INTERVIEWER: MAHMOUD MANSI

“Running has given me fuel in my life, it made me more engaged, goal oriented and more hopeful for achieving results. It had a huge impact on my productivity and career enhancement in my work”

Marwan Rashed

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Photography Mahmoud Mansi / ALEF Bookstores Kafr Abdu

About Alex Runners

A booming initiative that started in Alexandria and now is having a much global impact. It works on organizing runs for inspiring the youth, increasing awareness towards personal health, building a new community of positive people, and creating continuous social events that support causes and charity.

About Marwan Rashed

One of the Co-Founders of Alex Runners. He studied business in the Faculty of English Commerce in Alexandria University and he took his MBA from The Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport. Marwan started a couple a private businesses and has been through different jobs, and he was a TedX AAST speaker 2015. Currently he is the Branch Manager of ALEF Bookstores in Kafr Abdo and in Sporting Club.

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Mai Madi Photography

THE INTERVIEW

1-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How did running change your lives?

Marwan Rashed: “Alex Runners is in the business of radically changing people’s lives.” This is part of our Mission Statement in Alex Runners. I will start by telling you how sports have changed my life. During the years of the revolution my private business went down and problems happened in my personal and professional life. This is where I ended up in total depression.

Getting up again after serious of problems was very hard, among all this one day a friend of mine – Mohamed Sorour – called me inviting me running early the next day, I felt a lot younger, last time I went running was like 5 years ago, and my friend challenged me to run 4 kilos! That particular day was around 3 years ago, I was a heavy smoker for 10 years, and today I am getting ready to join an ironman competition 70.3 next July, and I have already joined several competitions and won the Olympic relay triathlon, my team won the gold medal.

I started running 3 times a week at 6 am, and with this routine I felt more focused and energetic during my work, and with this positive attitude I was able to influence this energy inside my employees.

2-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How did the story of Alex Runners start?

Marwan Rashed: My friends Hareedy and Anwar Fahmy called me and others for starting a running program on the cornice every Friday. The first people who answered the call were me, Sorour, Mohamed Belal, Mohamed El Sheikh and Islam Orfy Nagi. The 8 of us become the board members of Alex Runners. I never thought a phone call would be so important!

By time, our friends who were interested in running increased. Our first ambition was to change the face of Alexandria’s Cornish and to change our lives towards a healthier lifestyle and to also inspire others to do the same.

When the number of interested people started to increase – in the run and on our social media page reaching more than 30 thousand likes – we started to use “running” as a language to highlight several social causes, therefore to have an impact on our society. From this point we started organizing well-planned events for each run. During these 3 years we ran for more than 20 causes, examples of these causes are the following:

Currently Alex Runners operations consist of our weekly Friday run that is the hallmark of our identity and an elite group of committed early birds that runs at 6 AM twice a week and an afternoon group in both Alexandria Sporting Club and Smouha Club.

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Alexandrian Writer Nada Moussa of أفكار يوم الجمعة الصبح / Waseem Awadallah Photography

3-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How did you manage to attract Alexandrian people to join you?

Marwan Rashed: “It is our goal to give everyone the reason to run and the means and opportunities to keep running and never stop.” This is part of our Mission Statement. So we did this by sharing our happiness, success and enthusiasm on our social media pages through pictures, videos and personal stories. This way we started attracting partners. Another tool that was very effective in spreading our work was through offering free training sessions, and creating a special annual membership to our loyal runners. We had a huge impact on not only inspiring people to do sports, but on preparing them to enter competitions, and win. We prepared our runners to join half marathons like the Cairo Half Marathon that was organized by Cairo Runners, and we then organized our own competitions. We organized a 3 kilo, 5 kilo, and a 10 kilo race. Not only did we focus on running, but we encouraged people to join triathlon (swim-bike-run race) and duathlon (run-bike race).

We also initiated a motivational and honorable weekly prize and we named it “run of the week” that is granted to the most committed runner or someone who achieved a high level of personal sports achievement. This had a very positive impact on the runners, and it kept them in a positive competitive environment.

4-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: What does running symbolize in a person’s life?

Marwan Rashed: “The simple act of putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward can make you healthier, happier, fitter and more confident.” This is another part of Alex Runners Mission Statement. We long to change the culture of our youth and engage them in a more active lifestyle, through time we will be changing Alexandria to a world class sports events destination. So running is about being stronger, creating positive changes to our culture, and affecting tourism from a different angle.

Personally, running has given me fuel in my life, it made me more engaged, goal oriented and more hopeful for achieving results. It had a huge impact on my productivity and career enhancement in my work.

5-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: For the success of this project, how does the co-founders plan and communicate together?

Marwan Rashed: At the beginning we organized a weekly meeting, then when things got bigger our communication relied more on virtual tools such as whats-app, and the meetings were twice a month. At the beginning we took all our decisions based on voting, but we found out that this was very time consuming, so we decided that each year we will vote for a CEO who manages the operations and cycle of runs. We use voting for strategic decisions and the CEO finalizes between these votes.

6-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: What are the different departments functioning within Alex Runners?

Marwan Rashed: Fitness Department that is responsible for the training and fitness tips. The media department that is responsible for documenting events and posting it on our social media pages. The PR department that works on mainlining partnerships with other organizations and initiatives. The Run Operations department that plans and manages the run from A to Z.

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Waseem Awadallah Photography

7-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How do you manage the volunteers who work with you?

Marwan Rashed: We chose some of our loyal runners who have leadership skills and passion towards our Mission and Vision Statements to become part of our operations team and help us in the management and implementation. We use the same communication method that is used between the board members.

8-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: What were the challenges you faced while launching Alex Runners and managing it? How did you overcome them?

Marwan Rashed: We didn’t have many challenges at the beginning. The big challenge appeared later when we wanted to maintain the same quality of enthusiasm and events. By being well-committed to our goal, and through time after volunteers started joining our team, this was not a challenge anymore. One of the other challenges was to take permissions from the government to organize specific events in places like El Montazah. We took the permissions in the end but the problem was in the amount of time we waited till our proposals were approved, this led us sometimes to postpone some events. After the government started understanding our causes through dealing with us several times things became much easier and according to schedule.

9-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: What are the qualities you seek for the volunteers who want to work with you? How can people apply to work with you?

Marwan Rashed: Start by joining our weekly runs because it will show how passionate you are in what we do, once we see your commitment to our goals, simply contact one of our organizers and your name will be added to the list of volunteers. In the net event you will be contacted and by time you can easily be part of our operations team.

Joining Alex Runners is very easy and simple, just visit our page, fill out our application form which includes sections about your current health state, background health checks, emergency contact number, and other details that cover your safety, and wear your sportswear.

HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Marwan, I would love to thank you and the ALEX Runners family for this wonderful interview and project. Thank you for contributing to the society and for empowering others this way.

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Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/AlexRunners1