Outra Fé Running as Therapy and Faith in São Paulo

Another Faith, Another Way to Run

There is a phrase at the heart of everything Outra Fé does, and it has nothing to do with pace charts or podium finishes. "Your race will never be the same." It is not a promise about times or distances. It is something quieter and more lasting than that, an invitation to look at running differently, to treat it as a practice of the self rather than a performance for others. This crew, rooted in São Paulo since September 2009, was built around that idea from the very first day. They called themselves Outra Fé, which translates from Portuguese as "another faith," and the name carries exactly the weight it was meant to. Running, for the people who started this crew and for everyone who has joined since, is a form of belief. Not in medals or rankings, but in movement, in connection, in what happens when people show up for each other on the streets of a city as restless and alive as São Paulo. The founding of Outra Fé brought together four people with a shared sense of what running could be. Poldo Longo, Héctor Farto, Leandro Dornellas, and Camila Brogliato each came to the sport with their own histories and their own reasons for lacing up, but they arrived at the same conclusion: the running community around them was missing something. Too much focus on competition, not enough space for the full, complicated, human experience of simply running together. So they built that space themselves. In a city of more than twelve million people, where the streets never fully sleep and the energy is always crackling just below the surface, they staked out a corner of São Paulo for runners who wanted something different. Not better. Not faster. Just different. Another faith.

A Simple Definition That Changes Everything

One of the most quietly radical things about Outra Fé is the way they define who belongs. "A runner is someone who runs." That is it. No qualifying time, no weekly mileage requirement, no gear checklist or brand affiliation. The definition is disarmingly open, and it is entirely intentional. In a running culture that often sorts people into categories before they have even tied their shoelaces, Outra Fé insists on stripping the whole thing back to the most honest version of itself. If you run, you are a runner. If you are a runner, you are welcome here. This philosophy is not a marketing line that gets forgotten the moment someone actually shows up. It is the operating principle of the crew, felt in the way runs are structured, in the way newcomers are received, in the way the group talks about itself and about the sport it loves. The crew's founding ethos was shaped around one clear intention: "We do not want to compete with anyone, we want to come together to be stronger." Those words carry a particular resonance in São Paulo, a city whose competitive energy is part of its DNA, where ambition runs thick through every industry and neighbourhood. Against that backdrop, choosing togetherness over competition is a considered act. It asks something of everyone involved, a willingness to slow down, to match your pace to someone else's, to measure a good run not by the split times on your watch but by the conversations you had along the way and the sense of shared effort that lingers in your legs afterwards.

The Whole Person, Not Just the Athlete

Ask anyone at Outra Fé to describe their crew and they will probably start with a list that has nothing to do with running at all. They are tattooed. They have children. They have families, dogs, cats, and parrots. They go out dancing. They drink beer. They stay up too late and then get up early anyway, because the run is waiting and the run is worth it. This is not incidental colour added to make the crew seem more interesting. It is the whole point. Outra Fé was built for people who are fully, messily, completely alive, and who run not to escape their lives but to carry those lives more easily. That integration of running into a wider human existence is part of what makes the crew's community feel different from groups that treat training as the only thing that matters. At Outra Fé, the race is described as "our way of caring for the body and the soul," and that framing matters. It positions running not as a discipline imposed from the outside but as something that grows from the inside, a practice of self-care that belongs alongside everything else that makes a life: family, friendship, food, music, rest. In São Paulo, where the pace of daily life can feel relentless, that reframing is not just appealing. For many people, it is necessary.

Running as Therapy in a City That Never Slows Down

São Paulo is not a city that makes running easy. The traffic is dense, the neighbourhoods sprawling, the distances between things enormous. But it is also a city with remarkable parks, tree-lined avenues, and pockets of quiet that reveal themselves to those who move through them on foot. Outra Fé has always understood that running in São Paulo requires a certain relationship with the city, not fighting against its chaos but finding the routes that let you breathe inside it. Over more than fifteen years on these streets, the crew has built that relationship in depth, earning an intimacy with São Paulo's running geography that only comes from years of showing up, season after season, through the humid summers and the cooler winter mornings when the light falls differently over the skyline. The crew describes running as therapy, and in São Paulo that framing is particularly apt. The city moves fast and demands a great deal from the people who live in it. Running offers something the city does not always provide: a moment of regularity, of physical simplicity, of the body doing exactly what it was designed to do. For Outra Fé members, the therapeutic quality of running is inseparable from the social dimension. Running alone can clear your head. Running with people who know you, who share your values and your sense of humour and your taste for a cold beer after a hard effort, does something deeper. It builds the kind of connection that holds people together through difficult stretches of life, not just difficult stretches of road.

Fifteen Years and Still Gathering Strength

There are not many running crews anywhere in the world that can point to a founding date in 2009. Outra Fé can. The crew predates most of the global running crew movement that would gather momentum through the following decade, predates the explosion of social media that would make running crews visible and fashionable, predates much of the infrastructure that now supports crew culture around the world. Poldo, Héctor, Leandro, and Camila built something in São Paulo before there was a template for it, guided by instinct and by a genuine belief that running together was better than running alone. That the crew is still here, still active, still gathering people on the streets of one of the world's most complex cities, says something important about the strength of that original vision. Longevity in a crew usually comes from the same place: the founders built something that was genuinely about the people, not about themselves. When a crew exists to serve the community it creates rather than to promote the individuals who started it, it tends to last. Outra Fé demonstrates that principle clearly. The founders gave the crew a name with meaning, a philosophy with depth, and a definition of membership so open that almost anyone could find their way in. Then they stepped back and let the community do what communities do when they are given enough space and enough trust: grow, evolve, and become something larger than any single person imagined at the beginning.

Come and Run With Us

The invitation that Outra Fé extends is characteristically straightforward. "Come and run with us." No elaborate conditions, no signup process described in fine print, no performance threshold disguised as a welcome. Just an open door and the implicit promise that whatever you bring to the run, whoever you are when you show up, there will be space for you. In a city the size of São Paulo, where it is entirely possible to feel invisible even in a crowd of millions, that kind of genuine openness is rare and worth seeking out. For anyone standing at the edge of the running world, wondering if there is a place in it for them, Outra Fé offers a clear answer. You do not need to be a certain kind of runner. You do not need to look a certain way or run a certain distance or leave your dog and your tattoos and your fondness for dancing at home. You bring all of it. The run holds all of it. And when you cross whatever finish line the day presents, you do it with people who were rooting for you from the first step. That is another faith. That is Outra Fé.