On Mile 21 of the Boston Marathon course there's a notable shift in the energy. In 2017, this is the stretch that Boston run crew PIONEERS marked the unofficial gathering point for Black runners and crews. Between the cheers, music and familiar faces, it’s one of the only places on the course where the crowd is their own. And they’re still there.
Year after year the vibe is supportive and celebratory. However, in 2023 PIONEERS’ founder, Sidney Baptista, stood there alongside members of his run crew and other Black-led groups, doing what they have always done: show up to support. This time, they were met with resistance. City officials accused them of interfering with the race, even as other spectator groups remained untouched.
For Baptista, the moment underscored something he’s long understood. Who gets to participate and who gets pushed to the margins of running’s biggest stages isn’t accidental, it’s structural. And if the systems weren’t built to include his community, he would build his own. As the founder of one of Boston’s liveliest run crews and the first Black-owned running apparel brand, PYNRS (pronounced "pioneers"), Baptista has spent the last decade pushing against the sport's mainstream, expanding who running is for, and who gets to shape it.
Here, we dig in deeper.
Sidney Baptista | Courtesy PYNRS
Finding the Starting Line
Baptista's path into running wasn’t linear. His introduction to the sport came in 2014 through friend Jarick Walker, brand director of The Speed Project. Baptista noticed how weekly runs lighted Walker up—and he wanted a piece of that feeling. So he laced up for himself. “I got into running during a time when I was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing with my life,” he tells Field Mag.
At the time, Baptista was working at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a “Big Four” accounting firm, and he was unhappy and trying to chart his life's next chapter. He watched three friends organize Trillectro, Washington, D.C.'s first hip-hop and electronic dance festival, and was inspired to organize a similar event in Boston. In 2014, he left PwC to put his full effort into an event called Sea by Sound in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood.
The festival was designed for a younger, more diverse audience, showcasing local hip-hop artists rather than the mainstream acts that fill the lineup at another festival called Boston Calling. When the two events were scheduled for the same weekend in September, it was a setup for immediate conflict. Boston Calling’s founders pushed back, lobbying to upend Sea by Sound’s efforts, causing the Boston Office of Tourism to withdraw its support of Baptista. (Kenneth Brissette, then chief of Boston’s tourism office, would later face charges related to union-related extortion.) Sea by Sound never happened, and the fallout left Baptista without a job, without a festival, and unsure what to do next.
Then he decided to redirect his energy into running.
Sidney Baptista | Courtesy PYNRS
Baptista joined Boston’s now defunct Nike Run Club on Newbury Street, where he became a pacer and then run leader. He built a community there, but something didn’t sit right. Friends from his predominately Black and immigrant neighborhood of Dorchester weren’t making the trip from the south end of the city across the river to run in Cambridge. The disconnect between Boston’s booming running scene and the neighborhoods he grew up in wasn’t lost on Baptista. It reflected a deeper story about where he came from and the circumstances that shaped him.
When he was 14, Baptista's brother was shot and later went to jail. To protect him from the cycle of violence happening in their neighborhood in the late 90s and early 2000s, Baptista’s mother sent him to boarding school in Easthampton. “I experienced this life that was outside of the hood, and outside of the city that felt different,” he says. “I got to see the abundance that people experienced in the outdoors and just being somewhere else. I almost had this survivor's remorse around all of these experiences that I got to have.”
When he returned home, that contrast stuck with him. “When I came back to the city, it was like, damn none of these people get to experience this. They’re still doing the same thing,” he reflects. “It made me think, how can I bring the experiences that I’ve had back here?”
