Philadelphia’s Homeless Are Finding New Hope Thanks to This Organization

Now a year has passed from that day at St. John’s, and all Kreuzburg can think about is running and the effect it’s had on his life.

It was the first Sunday in May. Just before 7:30 in the morning, Verne Kreuzburg left one of the many houses in Philadelphia where he used to get high on crystal meth. The drug had taken over his life, leaving him homeless and forever focused on his next high. To him, this was just another morning of some unknown day in an unknown year.

But in Philadelphia, the first Sunday in May is a major event for the competitive and the aspiring-tough. They train all year for it. It’s the day of the Broad Street Run, an event promoters call “the Largest 10-Mile Road Race in the USA.”

And Kreuzburg wandered along the race route, beside the masses of runners, in his disconnected, euphoric state.

“How can they do that? How can they run that far?” he remembered asking himself.

He’d wondered the same thing about the smaller groups of runners he’d seen on another lost morning, sweating in their thin, bright attire and controlling their breath. Little did Kreuzburg know that this would become the sport to save his life.