One of San Antonio’s largest running clubs might have to find a new route after the city recently put a hold on its events in Brackenridge Park.
Founded in 2012 by Bo Brockman and several of his running buddies at the time, the Downtown Run Group has hundreds of members and trains together without a coach, encouraging one another to overcome obstacles and meet individual goals. There is no cost to join.
On Saturday mornings, they start at the Pearl for a long run. Until recently, the group also held weekday runs at Brackenridge Park. Those events were suspended indefinitely after a recent run in the city’s 343-acre park.
“A person who works for Parks and Recreation came over and pretty energetically told us that we couldn’t run there and cited some of these safety concerns,” Brockman said.
DRG has grown from about 12 joggers to between 200 and 300 runners who regularly show up for weekly training runs, due largely to social media. There are more than 1,000 people on an email distribution list, Brockman said.
One of the main goals of the club is to help its members train for the San Antonio Rock’n’Roll Marathon in December. To be ready, they start training runs in the summer — after first sitting for a group portrait.
More than 500 runners filled the Arneson River Theater’s stadium seating on a recent Saturday morning for the photo, with the amphitheater and stage along the San Antonio River Walk reserved for the occasion.
The first training run is four miles long and starts July 27, said Santino Corrales, who has been running with DRG since 2012, when he was getting ready to run his first half-marathon.
That training run was 10 miles, “and I had never run more than four or five miles,” Corrales said. “I got super lost, which happens to a bunch of our first-timers.” But he’s been going back ever since and now manages the group’s Instagram account.
The group is very diverse, members are parents with babies in strollers and men and women in their 70s; and at all running levels, from beginners to people who have qualified for the Boston Marathon, he said. “Everybody’s welcome.”
Brockman described DRG as a group of achievers because they set a goal and don’t quit when the going gets tough. But there are also some runners who “scowl at fellow runners” when warned there’s a car behind them and don’t move to the side, he said, behaviors that were part of why the group was asked to leave Brackenridge. “That puts us all in jeopardy.”
The entire club felt the consequences during a July 11 outing, when a park events coordinator told Brockman they must stop running in the park, despite having done so for about 12 years, he said.
The DRG founder said the bad behavior of some is the problem — not the number of people meeting at the park for group runs.
Before every run, Brockman goes over the safety rules, one of which includes not running into the roadway or obstructing vehicle traffic.
The “overwhelming majority” of club members follow those rules, he added, and a “small handful” act as if the cars should yield to the runners.
“The fundamental problem is not the size that we are,” he added. “The fundamental problem is we have some people who don’t want anybody telling them what to do, about not running in the road.”
After the city put a halt to the runs, Brockman sent an email on July 12 to group members announcing that the club was suspending runs in Brackenridge Park on Tuesdays and Thursdays until further notice.
It was also an “unmistakable message” to the people who aren’t running safely, he said. “If you don’t know what that means, come talk to me … and if you’re just unwilling to run safely, then go find someplace else to run.”
The Saturday runs, which start and end at the Pearl, are still on. Many of the runners take in the Pearl Farmer’s Market afterward.
Brockman called Brackenridge Park a wonderful resource that is well-managed. It provides everything needed to support a group run, including plenty of vehicle parking, water fountains, shade, picnic tables and restrooms.
After the ban, he met with Director of Parks and Recreation Homer Garcia twice to work on a solution and get the group running in the park again. “He’s trying to find a way for us to work through this,” Brockman said. Discussions with the city are ongoing.
An emailed statement from Garcia said that runners are allowed and encouraged to use the city’s parks and trails, but safety is the “number one priority.”
Brockman argued that the entire running group shouldn’t be disallowed because of a few causing problems. He even supports Park Police officers issuing citations, if necessary.
“We have 200 to 300 people three times a week in this weather, getting out and working on fitness and enjoying being with other people who do that same thing,” he said. “We don’t need Charles Barkley coming to town telling us what a fat city we are,” he added, referring to the sports announcer’s 2010 dig at San Antonio.
If the group can’t return to Brackenridge, he said it will end up somewhere else.
But if so, “what a waste of a great city resource,” he said, “when all that’s going on in the park at that time … is people playing on the ball field.”