CAIRO -- Young Egyptians are once again organizing on social media and taking to the streets of Cairo by the hundreds every Friday, not to protest injustice or tussle with police but to enjoy long runs through one of the world's most crowded and chaotic cities.
On a recent Friday morning, around 300 young people gathered at a central square, a small fraction of the 2,500 that had signed up for the event on Facebook, but a reasonable showing for an event held at 7 a.m. on a weekend.
Organizers with bullhorns led the crowd of young men and women -- many wearing headscarves -- in a warm-up, and then they took off, flooding a four-lane road and occasionally parting before honking taxis.
Cairo -- a city of 20 million people packed onto the banks of the Nile, with few green spaces and no jogging paths -- is an unlikely venue for distance running.
The streets are jammed at nearly all hours with smoke-belching microbuses, manic taxis, speeding motorbikes and the occasional donkey cart. The crumbling sidewalks are often worse -- blocked by parked cars, mounds of garbage and mangy street dogs. Anyone who runs in Cairo can expect stares and gentle mocking, and women must contend with leering, lewdness and occasional unwanted touching.
And yet despite all the obstacles, young Egyptians have established several increasingly popular running clubs over the past two years. A half-marathon this weekend drew thousands of runners, and more than 200 volunteers -- some wearing American football pads and helmets -- guided the runners through traffic circles and onto and off of overpasses.
Small running groups catering mainly to expatriates have been around for years, but Egyptians trace the growth in local interest to Cairo Runners, a group with a large social media presence that attracts hundreds of people to its weekly runs and has inspired similar groups across the city.
"The first time I ever went out on the streets to run was with Cairo Runners," said Mariz Doss, 27, who is now one of the group's organizers. "Whenever I traveled outside Egypt I saw that people had the opportunity to run outside in their own country, and I thought it was a pity that we didn't have this in Egypt."
The group organizes weekly runs and advertises them on its Facebook page, which has racked up more than 320,000 "likes." The runs are usually held early Friday -- the first day of the Egyptian weekend -- when the streets are mostly empty. Strength in numbers protects the runners from both cars and street harassment.
"We run when everything that is wrong with Cairo is asleep, and that has been our winning formula," said Salma Shahin, the group's social media manager. Shahin's cousin, Ibrahim Safwat, founded Cairo Runners in December 2012. The first run attracted 70 people, and now a weekly 5K run can draw up to 2,000, she said.
The group began organizing runs nearly two years after Egypt's popular uprising toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. At the time, Egyptians were fiercely divided over his successor, the Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. Demonstrations regularly set off clashes, and if hundreds of people were running through the streets it was usually to get away from something.
"The first time we ran in the streets all the workers and doormen stared at us," Doss recalls. "They asked, 'Who are you running from? Is this a demonstration or what?'"
The streets have been much calmer over the past year after a crackdown by the military-backed government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who overthrew Morsi at the height of the unrest in 2013.
Organizers say they've never encountered any problems with the authorities.
"When hundreds of people are in running shoes and shorts, we don't seem that scary," Shahin said.
A Section on 04/19/2015