South Side Run Crew Running Through the Makassar City Lights

The City Lights That Started It All

There is something about Makassar after dark that feels alive in a way that daylight does not quite capture. The streets of this sprawling port city on the southwestern tip of Sulawesi carry a specific energy in the evening hours, a mix of motorbike rumble, street food smoke, and the kind of ambient noise that belongs only to Indonesia's fifth-largest city. It was into that energy, in April 2016, that four friends decided to do something that had never been done in Makassar before. Idham, Faisal, Irfano, and Mirza laced up their shoes, stepped outside, and started running together through the city lights. That act, simple as it sounds, made South Side Run Crew the first urban running crew Makassar had ever seen. The city was not a blank canvas waiting to be claimed. Makassar has its own rhythms, its own identity, and its own relationship with public space. What the four founders understood intuitively was that running could serve as a way of moving through that identity rather than imposing something new on top of it. They were not trying to replicate what running crews in Jakarta or Singapore were doing. They were trying to figure out what running could look like in their own city, on their own streets, with their own people. The name South Side Run Crew grounded that intention from the start. This was a crew rooted in a specific place, and it was going to run that place on its own terms.

May the Pace Be With You

The crew's unofficial motto, borrowed with good humor from a galaxy far, far away, says everything you need to know about the philosophy at play here. May the pace be with you. It is a phrase that manages to be both playful and genuinely principled. Speed is not a value South Side Run Crew trades in. The founders made that clear from the beginning, and the culture they built around it has held steady through nearly a decade of runs. You do not need to be fast. You do not need to be fit in any particular way. You need to want to move, and you need to be willing to be around other people while you do it. That last part matters more than it might seem. Running is often framed as a solitary pursuit, a discipline of personal improvement measured in splits and kilometers. South Side Run Crew sees it differently. For Idham, Faisal, Irfano, and Mirza, running was always about interaction. It was a way of meeting people you would never otherwise encounter, of crossing the invisible lines that separate neighborhoods, professions, and social backgrounds in a city as layered as Makassar. The run itself is almost a pretext. The real point is what happens when people from different corners of the same city start moving together through the streets they share.

Running as a Way of Meeting People

Around 30 runners make up South Side Run Crew today. That number has grown organically since 2016, not through recruitment drives or social media campaigns, but through the quiet word-of-mouth that happens when someone has a good experience and tells a friend. The crew does not ask much of its members. There are no membership fees, no pace requirements, no fitness prerequisites. What the crew asks is simpler and harder to quantify: show up, be present, enjoy the run for what it is. The people who answer that call come from genuinely different backgrounds. That is not a throwaway line. In a city like Makassar, where social and professional worlds can be quite separate from one another, a running crew that makes no demands on pedigree or performance becomes a genuinely unusual kind of social space. You might find yourself jogging alongside a university student, a small business owner, a civil servant, and a first-time runner who downloaded the crew's Instagram the night before and decided to come out. The pace stays manageable enough that conversation is possible, and conversation is how those different worlds start to blur a little at the edges.

Two Runs, Two Sides of the City

South Side Run Crew runs twice a week, and the two sessions have very different characters. On Sunday mornings, the crew gathers at CFD Monumen Mandala at 06:30. CFD stands for Car Free Day, the weekly designation that closes certain streets to traffic and opens them up to pedestrians, cyclists, and runners. Monumen Mandala is one of Makassar's most recognizable landmarks, a towering monument built to commemorate the return of West Irian to Indonesia. Running from that point on a Sunday morning means running through a city that is briefly, beautifully quiet, its streets reclaimed from the usual chaos of traffic. The air is cooler, the light is golden, and the city feels like it belongs, for a few hours, to the people moving through it on foot. Wednesday evenings are a different story entirely. The crew meets at My Way Coffee, the crew's regular headquarters and the kind of place that functions as a genuine anchor for the community around it. The 19:00 start means running through the city as it shifts into its nighttime mode, lights beginning to appear in shopfront windows, the temperature dropping just enough to make movement comfortable. Running through Makassar after dark is the experience the founders had in mind when they first imagined what South Side Run Crew could be. The city lights that give the crew its identity are most visible on Wednesday evenings, and there is something fitting about returning to that original image week after week.

Rooted in Makassar, Open to Anyone

Makassar is a city that does not always get the attention it deserves in conversations about Indonesian urban life. Jakarta and Bali dominate most of those conversations, and cities like Makassar, with their own distinct cultures, cuisines, and histories, tend to be left in the background. The Makassarese people have a long tradition of seafaring and trade, of moving between places and building connections across distances. There is something in that tradition that rhymes with what South Side Run Crew does, the idea that movement is how you come to understand the world around you and the people in it. The crew runs through a city that is changing rapidly. Makassar has grown substantially in recent decades, and that growth brings with it both energy and friction, new infrastructure alongside old neighborhoods, development alongside displacement. Running through those changes, seeing them at street level rather than from inside a car or behind a screen, gives the members of South Side Run Crew a particular kind of intimacy with their city. They know which streets have changed and which have stayed the same. They know where the good air is on a Wednesday night. They know the city the way you can only know it on foot.

An Invitation Written in Running Shoes

Nearly nine years after Idham, Faisal, Irfano, and Mirza took their first run together through the Makassar night, South Side Run Crew is still doing exactly what it set out to do. The crew has not tried to scale beyond what feels right, has not chased numbers or turned itself into something it was not designed to be. It has stayed close to its original instinct, that running is a way of connecting with other people, that pace is irrelevant, and that the city is worth knowing from the ground up. If you find yourself in Makassar on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday evening, the invitation is open. Meet at CFD Monumen Mandala at half six with the sun still low, or find your way to My Way Coffee as the city lights begin to come on at seven in the evening. You do not need to run a particular pace. You do not need to explain yourself or prove anything. You just need to show up. South Side Run Crew will take care of the rest. May the pace be with you.