When Ronnie Porter went to his first We Run 313 meetup in May 2019, he wasn’t exactly there for the run. He had just gone through a divorce and figured it might be a good way to meet people and network for his business, Ronnie Love Catering.
At that point, he had only ever run on a treadmill, but he wanted to support his friend and one of the group’s co-founders, Lance Woods, so Porter set out on the two-mile out-and-back route with the club.
The run was exhausting—Porter weighed 315 pounds at the time and had to stop and walk every few minutes—but he made it to the finish line. “There were plenty of times when I couldn’t run half a block and I wanted to turn around and go back,” Porter tells Runner’s World. “But there were people behind me saying, ‘Don’t give up, keep going,’ so I kept going.”
Now Porter—known as Ronnie Love—is a team captain and pace leader and he uses those same words of encouragement that inspired him to finish what he started. “I was in a dark space, and as I kept running with the team, socializing and coming to the runs, I slowly climbed myself out of that dark hole,” Porter says. “We Run 313 really saved my life.”
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Source: This Detroit Running Group is Transforming Lives in the Community, Two Miles at a Time
