “After my leg [of the relay], which went great according to them, I remember saying, ‘I can’t feel my uterus. I really think you guys tried to kill me.’”

But after that experience, Brown was all in, joining the women to train for a marathon. “I was gung-ho, like this is the coolest thing ever,” she says. This year Brown is training for the New York City Marathon, and then will run the Athens Marathon in Greece, also in November, along with five other women from Black Girls Run Long Island. She’s also considering running the BMW Berlin Marathon.

Brown says when she runs a marathon, she puts lipstick on, paints her fingernails with scenes of the marathon logo, a New York City skyline and the Jamaican flag, pulls her hair into a “long ponytail like Flo-Jo” (Florence Griffith Joyner, the Olympian considered to be the fastest female runner of all time) and coordinates her sneakers to match her running clothes. “My hashtag is ‘she can’t beat me or my outfit,’” Brown says.

COME ONE, COME ALL

Women of all sizes and experience levels are encouraged to join, says Sharon Hoskins, 49, an attorney from Freeport. “A lot of black women tend to be overweight. When you see others who are above the average weight, it’s a motivation to say, ‘Well, if they can do that, I can do that, too.’ I always say I run because I like to eat.”

Says Walker: “I was told by Sharon Hoskins, ‘If you’re out here and you lace up your sneakers and you’re on the pavement, you’re a runner.’”

The health benefits can be great, says Tammy Mays, 55, of Dix Hills, a labor relations specialist and Black Girls Run ambassador for Suffolk County. She says her cholesterol level has dropped since she started running. “Both my parents passed away young. Neither made it to 50,” she says.

Mays wants to be sure to be there for her future grandchildren, she says.

In addition to the health boost, what keeps members coming back is the support and camaraderie, Hoskins says. The group encourages women to do what they never thought they could do. “Every little goal is celebrated,” she says. “It could be, ‘Hey, I just ran around the track without stopping.’ If it is big to you, it is big to us.”

By Beth Whitehouse beth.whitehouse@newsday.com @BethWhitehouse1

Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.