Afghan Women Runners Are Holding "Underground Runs" in Solidarity With Women Back Home

When Nadira Talayee first started running at the age of 14, it wasn’t on the track at school or in the local park. It was in a secure outside area under the cover of night—the only way a young woman in Kabul, Afghanistan, could safely exercise.

“I had to wake up at 4 a.m., and we couldn’t turn on the lights or play music in the car [on the way to the run] so as not to attract attention,” Talayee tells Outside Run. “But those mornings gave me a chance to see another part of my city and spend time with other girls in similar situations. As Afghan women, we’re strangers in our own cities and our own country.”

A recent graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts, where she was co-president of the running club, Talayee moved to the United States in 2019 to study. Since then, the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan has deteriorated dramatically.

Earlier this month, Talayee led a predawn run in her current home of Portland, Maine, to draw attention to the extreme restrictions placed on women’s rights and basic daily movements—including bans on attending secondary and higher education; travelling without a male chaperone; and even speaking audibly in public—since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan five years ago.

“Women and girls in Afghanistan feel like the world has forgotten them,” says Sana Mahmud, the global programs director of Free to Run, a U.S.-based NGO that works in conflict-affected regions to advance gender equality through running. Its program was the one Talayee participated in as a girl.

“They are slowly dying inside their homes as their world shrinks; it’s illegal for them to play sports, access recreation, or even study,” Mahmud says.

Worldwide Support for Afghan Runners

To highlight the impact of five years of Taliban rule, Free to Run partnered with female Afghan runners like Talayee in 16 cities across eight countries to hold a series of Underground Runs, organized through community-based connections rather than public advertising to reflect the precautions required in Afghanistan. Four runs were also held at secret locations in Afghanistan under strict security measures.

Talayee decided to organize her run at 4:30 a.m. as a way for others to experience a taste of the conditions under which her own running journey began, reaching out to running club leaders she knew in the Portland area to spread the word. Despite what she called a “pre-run panic” that no one would show up so early, two dozen participants joined for a 4-mile, no-drop run.

“When my alarm went off that morning, I was lying in bed making excuses, but I told myself, you need to get up and go show your support for women who don’t have the freedoms that we do,” says Robin D. Henry-Pearl, a bookkeeper and new runner who joined Talayee’s run event. “Hearing Nadira’s story really opened my eyes to what is going on in Afghanistan.”

Other Underground Runs were held this month in cities from Montreal to Dushanbe. Some run leaders invited other Afghan women to share their stories in the pre-run meet-up, ran with Afghan flags, or prepared race bibs for participants with words like “justice,” “equality,” or “resilience” written on them.

“I felt support from a very diverse community. It was a day that we stood together,” says Fatima Painda, a U.K.-based Afghan ultrarunner who organized two 5K Underground Runs, one in London and one in Peterborough, a city in eastern England. The latter run was attended by some young Afghans who had escaped Kabul on August 15, 2021, the day the country’s capital fell to the Taliban, as well as by a former British soldier who had served in Afghanistan.

“There was a lot of emotion in that run,” says Painda, who works as a fitness trainer and last year completed the 175K UTMB Mont-Blanc race as a fundraising ambassador for Free to Run.

Over a Decade of Chasing Freedom

Free to Run was founded in 2014 by ultrarunner and human rights lawyer Stephanie Case, who had been working in Afghanistan. After meeting Afghan women who were curious about her athletic activities, Case began organizing women-only hikes and runs that eventually developed into a more formal running-based leadership program in five provinces of the country.

Between 2014 and 2021, these programs engaged almost 2,000 girls and women, and trained and supported path-breaking Afghan women athletes to run marathons and ultra marathons and compete in triathlons. Free to Run now also has similar programs operating in Iraq and Palestine.

In Afghanistan, however, this original model came to a sudden halt with the Taliban takeover in 2021. “We had to immediately close up shop and even burn any documents that might implicate local women,” Mahmud says. “Women who had worked with us as community development leaders got threats for working in sports and working with an American organization.”

In the immediate aftermath, Free to Run focused on evacuating its staff and some active and at-risk volunteers. It was local girls and young women who reached out to say they were not ready to give up, and wanted some kind of programming to restart.

“Women are not even allowed in public space now; they’ve been locked up inside, and depressive symptoms have increased. Addressing that is the main need right now,” Mahmud says. In response, Free to Run developed a mental health and movement program that can be led largely indoors and virtually by young local women, with the organization supporting internet access for those who don’t have it.

Called Omid (امید) after the Dari word for hope, the clandestine program reached around 500 girls and women last year with weekly strength and mindfulness training sessions. When possible, participants still meet in secret to run or train, but even the virtual meetings are carried out under strict protocols to ensure that word of the program doesn’t spread to others, even family or community members, who might pose a threat.

“The program is only possible because of the resilience and courage of these underground trainers,” says Mahmud. “It’s their form of resistance to continue to move.”

For the Underground Run leaders in the Afghan diaspora, running has likewise been a lifeline.

“I spoke no English when I moved here [to the U.K.], but sports has no language, so through sports I was able to get involved in community events and after-school clubs,” Painda says. Although she had never heard of trail running as a sport before coming to the U.K. with her family as a refugee, it was a natural fit for someone who spent her Afghan childhood in the mountains, traveling an hour by foot to school.

“When I finished UTMB last year, I cried thinking about all the people back home who don’t have this freedom to just lace up their trainers and go,” she says. “Don’t take that freedom for granted; running is a beautiful blessing—it’s medicine itself.”