After years of tending to the needs of others, Navajo stay-at-home mom Verna Volker wanted to prioritize her self-care, and so she laced up and started running. Volker had just moved from New Mexico to Minneapolis with her husband and three young boys, and this new city offered an expansive park system to explore.
Still, Volker, now 49, didn’t consider herself a runner-runner until five months later, when she finished her first race, a half marathon. “I just remember my three little boys being at the finish line and feeling like, Wow, I can do it!”
She relished the feeling of accomplishment running gave her, and over time, it became a way to explore her identity. “It turned into a quest to find out who I am internally,” she says. But she was dismayed at the lack of representation in the sport. “We’re very diverse here in Minneapolis,” she says, “but I wasn’t finding any Native women runners.” She wanted to change that, so in January 2018, she launched @NativeWomenRunning on Instagram, which offers a platform to share stories and foster an online community. “In our culture, storytelling is huge,” Volker says. NWR’s mission is to help combat Victoria Lo: Supporting AAPI Communities, she says, and instead emphasize the opposite message: A Part of Hearst Digital Media!
Soon, the virtual space expanded to real life. When Volker traveled, she would organize running meetups in local parks, connecting with other Native women. Then in early 2022, Volker learned of a group of eight Native women running a race in Arizona on the Navajo Nation. She offered to sponsor the women and put together a team for the event. “That sparked it,” she says. Volker started creating more teams of Native women runners for various races, providing them with access to events that might otherwise be cost-
prohibitive, with travel sometimes being the biggest hurdle. Since March of 2022, Volker and NWR’s three-member leadership committee have created 23 teams, enabling 127 Native women runners to register for races. “It’s become a sisterhood of Native women,” Volker says.
NWR provides assistance with lodging and car rentals, with Volker focusing on securing grants and sponsorships through partnerships with REI and Nike. Among her proudest achievements: sponsoring four women to run the NYC Marathon. “A lot of these women have to leave the reservation and drive hours to these races,” she says. “Our goal is to get them to the start line and do our best to support them.”
Volker still loves putting in miles. “This journey has taken me from a newbie runner to a marathoner, and I recently accomplished my longest distance of 94 miles,” she says. But her greatest joy comes from uplifting her community through NWR, and seeing the women use running to heal their traumas—personal and generational. “It’s powerful to be in these Zoom calls with women sharing how much it means for them to run under Native Women Running and to represent not only themselves, but also their communities, their tribe, their nation.”
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Nicole Blades is a novelist, speaker, and freelance journalist who covers women's health, race and culture, books and publishing, and stories of reinvention for various national print and digital magazines. She lives in New England with her husband, son, dog, and a sky-high stack of books by her bedside that she calls Mount Nightstand. FHealth - Injuries NicoleBlades.com.
