Community club offering safe haven for Riyadh runners

Riyadh: Nezar Al-Tuwaijri’s bucket list from 13 years ago had, in his own words today, a “trillion” items on it.

Among them were learning “three or four languages” and running a marathon.

“They were basically just the wild dreams,” the 31-year-old Riyadh resident told Arab News.

But one of them has come true, many times over, albeit inspired by a traumatic event.

As a university student in Boston from 2010, Al-Tuwaijri came across the city’s famous annual marathon.

He said: “I would only find out on the day of the marathon. I’d basically see the runners passing and cheer them on. This happened in 2011 and 2012. In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings happened.”

A year earlier, Al-Tuwaijri had torn his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) and underwent surgery on his knee at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The following year, in the aftermath of the bombing, the hospital took in many of the injured.

“In order to support the hospital, I decided I would run on their Boston Marathon team (in 2024). They had a campaign called Life Getting Breakthroughs, which is basically research in the medical field. I decided to run on their team and fundraise for the hospital,” he added.

Al-Tuwaijri was born in Virginia and had moved to Saudi Arabia with his parents at the age of eight, before returning to the US to study at Northeastern University.

He said: “The bombing was like a catalyst event for me. A city that I had grown to love and appreciate was attacked at a sports event. I basically registered to support the hospital, to support the city.”

The Dubai and Berlin marathons, among others, would follow.

But back in Riyadh in 2016, Al-Tuwaijri had no one to run with so he took to running alone in Wadi Hanifa.

It was