At the starting line of the 2025 Chicago Marathon, Matt Bourland was wearing a custom jersey with ‘Free Palestine’ written on it.
“I thought it was important to slightly decenter myself,” he said. “There’s this reading of running that is very individual and sometimes comes off as very selfish, just feeding the ego and spending a bunch of money to go and do these large races … but I think running can be a very powerful action.”
That’s where he met Kenny Moll, after noticing that Moll had ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Fuck ICE’ written on his chest. “Something I immediately respected about [Moll] was his using his privilege to center what’s important, which is the liberation of all people,” Bourland told me.
Now, Moll and Bourland are two co-founders of the Global Endurance Collective (GECo), a volunteer-run nonprofit that mobilizes “runners, walkers, bikers, skaters, and movers to take action for social and climate justice.”
GECo came a few years after Moll started A Week for the World in 2023. Living in Chicago, he challenged himself to run seven marathons in seven days to raise money and awareness for the climate.
“I was looking for a way to combine my passion for environmental activism and protecting the planet, working with people, building community, and my passion for running.”
A Week for the World fell short two days because of the very same climate crisis that Moll was running to fight: “the same wildfires that turned New York skies orange migrated into Chicago.” But Moll wasn’t finished.
The next year, 2024, he brought A Week for the World to New York and expanded the project’s reach by having more runners join throughout the week and including a speaker series after each day of running. Moll, Bourland, and other athletes and advocates founded GECo in 2025 to facilitate and broaden the project’s continued growth.
In 2026, from June 14th to 20th, members and friends of GECo gathered at 6 am each morning in Central Park for the fourth year of A Week for the World. After running up to 26.2 miles in laps surrounded by lush greenery, runners heard from lineups of organizers, advocates, content creators, and students as part of the event’s daily speaker series.
On Friday, the sixth day of the weeklong challenge and the sixth iteration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, I listened to the speakers (the lineup included the activist-lawyer Steven Donziger, racial justice activist and elite runner Russell Dinkins, and community organizer, EMS worker, and climate advocate Michael Magazine) and spoke with participants afterwards.
Reflecting on the project’s evolution, Moll stressed the importance of collectivity: “It’s not just an endurance challenge anymore. It really is a week of community building and a week of activation for our planet.”
Jamilah Maronde, a GECo co-founder who has been involved with A Week for the World since its inception in 2023, was on the same page. “This started as one person, one man who wanted to do something instead of nothing,” she said. “Today, there are [hundreds of] people that come out during the course of the week to get involved in all different kinds of ways.”
“[We’re] the antithesis of closing doors in the running community.”
Amid the seemingly ever-increasing popularity of running, GECo seeks to actively resist the growing corporatization and commodification that have accompanied the sport’s rise. While massive, corporate-sponsored races can often be cost-prohibitive (the entry fee for the New York City Marathon is $333 this year), Maronde believes that A Week for the World sets itself apart from most races by being free and open to all.
“You don’t have to pay to come run, we’re using public space, our priority is making this inclusive and accessible rather than making it highly commercialized … running is supposed to be a sport that is very easily accessible,” she said. “You shouldn’t need expensive gear to be able to do this, yet all these brands and companies tell you that you do.”
Moll agreed, noting that A Week for the World tries to open doors into the running community instead of closing them. “This is a free event. People are allowed to come out, get free drinks, free food, free water. We have infrastructure to allow people to run however long they want,” Moll told me.
“Running is political.”
At first, it may be hard to understand the link between running and climate justice — or between running and any kind of social or political change, for that matter.
Joe Blanchet disagrees: “Running is political.”
A GECo co-founder and content creator who makes fitness content mixed with political information, Blanchet ran his first-ever marathon and delivered a speech on the sixth day of this year’s A Week for the World.
After his marathon, Blanchet explained why the connection seems so obvious to him. “For those who have thought about it, [running] is explicitly political,” he said. “We run outside, we run in public space, we run on sidewalks, and your taxes go to sidewalks. It can be as basic as that.”
The connection seems to go further. “Running is now a form of radical rebellion, when they’re trying to limit humans’ bodily autonomy, where humans are allowed to exist, and who is allowed to exist in certain spaces based on their identity,” Blanchet added. He also cited how climate policy and funding for local governments directly impact the availability and quality of everyone’s running environments.
For Blanchet, running intersects with both climate injustice and systemic racism. “Black communities are not only disproportionately impacted by climate change and environmental damages, but they’re also impacted by a cultural and physical limitation — access to running isn’t for them,” he said, citing racial stereotypes around the sport and access to running spaces.
“Kenny showed me that I do have time for activism.”
Jillian Calero is another GECo co-founder and an obstetrics and gynecology physician’s assistant from the Bronx. Last week, she became the first woman to complete the full weeklong, running seven marathons for a total of 184 miles in seven days.
Six days and over 150 miles into the challenge, Calero told me that despite feeling “a little tired,” with some soreness “here and there,” her body was holding up without much of a hitch. The mental component seemed to be proving more difficult: “The first two days you think, ‘Oh, I ran two marathons, but I still have five more,’ which is a little daunting.”
With an impressive amount of energy given how much she’d been running, Calero then walked me through what goes through her mind while she clicks off the miles. “On hot, humid days, you think a lot about the climate crisis and how this is going to affect summer running and fall marathon training … I do think about the climate crisis a lot when we’re running.”
A Week for the World was instrumental in bringing Calero into the world of social change.
“I have a busy life … in my head, I don’t think that I have time for activism, and Kenny showed me that I do have time for activism. This is me showing myself that I have time, that I play a part, and it’s also showing others that they can play a part in the climate revolution,” she told me.
After her seven marathons, Calero plans to pursue climate organizing in the Bronx. She wants to work with members of her Hispanic community (her family is from Puerto Rico) and specifically investigate the health of children and pregnant mothers in the area.
“The future’s bright for us, and we need to figure out what it looks like.”
Asiah Quattlebaum, a climate organizer and a featured speaker on day six of A Week for the World, thinks that GECo is coming at the perfect time. “[The climate justice movement] has died down recently … a lot of folks are burnt out,” she said. “But we still need to continue the work … That’s why something like [GECo] is super good, so we can get new people to be part of our fight.”
Quattlebaum has witnessed firsthand how A Week for the World activates people into the climate organizing world: “A lot of the runners were asking, ‘How can I get more involved?’ That’s amazing!” She lauded GECo for specifically targeting “ordinary people who are normally not political, or not involved in climate organizing or electoral work” as part of their mobilization efforts.
But the runner-activists at GECo, the Global Endurance Collective, are just getting started. “I think the future’s bright for us, and we need to figure out what it looks like,” Bourland told me. Moll, who created the first Week for the World three years ago, has a simple and cheeky ask: “Join us for the long run.”
