Jukueja Runners Carrying Local Wisdom Through the Streets of Makassar

Where Local Wisdom Meets the Open Road

There is a phrase embedded in the name itself. Jukueja, drawn from the local tongue of South Sulawesi, carries a warmth that no direct translation can fully capture. It is a greeting, a gesture, an invitation. When founders Krismas and Tri Dini chose that name for their running community back in January 2012, they were making a statement before anyone had even tied a shoelace. Running in Makassar would not simply be a matter of kilometres logged or personal bests chased. It would be an act of belonging, a way of moving through the city with an awareness of where you come from and who is running beside you. That founding instinct, rooted in local identity, has never left the crew. More than a decade later, it still shapes the way Jukueja Runners gathers, runs, and welcomes newcomers. The crew's name is not decorative. It is a philosophy worn on the chest at every run. Makassar is a city of energy and contradiction. It is the largest city in eastern Indonesia, a port city with centuries of maritime history, a place where the Bugis, Makassarese, Torajan, and dozens of other cultures have long shared the same streets and waterways. The city moves fast, and it moves loud. Running through it requires a certain attentiveness, a willingness to be present in the crowd rather than apart from it. Jukueja Runners understood this from the beginning. The crew was not built to escape the city but to inhabit it more fully, to notice its landmarks, its open fields, its morning light. That orientation toward place, toward the specific textures of Makassar, gives the crew a character that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. You cannot simply lift Jukueja Runners and set it down in another city. It belongs here, in the humid evening air rolling off the Makassar Strait, on the ground beneath Sulawesi's wide skies.

A Crew Built on Openness

From its earliest days, Jukueja Runners declared itself open to all. Those three words carry real weight in a running culture that can sometimes feel segmented by pace, experience, or social background. For Krismas, Tri Dini, and crew captain Khaidir, the invitation was always unconditional. You did not need a race bib, a GPS watch, or a particular weekly mileage to belong here. You needed only the willingness to show up. That simplicity of entry has been one of the crew's most enduring strengths. It meant that Jukueja Runners grew not by recruiting serious athletes but by becoming a genuine community resource, a place where people from all corners of Makassar could find a reason to move, a group to move with, and a rhythm that fit their lives. The result, more than a decade on, is a crew of around 170 members, a number that speaks to the sustained trust the founders built over years of consistent, welcoming runs. The openness is not just rhetorical. It shows up in the schedule, which offers three distinct run sessions across the week, each at a time that acknowledges the different rhythms of a working city. There is a morning session for those who prefer to run before the day takes hold, and two evening sessions for those who need the workday behind them before they can breathe freely. No single type of runner is prioritised. The schedule is designed to meet people where they are, not to demand that they rearrange their lives around a single sacred time slot. That practical generosity is a hallmark of how Jukueja Runners thinks about community, not as an aspiration but as a lived arrangement.

Three Sessions, Three Rhythms, One Community

Monday mornings begin at Monumen Mandala. The monument itself is one of Makassar's most recognisable landmarks, a towering structure commemorating the struggle for the reintegration of West Irian into Indonesia. To gather at its base at six in the morning is to start the week in the shadow of something significant, something that reminds you, even wordlessly, that this city has carried heavy things and kept moving. The early hour means the streets are still relatively quiet, the air marginally cooler than it will be in an hour's time, and the light is soft in the way that only early morning light can be. It is a particular kind of start: deliberate, grounded, a little contemplative. Come Wednesday and Thursday, the crew shifts to Lapangan Hasanuddin for the seven o'clock evening sessions. Lapangan Hasanuddin is a public square, the kind of open urban space that becomes a social commons after dark in Indonesian cities. By the time Jukueja Runners assembles there in the evenings, the heat of the day has softened, vendors may be setting up nearby, and the square hums with the low-level activity of a city unwinding. Running through and around that environment is a different experience from a morning session at a monument. It is social, ambient, alive with the sounds and sights of Makassar at ease. The two evening sessions give the week a rhythm that feels earned: a Monday start, a midweek check-in, and a Thursday send-off before the weekend opens up.

Founders Who Chose Their City as Their Subject

Krismas and Tri Dini founded Jukueja Runners in January 2012, at a time when running crews as a global phenomenon were still finding their shape. In many cities, the early 2010s were the years when informal running groups were beginning to crystallise into something more organised, more intentional. In Makassar, the two founders were asking a specific question: what would it look like to build a running community that did not simply import a template from elsewhere but grew from the ground of South Sulawesi itself? The answer was Jukueja Runners. The name, the values, the openness, the choice of meeting points that carry civic and cultural meaning, all of these decisions were acts of local authorship. They were not mimicking a model. They were building one. Captain Khaidir carries that founding spirit forward in the crew's day-to-day life. The role of a captain in a running crew is often underestimated. It is not a ceremonial title. It involves showing up consistently, setting the tone for runs, being the person who bridges the founding vision with the living, breathing community of any given Tuesday. Khaidir's presence in that role is part of what has allowed Jukueja Runners to maintain its identity across more than a decade of growth, membership turnover, and the inevitable changes that any long-running community experiences.

Running as an Act of Local Identity

The phrase that Jukueja Runners uses to describe itself, a running community that gives a nuance of local wisdom, is not marketing language. It is a description of an actual practice. Local wisdom, or kearifan lokal in Indonesian, refers to the knowledge, values, and customs that communities develop over generations in response to their specific environments and histories. It is the accumulated intelligence of a place. When Jukueja Runners frames its community around that concept, it is saying something meaningful about what running can be in this context. It can be a way of staying connected to where you are. It can be a practice that keeps you oriented toward your community rather than away from it. It can be, in its modest and repetitive way, a form of cultural continuity. This orientation gives Jukueja Runners a quality that is increasingly rare in a running culture that often prizes speed, performance, and individual achievement above all else. The crew is not indifferent to those things, but they are not the organising principle. The organising principle is the gathering itself, the act of meeting at a landmark, moving together through familiar streets, and returning to the same places week after week with the same people, or with new people who quickly become familiar. That repetition is not monotony. It is the texture of belonging.

An Open Invitation to Run in Makassar

If you are in Makassar on a Monday morning, Monumen Mandala at six o'clock is where you will find Jukueja Runners beginning the week. If you arrive mid-week, Lapangan Hasanuddin on Wednesday or Thursday evening at seven will put you in the middle of a community that has been doing this together for well over a decade. There is no particular qualifier required. The crew's founding commitment to openness has not eroded with time. If anything, it has deepened, because a crew that has survived and grown for as long as Jukueja Runners has knows that its longevity is not accidental. It comes from the repeated choice to include rather than exclude, to welcome rather than screen, to keep the door as wide as the name suggests. Around 170 people have found their way through that door. They come from different neighbourhoods, different backgrounds, different reasons for running. What they share is a connection to this city and to a crew that takes seriously the idea that running can carry something more than fitness. It can carry culture. It can carry memory. It can carry the particular warmth of a word like jukueja, spoken at the start of something, again and again, for as many mornings and evenings as the city keeps offering them.