By San Diego Guide and Chicago Manager Chelsey Stone
Above all, City Fit Tours values the opportunity to showcase our cities. Our guides love their cities, enjoy learning its history (even those born and raised there), and are passionate about sharing that love and learning with visitors. But we’re not the only ones showcasing our cities through running. We’ve gotten to know some of the running communities in our cities and we’d like to showcase one of these for you here: Chicago’s Read & Run.
Read & Run designs running tours based on books. As you’ll see below, sometimes this is essentially a book club and other times the book is simply the inspiration for the run.
Before becoming a guide with City Fit Tours, I was a guide with Read & Run, so I sat down with founder Allison Yates to learn about the incredibly unique experience she brings local runners and how out-of-town visitors can get in on the action too.
What inspired you to start Read & Run?
Allison: I started Read & Run because I was reading a lot and I was running a lot–I realized, I loved these two things. Having just moved to Chicago, I felt very little connection to this place I called home, so I started to read and run to feel more connected on my own. Then I wanted other people to experience it.
At first, it was very informal. It was about getting together to talk about books. Then I realized there are these levels of learning: reading and discussing but the next level is the background, the history, the further context to a certain building or neighborhood you're talking about. So that's why I started to pursue the tour aspect to these runs.
Allison describes the significance of this church referenced in South Side Girls, a book set in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.
Programming, as defined by Allison
Running tours: you can show up and not have read the book ahead of time. They are based on books, so you're supposed to be gaining a lot of information without having to do anything prior to the run. You can continue to read about the topic afterwards, if you want to. But if you learned everything you wanted to learn, you're like “great, I don't have to read another book.”
Book club runs: meant to be a book club but with a run where you experience the book through movement prior to discussing or as we're running.
Trail runs: Because all those trails have stories and backgrounds and can teach us a lot about the plant life in the Chicago River or different policies or native tribes that lived in the area! You can learn so much about Chicago, just on the trail.
General community events: not always focused on specifically a Chicago topic but it might be a Chicago author.
Can anyone join a tour?
Allison: If someone is just in town and is wondering if they should come even though they haven’t read anything, I would say absolutely. Primarily Read & Run events are meant for people who live in the city, but that doesn't mean that anybody can't join–just keep in mind there might be references to places, people, and events that are hyper local. But it’s great if you are a traveler who, like me, wants to know exactly what it is like at this moment in time, in the city you are visiting. It makes you feel like you're getting to know the world in a different way.
We’re definitely focused on the history of the city, but it's also a lot about who we are, our identity as Chicagoans. So if that's something you're interested in, you'll get a lot of that. And if it’s a topic you really care about, you'll be able to compare how it shows up in Chicago and compare.
Chelsey (right) and Allison (left) preparing for a run of Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood to explore its WWII Japanese American community.
Allison’s other favorite Chicago tours
Chicago for Chicagoans: “I love their free citizen-led history walking tours that are really well researched. The people who lead them are the nerdiest, most intense people, and they're all hyper experts. I love their mission of valuing people, everyday people knowing their city's history and why that's important.”
“I also really love historian Sherman Dilla’s Chicago Mahogany tours. He's the Tick Tock historian that has gotten really really famous for good reason. The way he talks about history is hilarious and really digestible, and he focuses on Southside and black history. He makes history approachable for someone who maybe isn't usually into history or a big reader. I don't know how he fits so much information in his head, and how he connects it to so many different contemporary things. He does an incredible job of talking about why history matters today.”
Check out Read & Runs’ event page to learn more.
