BiKoşu Adana Running Long Because Life Is Too Short

A Road Trip, a Big Idea, and a City Ready to Run

It started on a moving car somewhere between Adana and a race start line. Four friends, already deep into the world of running, were doing what runners do on long drives: talking about running. Distances covered, races ahead, the communities they had encountered elsewhere in Turkey, and the quiet thought that their own city deserved something like this. That conversation in 2015 planted the seed. It took another year of planning, organising, and opening the idea up to whoever in Adana shared their passion before BiKoşu Adana officially launched in July 2016. The founding was deliberate, not rushed. The four founders wanted to get the culture right before they got the numbers right, and that patience shows in everything the crew has built since. Adana sits in the Çukurova plain, pressed against the Taurus Mountains to the north and the Mediterranean coast to the south. It is Turkey's fourth largest city, a place defined by scorching summers, a fierce local pride, and a character that resists easy description. For BiKoşu Adana, the geography is not just a backdrop. It is the entire point. Those mountains are visible from the city on clear days, and for most of the crew's members, they are the primary destination. The crew calls the mountains their home, and they mean it literally. Month after month, the group travels to mountain races across Turkey, treating the competition calendar as a collective adventure rather than a series of individual athletic events.

Ultra Runners Who Happen to Live in a City

Around 45 people run with BiKoşu Adana today, and the majority of them are ultra trail runners. That detail shapes everything about the crew's identity. Ultra running is a discipline that demands patience, self-knowledge, and an ability to suffer productively over very long distances. It also tends to attract people who are serious about the craft without being precious about it, people who will share a gel at kilometre seventy and laugh about the state of their feet at the finish. That spirit pervades BiKoşu Adana's weekly rhythm and its wider culture. Training here is purposeful. Improvement is a shared goal, not a private one. Members push each other, track each other's progress, and show up when someone is struggling through a hard block of preparation. The crew's Strava club reflects this training seriousness, a feed full of elevation gain, long efforts, and the kind of weekly mileage that tells you these are people who run to go somewhere, not just to fill an hour. But the commitment never tips into exclusivity. The founders built the crew to be open to everyone who loves running with genuine passion, and that remains the only real entry requirement. You do not need a race result to join. You need to care about the act of running and the people doing it alongside you.

Behaving Professionally Without the Machinery

One of the things BiKoşu Adana says about itself, quietly and with some pride, is that it has no interest in becoming a professional team with sponsorships and polished branding. And yet the crew behaves professionally. There is a meaningful difference between those two things. Professional behaviour, in this context, means showing up consistently, organising runs that people can rely on, attending races as a collective, communicating clearly, and holding the group's standards without needing a corporate structure to enforce them. It means taking training seriously while keeping the atmosphere human. Founder and captain Dilem Koçak has been central to shaping this balance since the beginning, carrying both the founding vision and the day-to-day responsibility of keeping the crew coherent. The crew that emerged from that 2015 road trip conversation is, in many respects, a direct expression of how those four founders wanted to run: with intention, with community, and without the noise that often comes with growth.

Three Weekly Runs and the Mountains Beyond

The week for BiKoşu Adana members has a reliable structure. On Tuesday evenings, the crew meets at the Turgut Özal Migros at 19:30, a central and familiar landmark that makes the logistics easy and the gathering social. Thursday evenings follow the same format, with a meetup at Galleria Migros at 19:30, giving members who missed Tuesday a second opportunity to run in company through the city. These two evening sessions keep the crew connected during the working week, offering a rhythm that fits around jobs and families while still making running a consistent, shared part of daily life. Saturday mornings shift the mood entirely. The 07:00 start at Yaşar Kemal Parkur is the longest and most social run of the city week, held early enough to beat Adana's intense summer heat and late enough to feel like a proper weekend ritual. Yaşar Kemal Parkur itself carries some weight in this context. Named after one of Turkey's most celebrated authors, a writer born in the Çukurova plain and deeply identified with this region, the park is a fitting anchor for a crew with strong local roots. Running through a space connected to that kind of literary and cultural history is one of those small things that makes a local run feel grounded in something larger than the kilometres.

Monthly Mountain Races as a Collective Commitment

Beyond the city calendar, BiKoşu Adana's real heartbeat is found in the mountains. The crew travels to trail and ultra races across Turkey on a monthly basis, not as a handful of individuals who happen to share a group chat, but as a genuine collective. Members prepare together, travel together, and race with an awareness of each other's goals. The Taurus Mountains, which form the dramatic northern edge of Adana's landscape, are a natural training ground for a crew built around trail running, offering the kind of terrain that cannot be replicated on city streets. This monthly race commitment gives BiKoşu Adana a coherence that purely urban crews sometimes lack. There is a shared object of desire, a specific kind of difficulty that everyone in the group understands and has chosen. That shared language binds people together. It also gives the crew its distinctive reach. Despite being rooted in one southern Turkish city, BiKoşu Adana is known across the country. The race circuit means the crew's members are visible in the trail and ultra community nationwide, and the crew's reputation has grown accordingly.

Be Local, Think Global

The motto BiKoşu Adana has adopted, "Be local, think global," is not a marketing line. It is a fairly precise description of how the crew operates. The local part is taken seriously: this is a crew of and for Adana, shaped by the city's geography, climate, and character. The members are not trying to replicate something they saw in Istanbul or abroad. They are building something that belongs here, on these roads and in these mountains. The global part reflects an outward curiosity, a willingness to engage with the wider world of running, to race far from home, to draw inspiration from the broader ultra and trail community while remaining anchored to their own place. There is something in the crew's founding motto that also captures its philosophy toward time. Life is too short, the founders say, which is why they run long distances. It is a knowing inversion, the idea that the best response to a limited number of years is to spend some of those years covering extraordinary distances on foot through difficult terrain. It is not a sad observation. It reads more like a declaration of priorities. And for around 45 runners in the south of Turkey who gather three times a week in their city and once a month in the mountains, it seems to be working exactly as intended.