Karşıyaka One Team Running for Inclusion and Movement in Izmir

A Civil Movement Born on the Aegean Coast

Picture Bostanlı on a Tuesday evening in January 2015. The air carries the faint salt of the Aegean, the promenade hums with the steady rhythm of a city that has always known how to live outdoors, and a small group of runners gathers with an idea that reaches well beyond split times and personal records. That idea belonged to Tümer, the founder of Karşıyaka One Team, and it was straightforward in its ambition: running should be a space where everyone belongs, including athletes living with spinal paralysis who are too often left at the margins of mainstream sporting culture. From that first gathering in the Karşıyaka district of Izmir, the crew set out to do something that Turkish running had rarely attempted at scale, which was to build a movement that was genuinely civil in the fullest sense of the word. Not a club organised around competition, not a brand ambassador programme, but a grassroots effort to make movement visible, accessible, and communal. Nearly a decade on, with around one thousand members and a presence that extends well beyond the neighbourhood where it was born, Karşıyaka One Team stands as one of the largest running crews in Turkey, a fact that feels earned rather than manufactured.

Why Inclusion Is the Whole Point

The founding vision of Karşıyaka One Team was shaped by a specific and deliberate commitment: to train alongside athletes with spinal paralysis and to make that co-existence normal rather than exceptional. This was not a one-off charity event or a seasonal campaign. It was baked into the culture from the start, part of what the crew describes as a civil society movement aimed at spreading awareness of movement for people who are paralysed. The message was as much for the wider public as it was for the runners themselves. By showing up together, week after week, professional athletes, recreational runners, and sedentary people new to exercise stood next to athletes who navigated the world differently, and the simple act of shared training said something that no poster campaign could replicate. Tümer and those who built Karşıyaka One Team alongside him understood that sporting culture is shaped by what communities normalise. If you want inclusion to mean something, you practise it at 20:00 on a Tuesday night in Bostanlı, not just in a mission statement. That conviction has guided the crew's growth and continues to define what it means to wear the Karşıyaka One Team name.

Paces Named After Izmir Street Legends

One of the most immediately charming details about Karşıyaka One Team is the way it has organised its pace groups. Where other crews might use colour codes or numbered tiers, Karşıyaka One Team turned to the street food culture of Izmir, one of the most food-proud cities in Turkey, and named each group after a beloved local staple or a piece of authentic Izmir slang. The fastest group, the Domatcılar, covers ten kilometres at a four-minute-forty-five to five-minute pace. The Gevrekçiler run seven kilometres between five-thirty and six minutes per kilometre. The Kumrucular take on six kilometres at six to six-thirty pace. The Çiğdemciler run five kilometres at six-thirty to seven minutes. And the Boyozcular, the most welcoming entry point for those just finding their feet, cover four kilometres at a seven-thirty to eight-minute pace in a run-walk format. Each name is a nod to a vendor, a snack, a slang term that any Izmir local would recognise immediately: the tomato sellers, the simìt-style gevrek vendors, the kumru sandwich makers, the roasted chickpea sellers, the boyoz pastry men. The naming system does something quietly powerful. It makes the crew unmistakably local, rooted in the specific language and food culture of Izmir rather than borrowing the aesthetic vocabulary of running crews from Berlin or New York. When you join a pace group, you are not just finding your correct training band, you are also joining a little piece of the city's identity.

Tuesday Nights at Bostanlı

The heartbeat of Karşıyaka One Team's weekly rhythm is Tuesday evening. Every week at eight o'clock, runners gather at the Karşıyaka One Team Bostanlı Antrenman Alanı, the crew's dedicated training ground on the Bostanlı waterfront, one of Izmir's most loved stretches of public space. The location is fitting. Bostanlı sits at the northern tip of Karşıyaka, a district that has a personality distinctly its own within Izmir, slightly more relaxed, intensely local, proud of its neighbourhood character in a way that mirrors the crew's own values. Tuesday runs bring all five pace groups out together, so the training ground sees runners moving at wildly different speeds, all sharing the same air and the same commitment to showing up. There is something grounding about a fixed time and place. It removes the negotiation, the uncertainty, the need to convince yourself. Eight o'clock on Tuesday means eight o'clock on Tuesday, and around one thousand people know that to be true. For newer members, that predictability is part of what makes joining feel manageable. For long-time members, the Tuesday run is a weekly ritual that has accumulated years of shared miles, changing seasons, and the particular satisfaction of knowing your city's waterfront at night better than most people ever will.

Thursdays, Sundays and the Winter Trails

Karşıyaka One Team does not limit itself to road running or to the weekly Tuesday session. On Thursdays, the crew runs functional training, sessions designed to build the strength, mobility, and resilience that make runners more durable over time. It is a practical addition to the programme, one that reflects a genuine interest in athletic development rather than simply accumulating kilometres. Then there is One Team Extreme, the crew's trail running initiative that runs on Sunday mornings during the winter months. The shift to trail terrain changes the dynamic entirely. Trail running in and around Izmir means heading into the hills above the Aegean coastline, where the landscape turns rugged and the footing demands attention in a way that flat road running never does. One Team Extreme draws members who want something rawer and more demanding than the Tuesday waterfront sessions, people who are comfortable with effort and discomfort and the specific pleasure of finishing a trail run with mud on their shoes. The existence of these parallel programmes reflects something important about the crew's philosophy. Karşıyaka One Team is not trying to be one thing. It holds space for the walker-runner finding their first kilometres in the Boyozcular group and for the trail athlete pushing hard through winter hills on a Sunday morning. That range is not accidental. It is the direct result of a founding vision that insisted on inclusion as a structural principle rather than a slogan.

One Thousand Members and Still Counting

Growing to around one thousand members while staying true to a founding philosophy is not straightforward, and Karşıyaka One Team's scale makes it one of the most significant running communities in Turkey by any measure. The crew's Strava club and Instagram presence extend its reach beyond Izmir, giving the group a visibility that has helped spread the culture of group training to people who might never have encountered it otherwise. That outward reach matters because one of Karşıyaka One Team's stated goals from the beginning was precisely to spread group training culture to the wider society. The crew was never intended to be an inner circle. It was intended to be a door left open, with pace groups structured to make that openness operational rather than aspirational. A thousand members means a thousand people who have, at some point, decided to show up. Some will have been running for decades. Others will have arrived at Bostanlı on a Tuesday night never having run a structured session in their lives. Both of those people found something worth returning to, which is the clearest possible evidence that the original idea was sound.

Running in Karşıyaka Means Running in Character

Izmir is a city that tends to do things its own way. Historically open, cosmopolitan by instinct, proud of a certain Aegean ease that sets it apart from Ankara's formality or Istanbul's intensity, it is a place where public life happens outdoors and where community identity runs deep at the neighbourhood level. Karşıyaka, the district that gives the crew its name, is a particular expression of that character. Connected to central Izmir by ferry across the bay, it has the feeling of a town within a city, with its own markets, its own cafe culture, its own rhythm. Running through Karşıyaka with a group of a thousand members at your back is to participate in something that feels native to the place, not imported, not replicated from somewhere else, but grown organically from the specific soil of this neighbourhood and this city. The pace group names, the Bostanlı training ground, the Tuesday evening time slot that suits the unhurried tempo of Aegean evening life: these are details that could only have emerged here. Karşıyaka One Team is, in the most honest sense, an Izmir story. And it is still being written every Tuesday night at eight o'clock on the waterfront.