Our Stats

Our Mission

StayRunning is centered around two main goals: to inspire and to protect.

Part of our mission is to protect all runners; from the workout warriors to the hardcore high schoolers to the jogging crew. We believe that the greatest roadblocks to sustained fitness and health are safety concerns and the risk of injury; runners always have to be careful when running in the dark and those pesky shin splints are always a run or two away from ruining a season of training. Through our shared vision of overcoming these problems, we aim to educate runners on proper injury prevention techniques and provide them with the gear necessary to prevent potential safety hazards.

The other part of our mission is to inspire the future generation of runners. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, StayRunning worked with students from local schools in order to inspire them to start running. Through this program, our goal was to promote both the physical and mental health benefits associated with running to those who would otherwise not be exposed to these ideas.

Our Vision

Picture this: you just got up at 6 am to go out to run, when everyone else is comfortably sleeping in their bed. You’re rubbing your eyes and trying to process everything while you shuffle out the door. You’re proud of yourself of getting out of bed to run in the cold and the dark. You would never imagine that you could be run over by a car on the run, let alone be killed while crossing the street. And yet, that’s what happens to tens of thousands of pedestrian runners around 120,000 pedestrian runners each year. Whether it was actually due to texting while driving, driving under the influence, or reckless driving, the fact is that those runners are fatally injured and that the drivers could not see them running, due to the dark. Imagine an alternate scenario: you’ve trained intensely for the past year and a half, trying to run a marathon. You want to impress all your family members and friends, and you are really motivated to run every day, even when you aren’t feeling great. But one day, you feel a sharp pain in your shins on an easy run. You try to run again the next day and the pain doesn’t go away, and even after waiting a week, it doesn’t go away. You try everything, but nothing seems to work and the pain in your shins seem to get worse. All the training you put in is going down the drain and every day you can’t run because of the pain kills your fitness. There are millions of runners in the United States and every year, 63% of those runners are sidelined from injuries that are easily preventable. With these realities in mind, our vision at StayRunning is to ensure that every runner can train hard and run happy without worrying about safety and the risk of injury. We strive to reach out to the community and branch out, so that awareness about running safety and injury prevention is widespread. We want to create an active and cognizant running community, so that the number of pedestrian related deaths and preventable injuries becomes zero. Our ultimate target is zero and we will continue to work until that goal is met. #targetzerorunning

Our Plan

In order to combat the safety issues and injury concerns plaguing runners all over the United States, we are organizing various community outreach and educational opportunities, as well as taking part in efforts to distribute runner-specific gear to local running communities. These endeavors include:

• Organizing injury prevention seminars to raise awareness about common running injuries and how to prevent them.
• Collecting and donating running shoes to schools, running clubs, and disadvantaged youth in the community. Quite possibly the most important aspect of running, other than the actual running itself, is footwear. Wearing proper shoes instead of improper shoe brands such as Vans and Converse, can go a long way to prevent common running injuries.
• Organizing youth advocation events to help create and inspire the next generation of runners.

Our Story

StayRunning was founded in March of 2019 with the goal of educating the current running community about proper form and technique and inspiring the next generation of runners. StayRunning has been working to accomplish these goals with youth outreach programs in local elementary and middle schools, as well as educational events with local physical therapists speaking about relevant running health topics. However, both of these events and all related plans have been postponed indefinitely as StayRunning waits for guidance from local authorities to know when it is safe to return to normal operation.

In the wake of K-12 schools closing and statewide stay-at-home orders, the StayRunning team launched into action to find a way to continue its mission despite being physically disconnected from the community. StayRunning initially launched a set of blog posts on the StayRunning blog teaching the community about how to stay active and safe during the crisis. These blog posts include recommendations on what to do while stuck at home and precautions to take while running outside.

However, the team felt that this information was already widely known and strongly felt that there was still more they could be doing. There was a large opportunity to promote exercising and going outside as many local authorities have been advising those stuck at home to stay active to go outside. Additionally, they wanted to find a way to promote exercise while contributing to alleviating the crisis that was already devastating so many lives both in the local community, and the international community. This is the context that brings you to the modern form of StayRunning and provides the context behind all of our decisions as a non-profit.

Our Team

The StayRunning team consists of thirteen teenagers from three high schools across the Greater Seattle Area. Every team member is not paid in any way and works only to help the community, additionally, all funds and donations StayRunning receives go directly towards our youth outreach or educational event programs or other relevant outreach programs.

• Anushri Rao
• Arnav Chawla
• Durva Patil
• Emily Chang
• Isabella Bono
• Kaeden Brinkman
• Paul Pachikara
• Phillip Cutter
• Sam Mahlman
• Shreeya Lingam
• Sidd Pachikara
• Sohum Sanu
• Yuta Fukazawa