Running is often thought of as a solitary activity, but in fact it is being increasingly used as means of building peace and wellbeing, improving social conditions and bringing people together by groups and organisations all over the world. Part of the reason is undoubtedly that running is one of the simplest forms of human expression, and something that most of us can do even a little of.

Here we look at the work of some of these groups:

The World Harmony Run

For the past twenty years, runners from the World Harmony Run have been crossing the globe with an Olympic-style torch in hand, to date visiting over 140 countries. Along the way, the torch gets passed from to everyone they meet along the route from hand to hand, a common thread linking everyone who comes in contact with it together in a spirit of friendship and togetherness. The Run was founded in 1987 by athlete and philosopher Sri Chinmoy, in an effort to spread the message that there is so much more that unites the inhabitants of this world together than divides them. "This world of ours has everything save and except peace." remarked Sri Chinmoy. "Politicians try to bring about world peace. Peace-dreamers and peace-lovers try to bring about world peace. Each one has a different way. You have one way, he has another way, I may have still another way. But we are all aiming towards the same goal." Visit World Harmony Run site....

Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation

Founded by Kenyan marathon great Tegla Laroupe, which amongst other projects organises Peace Races to heal divisions and prevent conflicts between different groups in her native Western Kenya and Uganda. Most of the great Kenyan Athletes come from the Rift valley area of Kenya, but the regioun also suffers from tension and instability over scarce resources. The Peace races serve as a valuable tool to build trust between the different communities and encourage them to work together for the future. "By using sports, you will be able to bring people together where you can be able to talk." says Tegla of her work., "If you don't try anything, how would you know if you could be successful?" Visit Peace Foundation site...

Running Raw Project

This project was started by Tim Van Orden - a one man effort to show that conscious eating can be a deciding factor in performance, and can even significantly mitigate the effects of age. He has set himself some pretty ambitious personal goals (making the US track and field team at age 40!) but the aim is to be a visible demonstration, in his words, "to scientifically prove that an organic, plant-based diet, consisting of uncooked, unrefined, and unprocessed whole foods yields the highest performance for the human body." He hopes that to show that a raw diet can have performance effects even exceeding that of doping and hence voluntarily rid athletics of its drug problem. Visit runningraw site...