From death
came life.

Rundalay did not begin with a plan. It began with a man who understood, with total clarity, where his life was headed.

I weighed 315 pounds. I knew what diabetes can do to a family, and I knew, the way you know something you would rather not know, that I was walking toward the same place. Nothing about it was a surprise. That is what makes it so hard to say out loud. The danger was visible, and still it takes something to turn around.

So I decided to turn around. I said I wanted to run again, and I was told I was too heavy to run, that I needed to lose the weight first. If you have ever tried to change your body, you know that sentence. It lands like a closed door. It says you must become someone else before you are allowed to begin.

My best friend refused to accept it. He told that man exactly what he could do with his opinion, and then he turned to me and said, “I’ll run with you.” Then he did something harder: he changed his own habits to match my goals. He did not have to. He chose to stand in the discomfort beside me. Remember that, because everything that follows grows from it. Not a crowd. Not a cause. One person deciding that someone else would not have to start alone.

One Friday morning, a neighbor of his took us to the park where she ran every week. She ran her miles. I ran one block. One. Then I turned back to stretch, and my friend came back with me.

We posted online, inviting anyone who wanted to join us. Nobody came. We ran our first mile anyway, two people and a single mile, and it was enough.

It was a Monday morning. I was told my father had fainted and was in the hospital. By the time I arrived, he was gone.

I did not choose to run. I just ran. I ran out of that hospital and kept going until my body could not carry me another step, and then I fell to the ground and cried. It was the kind of crying that comes when nothing is left to hold you up.

Diabetes took my father, and it is preventable. Hold onto that word, because it is the reason for everything that followed. Preventable. A loss that did not have to happen, a road that could have been left behind. Somewhere, right now, someone is standing at the start of that same road, and no one has told them they are allowed to turn around.

Eventually, I found the courage to pull myself together and walk back into the hospital.

The following Monday, I ran. My father had died in the morning, so I would run for life at night. I could not give him his life back. But I could refuse to let his death be the end of the story.

My friend Anthony posted about the run, and four people showed up to stand with me. Four. From that night on, we gave Monday a name: Monday Rundalay.

There was no strategy, no budget and no plan. Four became a crowd, and the crowd kept coming back. Each person brought a reason of their own, and somehow there was room for every one of them.

When more than a hundred runners were showing up every Monday, we made it official. We became a 501(c)(3) non-profit and began collecting items and partnering with local charities. At that time, I knew of no run club or run crew in Los Angeles managing a hundred runners on a weekly basis. We believe we were among the first, and that the way we built it became a blueprint many groups follow today.

At our height, more than 350 people ran with us every Monday night. Think about what that means. Hundreds of people, every week, choosing to spend their night moving through downtown Los Angeles together, and carrying with them blankets, toys, hygiene kits, clothes and school supplies for people they would never meet. Every December, Toys for Tots. Every year, the Luau Run and Think Pink. Month after month, a different cause, because need does not take a month off.

Then came COVID, and our numbers fell, as they did everywhere. But the space we built is still here, still open, still waiting for the next person who needs somewhere to begin.

And from that change came a community, in the place where people needed it most.

That is the thing I most want you to understand. I did not set out to build anything. I set out to save my own life. One person’s need to change reached a friend, then four strangers, then hundreds, then charities, then shelters and families across a city. If one person’s need to change can do that, imagine what yours can do.

Rundalay began with one man trying to save his own life. It became a family.

We run for family.