One man’s mission to make running a sport for all

On a recent Sunday morning jog through Prospect Park, Martinus Evans was received like a victorious champion. Every few minutes, a passing runner would smile and nod to him as they rushed past to congratulate him.

But the runners didn’t applaud winning races. You could even say they celebrated him for his record of finishing last.

Mr. Evans is the founder of Slow AF Run Club, a virtual community for back-of-the-packers with over 10,000 members worldwide. Weighing in at 300 pounds, he’s a beloved figure among runners who feel left out of the sport. He graced the cover of Runner’s World, posed nude for Men’s Health and appeared in an Adidas ad. His Instagram account, @300poundsandrunning, has about 62,000 followers. And this month he’s releasing his first book, “Slow AF Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run.”

The idea for the club came about at about mile 16 of the 2018 New York City Marathon, just after the grueling Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan. Mr. Evans was cruising when he saw a man gesticulating from the sidelines. He pulled out his AirPods.

“You’re slow, buddy,” the man yelled, adding an expletive to indicate how slow. “Go home.” Mr. Evans tried to ignore him and turned his attention back to the course, which he eventually completed in just over eight hours, or six hours behind the winner. But as the bystander repeated his taunt, Mr. Evans got angrier – and then inspired.

The next time Mr. Evans, now 36, raced, he wore a shirt with the man’s expression, SLOW AF, and a cartoon of a smiling turtle on it. When he shared photos of his new racing uniform on Instagram, followers asked for their own shirts. At the beginning of 2019, Slow AF Run Club was born.

Mr. Evans, who lives in Brooklyn and is now a certified running coach, is helping lead a global movement to make the sport feel safe and welcoming to anyone who wants to run, no matter their size, pace, fitness level or skin color. He said his driving message is simple. “I want everyone to know they can run in the body they have now.”

“Mr. Evans, you are fat.”

Growing up on Detroit’s east side, the son of two auto factory workers, Mr. Evans, who is black, knew no one who ran away for fun. Most people he knew viewed recreational running as a white person’s activity.

As a boy he was mocked for his height – he was known in the neighborhood as “Marty the fat kid,” he said. When he tried out for a youth soccer team, the coach forced him to carry a garbage bag on the field to “sweat the grease out,” he said. He didn’t lose weight; he was just ashamed.

But after making his high school football team, he began to gain confidence in his physical abilities. He attended Lane College in Tennessee on a football scholarship before transferring to Central Michigan University, where he majored in exercise science. “I was like, maybe I’ll finally learn how to work out and lose this weight,” he said. “And then I can finally be accepted.”

In 2012, Mr. Evans and his then-girlfriend (now wife) moved to Connecticut where she had attended graduate school. He took a job selling suits at Men’s Wearhouse while figuring out his next move. The job, which involved dressing men of all ages and body types, would be an unlikely path to becoming a fitness influencer.

After months of wearing stiff dress shoes on the storeroom floor, he began to feel pain in his hip. The pain brought him to an orthopedic surgeon, who, he writes in his book, looked at him once and said to him: “Mr. Evans, you’re fat. You have two options: lose weight or die.”

Mr. Evans recalled holding back his tears as he defiantly told the doctor “with a half-tight smile” “I’m going to run a marathon.” He said the doctor laughed and told him that running a marathon would do the same kill him.

He left the appointment angry and still in pain (another doctor later diagnosed hip bursitis) and drove straight to a running store to buy a pair of athletic shoes, determined to prove the doctor wrong. For extra motivation, Mr. Evans started a blog he called 300 Pounds and Running where he began charting both his running progress and his weight loss. After a few months, he was surprised to find strangers reading and cheering him on.

He found himself enjoying the run, despite the passers-by occasionally insulting him. More than once Mr. Evans that he was also stopped and questioned by police while jogging. When he felt defeated, he glanced at a tattoo on his right wrist that read “No Struggle, No Progress.”

Finally he ran a 5K, then a half marathon. Finally, in the fall of 2013, Mr. Evans flew home to run the Detroit Free Press Marathon and fulfill his vow in the doctor’s office. When he crossed the finish line, he cried.

He has since earned a master’s degree in public health research and another in digital media and design. He said running gives him a sense of self-determination, confidence and purpose. And while it initially helped him lose about 90 pounds, dropping him below 300 for a while, he realized that running to lose weight took away that satisfaction. “I wasn’t 90 pounds happier,” he said. He decided to stop counting calories and just run for fun.

He remembered that what made him a successful salesperson at Men’s Wearhouse was his ability to help customers feel good about who they were. He suspected other runners might benefit from focusing on the fun of the sport over weight loss. On his blog, he leaned into his persona as a 300-pound runner.

“No struggle, no progress.”

Historically, the sport of running has made many large-bodied people feel like they have to lose weight to fit in — to be considered true runners, said Samantha White, an assistant professor of sports studies at Manhattanville College. By “empowering runners who are not focused on time, but rather on community,” she said, Mr. Evans a space “where recreational runners, especially black recreational runners, can find a place.”

As such, Slow AF Run Club’s first rule, which mainly exists in an app of the same name, is that members are not allowed to talk about their weight or weight loss.

“It’s a judgment-free zone,” says Jetaun Pope, 42, a Chicago high school algebra teacher who is a longtime member and moderates the club’s online discussions. “It feels good to feel like you’re not alone,” she said. “The more you see people in all bodies” being active, the more “it encourages you to take the first step.”

Joining the Slow AF app is free; Mr. Evans makes a living through coaching sessions, merchandise sales and brand partnerships. He’s also trying to convince race directors to keep water stations and finish lines intact for back-of-the-pack runners, and athletic apparel brands to include a wider range of sizes.

When advising runners, Mr. Evans advises that before they even put on shoes, they should focus on retraining their brains to adopt the mindset they can run, despite what a thin-obsessed, speed-oriented culture might say. In his book, he encourages them to neutralize their inner critic by naming it – his name is Otis, whom he imagines as an “ignorant, drunk uncle.” Finally, he tells runners to move forward as they can, even if it requires what he calls “delusional self-delusion.”

On a practical level, he recommends people run 70 to 80 percent of the time at what he calls “sexy pace” — “the pace you’d go if you were running on a beach in slow motion,” Baywatch-style — or whatever. most other coaches call a conversational speed. For starters, he suggests running for 15 seconds and then walking for 90 seconds. Then, over the course of about twelve weeks, progress to five minutes of running and one minute of walking.

“Starting gradually is great,” says Anne Brady, an exercise science professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. “It’s all about consistency. So you have to start with something that you can sustain in a short time.” She also recommended that taller people carefully choose supportive, comfortable footwear to reduce impact on their joints.

More than a decade after he started running, with eight marathons to his credit, Mr. Evans still weighs 300 pounds. He’s healthy by all the usual standards, though he doesn’t measure his well-being — or success as a runner — in numbers. He simply runs to keep running, for himself and for others. The longer he shows up and runs slow AF, he said, the easier it becomes for other runners to do the same.

Danielle Friedman is a New York City journalist and author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.”