ASRA Club
Running is often sold as a solitary pursuit. One person, one route, one pair of trainers, one stubborn decision to keep going. But for ASRA Club, running has always been about what happens when nobody has to do it alone.
By Glorious
ASRA Club began with Sahra‑Isha Muhammad‑Jones trying to find her way back to running. She had grown up on the track, discovering early on that athletics gave her a way to steady herself when school felt heavy and life moved too fast. It was the place she could breathe properly. When GCSEs arrived, she stepped away, convinced she needed to focus on studying. Years later, she realised she missed not just the sport but the version of herself she met when she ran, the one who felt grounded and capable and entirely her own.
Trying to return was not as simple as she hoped. She had begun wearing the hijab and wanted a women‑only club, somewhere she could run without feeling she had to justify her presence. She quickly realised how few spaces offered that. “I felt like I had to prove myself in certain spaces or be accepted before I could even just run,” she says. Running is meant to be uncomplicated. For her, it wasn’t.
She asked other Muslim women whether they felt the same and the response was immediate. Hundreds of messages arrived, full of stories about belonging, safety and the desire to be active without having to navigate someone else’s discomfort first.
That was the moment she decided to build the thing she couldn’t find. In 2019, ASRA Club began on a track in South London, held together by a woman who was still travelling between lectures and training sessions, doing whatever needed doing to keep the idea alive.
BARRIERS
Seven years later, ASRA is no longer something that fits neatly into a single sentence. The community now includes more than a thousand women across the UK and The Gambia, where ASRA also operates as a registered charity. There are two track locations, intergenerational park walks, wellbeing programmes, school partnerships and opportunities for women to enter races without cost becoming another barrier. The scale has grown, but the intention has stayed close to the beginning. ASRA is shaped by Muslim women, for Muslim women, with faith treated as part of sporting life rather than something to be worked around. “For some, it is a way to make connections with others, for others it’s a way to make a connection with themselves and for most of us, it’s both,” Sahra‑Isha says. The point is not performance. The point is belonging.
When the women talk about ASRA, one word keeps returning. Sisterhood. Laura, ASRA’s Creative Lead, describes walking into one of its spaces as feeling like a warm embrace, the moment when whatever anxieties you carried there can finally drop. You can be present. You can be yourself. You can move without worrying about how you look or who might be watching.
That sense of togetherness travelled with the team when ASRA took on the European edition of The Speed Project, an unconventional endurance relay that asks teams to run from Chamonix to Marseille without a set route, choosing their own way across the distance.
The original race, born in the US, is known for being one of the most notorious and frankly unhinged tests of collective stamina in running, the kind of challenge people attempt precisely because it makes no practical sense. Nine runners, four crew members and three drivers spent three days running day and night, navigating their own route across France while driving ahead to each changeover point in cars and an RV that quickly became a kitchen, bedroom, meeting room and recovery space. Directed by Aisyah Octavia and released through Make Running, Within You follows the team through the mountains, the heat, the exhaustion and the strange intimacy of living on top of one another while trying to do something that feels slightly impossible.
unconventional
The women settle into the relay’s rhythm as three long days unfold. They are tired, funny, anxious, hungry, confused, delighted and occasionally overwhelmed. They talk about ideal running conditions, tease one another, try to rest in an RV that never really stops moving and admit when they are frightened. As the relay stretches on, the conversations shift from the light-hearted moments of being together to more personal and vulnerable reflections on the experience, revealing the different ways each woman is navigating the challenge. Their faith threads through the hardest stretches, and so does the steady presence of one another, each person stepping in when someone is tired or unsure. What emerges is not just a lesson in endurance but a portrait of what it looks like when a group of women decide to carry one another through something extraordinarily difficult, including the everyday reality of being a visible Muslim woman in France.
For Sahra‑Isha, that visibility is one of the reasons Within You needed to exist. “It’s important for this documentary to show others that we too can do the same thing and shed light on the fact that Muslim women are and can participate in endurance sports,” she says. Since completing The Speed Project, she sees her role within the running industry differently. She feels more empowered to help others unlock their inner athlete, a phrase that has been part of ASRA since the beginning.
The final scenes bring the whole crew back together in Marseille. The team arrives exhausted, emotional and relieved, greeted by warm embraces, tears, laughter and the pride of people who have spent three days pushing themselves past what they thought they could manage. Laura still returns to those moments. “Watching the team running across the finish line, the moments of warm embrace between everyone, the tears, smiles and endless hugs,” she says. “A moment where we witness our sisterhood in action.”
But the moment that stays with Sahra‑Isha came after the running had stopped. On their final night, the team went to a Senegalese restaurant together. “We had such a fun and beautiful evening,” she says. “I didn’t want the night to end because it encapsulated the true essence of sisterhood for me.” By then, sisterhood had involved considerably more than a nice dinner. It had looked like running beside someone who was frightened, cooking for exhausted teammates, sharing beds in an overcrowded RV and repeatedly finding someone with enough energy left to say, you’ve got this.
Earlier this year, ASRA screened Within You at the BFI for friends, family and the wider community. Sahra‑Isha describes watching it with everyone as surreal and wholesome. “We all laughed, cried and cheered,” she says. Aisyah, who shot and edited the film, finally allowed herself to stop looking for ways to improve it. “The screening was the first time I was truly present and enjoyed the process for what it was,” she says. Laura remembers it as a moment of collective pride, a chance to acknowledge how far the community has come and how much it has built.
SURREAL
The documentary has since been released publicly, giving an audience beyond ASRA access to a community that statistics and programme lists cannot quite capture. It looks like laughter, friendship, shared beliefs and a willingness to push through, carried by the sight of your team cheering at the next changeover. It looks like women deciding that difficulty is worth meeting, provided they meet it together.
Seven years after Sahra‑Isha went looking for a women‑only running club and ended up creating one herself, the ambition has expanded. ASRA has grown from a single track into a community that spans countries and generations, with running sitting alongside wellbeing programmes, school work and opportunities designed to remove the practical barriers that keep women out of sport. The question now is not whether the space exists. It is what they decide to do with it.
Within You is available to watch on YouTube via Make Running HERE. Find out more about ASRA Club at HERE and follow the community on Instagram at @asra.club.
Title image photographed by Maria Camila Ruiz Lora
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