RunWithSpirit Chasing Trails and Memory Through Mexico City

There is a particular kind of grief that moves. Not the kind that sits still in a room, but the kind that finds its way into the body and asks to be carried somewhere, preferably uphill, into the mountains, with the wind cutting cold against the face. For Oscar Monjaraz, known to everyone around him as Kore, running has never been purely athletic. It has always been something closer to a conversation with the people he loves most, including those he can no longer speak to in any ordinary way. Kore grew up running. As a child, he explored the mountains alongside his father, covering trails that most city kids never see. That early formation left a mark. Running was not exercise. It was proximity, to landscape, to family, to something he could not quite name but did not need to. Then came a long pause, a season of stillness in which running faded from his life nearly entirely. What brought him back was loss. When someone close to him passed away, Kore found that the trails were one of the few places where the distance between here and the afterlife felt smaller. He laced up again, and this time with a different kind of intention.

Born From Confinement, Built for Open Ground

RunWithSpirit came into being in May 2020, in the middle of one of the strangest and most isolating periods in recent memory. Mexico City, like every major city in the world, had gone quiet. Streets emptied. Routines collapsed. And yet, as Kore and the people who would become RunWithSpirit understood from the start, no virus is large enough to extinguish the desire to move. The crew was founded not despite the pandemic but, in a strange way, because of it. Confinement made visible what had always been true: the need to run is not a luxury, it is something more fundamental than that. From the beginning, RunWithSpirit positioned itself in deliberate contrast to what had come before. Mexico City's racing scene is large, loud, and often overwhelming, saturated with official events, sponsor banners, and the relentless arithmetic of personal records. The founders were tired of it. Not tired of running, but tired of the version of running that the city's race calendar had come to represent. RunWithSpirit was their answer: a crew that would go out and find the routes that nobody else was running, the trails that connected towns, the paths that required nothing more than legs and the willingness to not know exactly where they led.

Routes That Resist the Obvious

If there is one thing that defines RunWithSpirit in practice, it is the routes. They are rare, deliberately chosen for being little explored and little traveled. The crew does not return to the same familiar loops that the city's running community has worn smooth over the years. Instead, they seek out the margins, the connective tissue between places, the trails that have no Instagram geotag and no race-day barriers. Running these routes means accepting uncertainty as a feature rather than a flaw. The philosophy behind the route selection runs deeper than novelty. There is something in RunWithSpirit's approach that echoes the way Kore first experienced running as a child in the mountains with his father. Those early runs were not about pace or distance. They were about moving through a landscape and understanding it from the inside. The crew has carried that same sensibility into their collective outings. Exploring a trail that connects two towns using only your legs is a different relationship with geography than any car journey or tourist itinerary could offer. It is slower, harder, and far more intimate. Consistent with this spirit of openness, RunWithSpirit does not demand athletic credentials from anyone who wants to join. The crew's own words are clear on this point: you do not need to be a star runner to be part of RunWithSpirit. That is not a marketing line. It is a structural commitment to keeping the door open. What the crew values is not performance but presence, the willingness to show up, move, and engage with the landscape and the people around you.

A Crew That Runs on Its Own Terms

RunWithSpirit operates with a deliberate looseness when it comes to schedules. Their runs are currently on pause, and even when active, the crew has always operated with a certain pleasurable unpredictability. You never really know where, when, or how. That quality might frustrate someone looking for a fixed weekly appointment, but for the runners who belong to RunWithSpirit, it reflects something honest about the nature of the crew. Runs happen when they need to happen, in places that earn them, at a pace that serves the terrain and the people. This approach places RunWithSpirit outside the standard category of urban running clubs, where meeting times are posted weeks in advance and routes are measured to the decimal. The crew's rhythm is closer to that of a group of friends who share a serious relationship with running and occasional access to somewhere worth going. When RunWithSpirit calls a run, it tends to mean something. There is a destination in mind, even if that destination is not always communicated in full before departure. For Kore and the people who have gathered around RunWithSpirit, the crew exists at the intersection of personal history and collective movement. It started in grief and found its footing in the mountains. It was born during a pandemic and chose trails over treadmills. It operates in Mexico City but consistently looks beyond the city's limits for the kind of ground that demands full attention. The crew follows RunWithSpirit on Instagram, where their journey through some of Mexico's least-traveled terrain continues to unfold, one rare route at a time.