GO! RUNNING TOURS OAXACA – SUPPORTING VIXI ESCUELA

We run, enjoy and love our cities, and take pride in taking care of them!
As a running guide in Oaxaca along with a privileged citizen,I am aware of all the aspects of my city, the good and the bad. Indeed, showing visitors the most awesome monuments, the best places to eat, where to enjoy a coffee or to take a picture make me fall in love with my city every day. But of course, I cannot set aside the other aspects that may not be so enjoyable. Big and noisy traffic jams, crazy bus driver fumigating us with a dark horrible smog, nearly non-existent sidewalks, stressed drivers wanting to crush you to earn 0.1 sec on their commute. We always try to avoid these problems by choosing to run on the more enjoyable streets but the problem still exists, meaning we need to try to MAKE IT BETTER.

My way of contributing to the city, started some years ago with some crazy (I prefer idealistic, but people call us crazy) friends, the non-profit association VIXI ESCUELA A.C. has the mission of promoting the use of bicycles as transportation. The starting point is clear and easily understandable: using your bike has so many advantages. So, why are people reluctant to ride their bike into the city? Well, we always hear the same answer: “IT’S DANGEROUS!” Ok, we don’t really understand this reasoning, because as bike enthusiasts we love to ride our bikes and don’t feel that it’s dangerous AT ALL. But saying “no, it’s not” didn’t help much so we decided to really work on changing this false preconception.

We started teaching at schools in Oaxaca, on how to ride a bike correctly. Soon enough, a lot of adults wanted to learn it too. That’s when we accompanied adults during their first bike commute, showing them the best routes and following them the first few days. We are constantly working with local, state and national administration to update and modernize regulations and infrastructures. And of course, let’s not forget the rides we organize regularly to show people how the city can be more enjoyable on a bike.

So as a running guide in Oaxaca, i thought about how could I support this initiative. A good way I’ve found, is to donate 5 pesos for every kilometre that our guests run.

I see at least seven benefits to this system:

1. It will directly help VIXI ESCUELA in its mission.
2. By helping Vixi Escuela and its actions I invest in my city so it can become even more enjoyable to run in the future.
3. It gives extra motivation for our visitors to run a bit further.
4. It gives the feeling to our guests that they are really part of the city and creates a more powerful emotional bond between them.
5. It makes them conscious about solutions to a worldwide problem, so I hope they can spread the word in their own cities.
6. It’s always a good topic to chat about.
7. It’s a donation so it helps me reduce my taxes.

I’m conscious that the money collected will never be that much, at this rate buying a bicycle would take around 700 km, but it´s something and the side effects listed above might have a bigger impact than the 5 pesos/km.

So it’s time to be creative. You’re the sentinel of your city, you know it better than anyone else, you love it and you’re living in and around it. You’re not in Gotham City (fortunately), Batman will never show up, YOU are Batman, so pick-up the trash, make a Twitter campaign to alert your local administration, involve your visitors… Making a better world is like an Ultra, you can only finish it if you run it step by step, little by little, at a constant pace, there is no other way.

Happy running,

Pascal

City Manager of Go! Running Tours Oaxaca

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