One chilly Saturday morning last June, my wife and I woke up at 6 a.m., sleepily loaded a surfboard into the car, and drove down to Rockaway Beach in Queens, about an hour southeast from where we live in Brooklyn. A few days prior, I'd come across an Instagram post for a protest in support of Black Lives Matter set to take place in the water, organized by the East Coast chapter of the Black Surfing Association, or BSA, a nonprofit dedicated to mentoring young surfers and diversifying the sport. My wife and I had participated in marches and rallies before, but the idea of a water protest sounded—I don't know—refreshing. A part of me was curious too: Surfing is by and large a white sport, one co-opted from native Hawaiians. Who was going to show up?
Admittedly, this demonstration was taking place during an especially tough stretch of the pandemic for us: Loved ones back home in California were battling COVID, friends were losing jobs left and right, and grotesque images of police brutality swirled around all of it, like phosphine fumes seeping into our chest cavities. I was experiencing frequent bouts of listlessness, zapped of all energy one moment and incandescent with white-hot rage the next. Mostly, though, I was feeling unmoored. I'd gained 10 pounds and was stuck in a fucked-up, interstitial headspace where the future was a blur on the horizon, just out of reach. In a city like New York, without social tethers to hold you down, it can be perilously easy to just float and float and float.
We parked the car a few blocks from the beach. The surf was flat; there were no waves. My wife laid a blanket out on the sand as I slipped into a wetsuit, scrubbed some wax onto my single-fin, and glided out under a clear blue sky with hundreds of other people. There they were, a whole taxonomy of New York City surfing, bobbing in the water: grannies on soft-tops, Black guys with locs, Japanese guys with unnatural locs, tiny long-haired groms with the buoyancy of inflatable pool flamingos. Glorious weirdos took their spots in the lineup next to immaculate yuppies. It was an otherwise impossible triangulation of people in neoprene.
The water was unusually cold. We positioned ourselves into a circle and shouted all the usual protest refrains, slightly off beat. We splashed water for the dead. And despite the lack of waves, the current that day was strong, and we all had to paddle constantly to keep from drifting eastward, efforts that distended the circle we'd tried to form. Later I'd come across an aerial photo taken by a drone far above us. Our protest circle was more of a heart.
I left the beach that day feeling not exactly recharged, but better, like my own internal computer was no longer running on low-battery mode. There was something almost spiritual about paddling out there on the open ocean with hundreds of other people—belonging, however briefly, to an idea that was in service of something bigger. It felt like the best possible permutation of church.
Over the next few months, I followed the BSA closely, curious about the community it had managed to build. One morning in April, I drove back down to the beach to meet with Lou Harris, 49, who founded the East Coast chapter of the BSA in 2016 with the goals of making Black surfers like him more visible and, together with a close-knit crew of BSA volunteers, teaching kids from the area how to surf and skate. (I arrived with an old shortboard I wanted to donate that had been gathering dust in my apartment, but more on that in a bit.) In person, Harris, who has two Wu-Tang tattoos, is bouncy and incapable of sitting still. “He has the energy of someone who's 25,” says Kevin Amuquandoh, a graduate student who volunteers with the BSA. Until recently, Harris worked full-time as a night doorman on the Upper East Side and would schlep back down to the beach to give local kids free morning surf lessons.
Harris tells me he made the decision to start the organization when he learned about a teenager who started a fire in Coney Island that ended up killing a police officer. “When the police found out it was a 16-year-old Black kid, they said to him, ‘Why did you do it?’ And he said that he was bored,” recounts Harris. “That blew my mind. This police officer would be alive if only this kid had an activity.” He knows that making himself and the people around him visible—whether that's grinding out long days in the community or posting constantly on social media—is important if he hopes to change tired old ideas of who gets to be seen as a surfer. “When I first started giving surf lessons, there was this one lady on the phone who didn't know I was Black,” says Harris. “When she got to the lesson, she was looking for the instructor. I said, ‘It's me!’ And she said, ‘No, you're not Louis!’ ”
These days, the BSA is a motley yet tight-knit cluster of friends who, with Harris at the forefront, gather every weekend to do the galvanizing work of nurturing the next generation of surfers, expanding imaginations, and making the sport more inclusive for everyone. And that entails welcoming outsiders like myself who trek down from Brooklyn. “We're working from a different perspective,” says Babajide Alao, a BSA volunteer and the owner of a local West African restaurant. “That's pretty much the main focus of us here in the Rockaways. It's been about building community versus ‘Oh, we're territorial over it.’ ”
There's something beautiful about physical activity as a means of connecting with other people, especially during a period of debilitating isolation. Within the past two decades, adult participation in daily sports and exercise has been trending upward, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I suspect it's because when you create a community around an activity—running, skateboarding, soccer—almost immediately you begin to share a sense of momentum. You lock on to a communal frequency, which not only improves your physical and mental well-being but also creates space for you to do the important work of looking out for the people in your orbit. Activeness as a foundation for activism—that creates a lot of good in the world. And it starts with finding others who share that love for moving together.
I have a slightly corny, purposely overgeneralized theory about making friends in New York if you're not from here. First, you convene with acquaintances from back home, folks a few degrees removed from your usual circles. These people you mostly just tolerate because you need someone to drink with. Second, you begin making other friends—likely through work—with whom you share similar ambitions and who, like you, left their hometowns with vague aspirations of something grander for themselves. There's a layer of richness to these relationships that you don't take for granted. And third, if you're lucky and commit to putting down roots, you eventually connect with a group of people who finally make the city feel like home, people with a shared sense of injustice and restlessness who understand where you're coming from and all the glittery baggage that makes you you. These are people you never would have encountered anywhere else on earth, because, really: How could you have? Somewhat miraculously, these people become your people. They become your heart. They become your tribe.
I was lucky enough to find my tribe here in 2014, when a friend persuaded me to join a co-ed basketball league in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that was sponsored by a local bookstore. (Our literary team name: the Slaughterhouse Five.) The team is a beautiful mishmash of players—women who hooped in high school and college and all seem to have smooth, consistent releases on their jump shots, plus a bunch of guys my age, mostly from California, who try hard on defense. We'd often practice a few times a week, and after games on the weekends, we'd spend the rest of the day drinking beer. Having a singular goal in common—trying to squeak out a win every week—made it easy to get mixed up in one another's lives.
Looking back, I think part of the reason the pandemic had made me feel so discombobulated was that I wasn't able to hoop with that core group of friends; the weekly ritual had grounded me more than I was willing to admit to myself. For one morning, basketball, even a goofy version with the lowest possible stakes, had commanded my full attention and pushed my problems out of my field of vision. When that flow state evaporated, all that was left was to turn inward, and all those anxieties would just fold into themselves.
I should note that what I was going through was by no means unique to me. The New York Rollin' Knicks, the city's premier wheelchair basketball team, are used to hooping all over the country, but when they were initially deprived of the ability to convene, the situation proved challenging, both mentally and physically. Zoom “wine nights” couldn't replace what they'd lost. “We're a band of brothers,” says Kevin Grant, a guard who also serves as the team's manager. “And I think that we're very supportive of one another, even in our own social, personal lives, you know what I mean? All of my guys are really good people, so it's kind of like it makes playing basketball like icing on the cake.”
Grant was injured in a car crash at 19 and has now been playing wheelchair basketball for over 20 years. (He saw others playing at an elite level and made it his goal to join them.) So when the pandemic hit and the Rollin' Knicks weren't able to show up for their usual twice-weekly practices, Grant was forced to find other ways to stay in competitive shape. He even bought a modified Peloton in April, which helped, but the exercise it gave him was a poor imitation of what hooping provided. “Basketball is like our therapy,” he says. “You know what I mean? When we want to not think about our problems, we play ball.”
Leo Baker, the legendary skater who appeared in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video games, has a similar support network. After moving east from California, they found their tribe through the New York skate community—“this wave of people skating that are nontraditional skateboarders, like queer women, nonbinary trans,” which Baker says helped them come out as transgender and nonbinary in 2020. “There's something about New York that makes something like this very possible and gives it way more life,” says Baker. “Back in California, everything just felt a little bland, very spread out, kind of boring. It was hard to connect with people. New York is just like… You're just in it. I feel like there's a certain layer of… I don't even know what the word is. You just get the real person. No one's really bullshitting.”
Along with close friends Stephen Ostrowski and Cher Strauberry, Baker cofounded their own skate company, Glue Skateboards, in early 2020. Just a few months later, the trio launched their first products in the midst of a cresting pandemic, selling shirts and skate decks. (“We just wanted to have a place for us to be able to funnel our creativity and support each other and just, like, do cool shit, honestly,” says Ostrowski.) The goal was to create visibility for skaters from marginalized groups, a community that fans could imagine being a part of. Baker sees Glue as a haven for “people like me or like Cher or like Stephen, who never really felt like they had a home in skating. That's where my heart is.”
Getting the company up and running during the pandemic posed all sorts of challenges, from financial to logistical, but Baker was thankful to be in a position to work with the people they love, as well as for the downtime. It gave them an opportunity to hit pause, “figure my shit out,” and retreat upstate, where they spent two months getting sober and healthy in order to prepare for top surgery. “The very first time of getting back on my board after surgery, everything just felt so good,” says Baker. “It's like, ‘I can feel the shirt flowing on my body. I'm not wearing, like, a fucking binder. I'm just free.’ ”
They add, “I'm just really excited for my life now that I don't have fucking tits anymore.”
There was one especially magical moment for the trio that occurred during the pandemic. They were driving around upstate looking for a spot to skate, filming what would become their “Smut” video, which would be released by Thrasher. It had already been a grueling three-day stretch: Ostrowski had injured their neck, and they were struggling. It was the end of the day, just as the sun was setting, when Ostrowski noticed a rail outside an old church and pulled over to check it out. “And I just ended up skating the rail and getting a clip at sundown, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” says Ostrowski. “I landed it and rolled away, and Leo and Cher were, like, freaking out. Cher cried, but out of happiness.”
One evening in March, I had dinner at Dr. Clark, a trendy Hokkaido-style bar and restaurant located on a sleepy corner in Chinatown. Outside, I spotted the playwright Jeremy O. Harris having drinks with some of the cast members of the Gossip Girl reboot, one of whom ended up singing the karaoke version of “Jolene” alone at the bar after everyone else went their separate ways. Co-owner Yudai Kanayama tells me he and his partners opened the space on March 15, 2020, literally right as New York was shutting down. The restaurant has been a rare success during the COVID era. In some ways, being brand-new allowed it to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, to experiment and try new things. Which is partly how the Dr. Clark soccer squad came about: Kanayama grew up on the island of Hokkaido, has played since he was six, and always “dreamed” of sponsoring a team. (“Soccer is a big thing in Japan,” he says. “A lot of people play it!”) So when he and a couple of his employees discovered their shared love of soccer, he decided to start their own team to compete in the local Chinatown league—an activity Kanayama sees as an easy way to advertise the restaurant while having fun. (That they all have custom jerseys designed by Emily Bode, who also created their work uniforms, doesn't hurt.) Scrimmages across the street at Columbus Park—amidst a backdrop of tai chi practitioners and mah-jongg players—can get “quite serious,” but the fact that their team has more than a few ringers doesn't bother Kanayama, even if it cuts into his own playing time. “I'm going to come off the bench for now,” he says. “I'm not ready to start yet.”
That same type of energy—competitive yet mellow and deeply rooted in the downtown scene—has always been a hallmark of NYC Bridge Runners, the O.G. New York running crew founded by Mike Saes in 2003. At the time, it was the antithesis of what was then considered “running culture”: Methodical training plans were replaced with boozy late-night 5Ks, hard partying, and community built around a loose constituency of grimy Lower East Side cool. “It became kind of this little downtown cult thing in the summertime, because we were running at midnight and drinking frozen margaritas at The Hat on Stanton and Ludlow,” says Saes. “We would run after parties at like two in the morning, and we just started running the bridges. So that was this kind of organic thing, where people were running in, like, Air Force 1s and Vans, and we'd be running on 'shrooms.”
These days Saes is more wellness-conscious. At the start of the pandemic, he began a regimen of intermittent fasting—which helped him drop his training pace to under seven minutes per mile—and will happily talk your ear off about the health benefits of sea moss and alkaline water. He plans to open several health clubs in the city—places he sees as “part GNC, part Soho House,” where people can chill out with vegan soft serve while recovering in infrared saunas.
NYC Bridge Runners provided the template, and soon a slew of other New York running cliques would follow. Dao-Yi Chow's Old Man Run Club. Coffey's DeFine New York Run Club. Steve Finley's Brooklyn Track Club. And more recently, Lenny Grullon's Boogie Down Bronx Runners.
Grullon started the Boogie Down in 2017, only two years after he had begun running to lose some weight. “Literally, you can start running at 40 and become a great runner,” he says, “whereas basketball, you can't start at 40 and become a great basketball player. It doesn't work like that in other sports, but it does in running.” He wanted to change the perception of what being a runner could mean for a community like the Bronx, which is “probably last place of all the counties in New York State as being the unhealthiest.”
When he advertised his first run with the Boogie Down—posting on social media, taping up flyers—to his great surprise, no one showed up. It was just him and his cofounder, Jean-Paul Fontana. Eventually he started tricking a few homies into coming; they snapped photos for Facebook and Instagram, and then—ta-da!—one night two total newbies appeared and things just sort of exploded from there. Now the crew has hit a critical mass with dozens of regulars, and Grullon is getting active in several senses of the word: One recent group run involved dashing between local community fridges to refill them.
For Grullon, good health is about consistency over everything else—a club is just a mechanism that makes you want to show up, thereby making consistency easier. “I always tell people, ‘It's stronger if you run one mile every other day than if you try to run six miles in one day,’ ” says Grullon. “That's how you can adjust, the body will adjust, and it becomes easier and easier and easier.” He sees himself as a proof of concept that anyone can get active and transform themselves into a runner. That anyone can do this.
“The people that we have in our running community, these are guys and gals who are not inspired by elite runners, right?” he says. “It has to come from someone that they can feel like, ‘Okay, this person did it. I can do it too.’ And they see that in me. They know I believe in them.”
After exploring all kinds of clubs and crews, I wondered if there were lessons to be gleaned from a smaller collective. A tight-knit family. So I sought out the rock climber Ashima Shiraishi, 20, a prodigy among prodigies who has long been coached by her father. Shiraishi's own athletic journey is well documented (she was the subject of a 2016 profile in The New Yorker in which she was described as “possibly the best female rock climber ever”), but in brief: She started climbing at age six in Central Park, where her father brought her to play. Her parents, both artists who emigrated from Japan, quickly realized that their young daughter possessed a rare talent and sought to nurture her gifts. Her mother would even sew all of Ashima's climbing pants—which she still does to this day—from bright, bold-patterned fabric selected by her father.
Despite her abilities, Shiraishi was an outlier in the climbing world, which was, and still is, overwhelmingly made up of well-off white people. “When I started climbing, there was not a lot of diversity,” she says. “I think in New York, it's special because it's a diverse hub of different people. But when I started, it was still mostly people who were rich and could afford to go to the climbing gyms. Who even knew what climbing was.”
Over Zoom one afternoon in April, Shiraishi, wearing a coveted Bernie Sanders bootleg tee, recounts one story from when she was only seven or eight and competing for the first time—the moment she became keenly aware of the class disparities in the sport she loves. “My parents couldn't afford to get me to the nationals, even though I qualified for it,” she says. “I did the regionals, the divisionals, and all of these competitions that lead to these big championships and all that. My parents couldn't afford to get me a trip down there.” Luckily, some folks at a local gym, Brooklyn Boulders, decided to sponsor her trip if she wore a T-shirt with the establishment's logo on it. “After that event, I went there and I won nationals,” she says. “And that was the first time I put my name on the stage.”
Now Shiraishi's paying that same generosity forward and intends to use her platform to achieve dreams bigger than climbing. She was just accepted to both UCLA and Berkeley and wants to start a clothing line, inspired by the pants her parents made for her. (She's kicking around a few monikers for the line, either her own name or Tamashii, from the Japanese word that means “soul.”) But mostly she wants to use her popularity to make climbing more inclusive. Less white. She recently launched a nonprofit called All Rise, along with Kyle Ng and Gavin Dogan of the brand Brain Dead and Grayston Leonard of Long Beach Rising. This spring they built a free-to-access climbing wall at the Long Beach Rising gym in Long Beach, California—which happens to be my hometown. The goal is to give people from the local community greater access to climbing by providing a free space to practice and take part in a new activity. I tell Shiraishi that her initiative is something that my childhood friends and I would have loved when we were younger.
Even though Shiraishi is a ferocious competitor, the pandemic helped her recalibrate her impression of what it means to be a professional athlete. “I think it gave me perspective that climbing isn't the only thing in the world,” she says. “So I'm actually grateful for that. And it reminded me that climbing can be taken away from me anytime. I could get injured and not be climbing, but I'll be okay. You can find joy through other things.”
Finding little joys. Taking up space where someone like you previously hadn't been able to. So many of these folks were, in their own ways, living examples of how you change existing frameworks and solve real problems. It's an idea laid out by activist and author Grace Lee Boggs in her autobiography, Living for Change, in which she argued that building a healthy, dynamic collective starts with children: “While they are working and absorbing naturally and normally the values of social responsibility and cooperation, they will also be stimulated to learn the skills and acquire information that are necessary to solve real problems.”
I witnessed the idea in action myself that April morning in the Rockaways. When I pulled out my shortboard to donate it to the BSA, Lou Harris said, “Are you sure? This is a nice-ass board!” I told him I was sure, and he immediately gave it to a shy young skater in an orange hoodie. “Bro, thank you!” he said, coming over to dap me up. His name was Jack, and it was his first time out with the BSA. His mother, who was watching him skate with a worried look on her face, said thank you and started to get misty-eyed. The family had recently moved here, and she seemed to realize, all at once, that her son was going to be in good hands. (Later, Harris would post about the moment on BSA's Instagram account. “Our newest member in the BSA Jack just moved here to Rockaway back in January,” he wrote. “It's only fair that we welcome him to the neighborhood with a Surfboard!”)
For Harris, it isn't so much about putting in work or feeling a sense of purpose as it is a way to live. “Ever since we started the BSA and all the TV I've done, I see a lot of Black people coming out to Rockaway to surf,” he says. “People I don't remember seeing out there before. But they're here now, and that's a beautiful thing.”
The way Harris was effecting change in his community was kinetic, and the swirl of people around him seemed to be feeding off his energy. If you're constantly on the move, you never feel unmoored. You're just free.
Chris Gayomali is a GQ articles editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2021 issue with the title "Get Active."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Danielle Levitt
Styled by Jon Tietz
Hair by John Ruidant using R+Co
Makeup by Mark Edio using Bobbi Brown
Tailoring by Alberto Rivera and Eliz Diratsaoglu for Lars Nord Studio
Set design by Eli Metcalf for MHS Artists
