Flowerboy Field Trip 001 - The Ground Is Lava

Welcome back to the blog, seems to be consistent and hoping you guys can enjoy these with a coffee in the morning or a wind down before bed. This week we recap our time running at Mt. Batur here in Bali with some friends and dive into what running means to each one of the lovely humans that joined us.

The idea of going up to Mt. Batur with some friends from Run Club was started with the prompt of permissionless acts. Instead of waiting around for a brand, job or client to approach you, ya just get out there and do it. Could be design, a campaign, an art show or whatever your dream scenario might be. Take what ya have and see what happens.

This permissionless act’s first idea was to showcase the undiscovered array of talent that Indonesia holds. I truly believe Bali is oozing with potential and I want to show the world. Not only the locations and their incredible beauty but the individuals with their effortless styles, diverse backgrounds and creative passions. All connected through the run club.

Running gives me space to think, to day dream and come up with wild ideas. Coming from skateboarding, I thought the idea of taking the layout of most skate videos and applying it to running.

That’s generally a montage of some sort at the beginning , then it splits into individual parts that showcase how each person tells their story through their approach, style etc.

This connected with a short and sweet statement from each person about what running is to them and we had our concept. We rented a ten seater van, invited ten people to leave Flowerboy at 2:15 in the morning with not much of an idea of what was going on other than running and Mt. Batur.

The ride was quiet and most people slept on the way up. Our driver was a bit of a legend in navigating some massive puddles along the way to our drop off point.

It was now approaching 5 am and we were ten humans in the pitch black with half the amount of headlamps we needed. We had a general idea of a main location we wanted to shoot which is one of the most fun sections of the local trail race BTR.

It’s essentially a steep, long, super soft and loose with big rocks hidden section on the lower part of the mountain. Thinking it would be cool to all start at the top and run down together. Thankfully we had a producer in Alea and the skillsets of both Yogi And Iman to paint the picture for us.

We hiked up and through this in the dark then up and up in anticipation of the sunrise. the whole crew stopped at some Geysers to crack some jokes and watch the sun greet the mountain scape around us. It’s incredibly beautiful up there and easy to forget that it’s so close to our daily lives on the coast.

The skill sets and experience levels of each one of us varied considerably but none the less we all cheered and supported each other as we all ran faster than we needed to on the way back down. We all took turns running one really long and steep section. Arno went first and made it seem like his knees were rubber the way he let gravity take over his decent. It was so cool to see how everyone approached it with different levels of caution and finesse. Unfortunately for the viewers everybody managed to stay on their feet. 

The money shot was a lot more difficult to wrangle then previously considered. With the idea of kicking up dust for dramatic effect being shunned by the eternal dampness of rain season. We tried a few different ways of running a human stampede down a lava rock mountain. It’s wild how small some of the photos make us look in this incredible landscape. 

The level of stoke, amount of laughs and cheeky jokes made for such a special morning. To later consider this was “training” for the race in May made it that much better.

Keep an eye on our instagram for more content around this and we will launch Flowerboy Fieldtrips soon. This will give you guys an opportunity to get out there and make some memories. The idea being some training and time in the mountains together leading up to BTR. 

“ a habit to which every run has an intention. To think about something or to think about nothing at all. To enter a void or avoid, to feel the passing of time, or to feel sublime, sometimes I run for a reason, sometimes I run for no reason.”

• Rama

Thanks for reading and hope to run together soon!

• Flowerboy