3Dash Running Uniting Samarinda One Stride at a Time

Three Lines, One Philosophy, One City

There is a bridge in Samarinda that runners know well. The Mahakam Bridge arches over the wide, slow river that gives East Kalimantan its pulse, and on certain Tuesday nights, the members of 3Dash Running cross it under a sky gone dark and warm, their footsteps echoing off concrete and steel. It is a small ritual inside a larger story, but it says something essential about who this crew is: they run where their city lives, through its landmarks and along its riverbanks, with the kind of quiet intention that does not need announcing. That intentionality is baked into the very name. Three dashes, three lines on a track, center, right, and left. The image is simple and precise. Stay in your lane, but know the others are there. Keep your balance. Keep moving forward. It is a philosophy that Firman and Abu Safaa carried with them when they co-founded 3Dash Running in February 2014, and one that has quietly shaped everything the crew has become in the decade since.

How Two Founders Changed Their Routines

The origin of 3Dash Running is, at its most honest, a story about restlessness. Firman and Abu Safaa were young men in a city that had plenty to offer but not quite the outlet they were looking for. Running felt like an answer, not a destination. It started personally, the way most meaningful things do, two people deciding to move their bodies and clear their heads. But something happened when they kept showing up. Others joined. Conversations started. A group formed around the shared experience of getting out before or after the day's obligations and doing something physical and purposeful together. By February 2014, what had been informal became intentional. 3Dash Running was named, given its philosophy, and pointed in a direction. The founders were not chasing a trend or building a brand. They were building a habit that other people could share, and in Samarinda, a city of real energy and real heat, that turned out to matter more than they expected. The crew's founding hashtags, #BridgeTheGap and #ConnectByRunning, say more than they might appear to. They reflect the idea that the act of running together across distances, literal and figurative, is itself a form of connection.

Samarinda as a Running City

Samarinda is the capital of East Kalimantan, the province on the island of Borneo that sits at the center of some of Indonesia's most dramatic geography. The Mahakam River is the city's spine, wide and muscular, brown with the sediment of the interior. Surrounding the urban sprawl are rainforests that have no equal in the world for density and biodiversity. Running here means navigating a city that feels alive in ways that are hard to describe to someone who has not stood on the Riverside Promenade at first light and watched the river traffic begin to move. The promenade is one of the routes that 3Dash Running has made its own over the years, a path with open water views and the particular atmosphere of a city waking up slowly and honestly. For runners who want something beyond asphalt and exhaust, the trails near the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation offer a very different experience, quiet, leafy, and humbling, a reminder of what exists just beyond the city's edge. 3Dash Running occupies a space between those two worlds, the urban and the wild, and the routes they run reflect the full texture of where they live.

The Weekly Rhythm of the Crew

Three times a week, the members of 3Dash Running gather. Saturday and Sunday mornings begin at six o'clock, when the air in Samarinda is still carrying the night's relative cool and the streets are not yet crowded. Tuesday evenings begin at eight, a different kind of run in a different kind of light, the city electric rather than quiet, the pace of the night giving energy to the effort. All three runs start at the Coffee Shop, a meeting point that functions as more than a logistical convenience. It is where the crew assembles, where the pre-run conversations happen, where the post-run recovery begins with caffeine and company. The combination of early morning weekend runs and a mid-week evening session gives the crew's weekly schedule a natural rhythm, something to count on regardless of what else the week brings. For a crew of around 40 members, that consistency is part of what holds things together. People know when to show up, and they do.

A Community Without Barriers

One of the things that has defined 3Dash Running since its earliest days is the deliberate absence of barriers to participation. There are no membership fees and no complicated sign-up processes. The invitation is straightforward: show up at the Coffee Shop at the right time and run. That openness has shaped the composition of the crew in meaningful ways. Around 40 members now form the core of 3Dash Running, drawn from different parts of Samarinda and different chapters of life. The crew has also extended its reach beyond the city, connecting with running communities in other countries through the #BridgeTheGap spirit that Firman and Abu Safaa built into the crew's DNA from the beginning. Running, in 3Dash Running's view, is a language that translates across borders with no loss of meaning. The act of putting on shoes and covering ground together says something that does not need translating. That belief has driven the crew outward, into relationships with other crews and other communities, and brought those connections back home to Samarinda.

Ten Years Deep at the Edge of Town

By the time a running crew has been active for a decade, certain things become clear. The people who stayed did so because the crew gave them something real. For 3Dash Running, now more than ten years on from its February 2014 founding, that reality is visible in the members who have been there since the early days and in the newer faces who arrived recently and found a home. The crew's tagline, run deep at the edge of town, carries a particular kind of geography in it. Samarinda is not the most prominent city in Indonesia's running scene, but 3Dash Running has made it matter on their own terms, building something durable in a place they know and love, with people who chose to show up again and again. The Mahakam Bridge still anchors some of those Tuesday night routes. The Coffee Shop still anchors the mornings. And somewhere between those two fixed points, across the kilometers that accumulate run by run, 3Dash Running continues to do exactly what Firman and Abu Safaa set out to do in 2014: connect people through the simple, repeatable, generous act of running together.