by GRP Trail Runner Canyon Woodward

All of us who love running know that it’s not about weekly mileage and race results. It’s about the path, the daily practice of striving toward audacious goals, and the ever deepening connection to self, community, and place made through that striving.

Much like running, organizing teaches us that change comes slowly, through uncertain terrain and dogged work put in day after day. My love for both running and organizing has been shaped by this understanding - that in both, you must anchor yourself to a commitment to keep showing up, putting your head down and trusting in the work, even in those times when the finish line feels devastatingly far away.

I was fortunate to be raised by parents who were and are activists in their own right - though I’ve never heard them refer to themselves as such - engaged throughout their lives both globally and locally in bringing folks together for peace and environment fights. I appreciated their work but largely from a distance, and it wasn’t until college that I really found my own meaning in organizing work.

My freshman year, taking part in protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, I met another first-year, Chloe Maxmin. She soon started a bold campaign to pressure Harvard to divest its ~$50 billion endowment from fossil fuel corporations. We ended up being the co-coordinators of Divest Harvard and spending the bulk of our energy throughout college organizing petitions, referendums, sit-ins, and blockades and slowly building the support of students, faculty, alumni, and community members into a campaign 70,000 strong.

Chloe and I became best friends and alongside dozens of dedicated friends and co-conspirators the divestment campaign became a small part of a growing national climate movement (Harvard ultimately agreed to divest in 2021). But as time passed, we realized that grassroots pressure - while necessary - was not enough on its own. We needed to expand from protesting to also electing the bold leaders who would fight for change, and building the durable majorities necessary to pass much needed legislation. That’s when Chloe and I turned our attention home. 

Home, where we were raised to appreciate the benefits of living in community and looking out for one another in times of need. Home, where we learned the necessity of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. Home, where we developed strong connections to the land and to each other. Home, where we gained faith in the basic goodness of our neighbors and learned to respect and listen to them, even when we didn’t agree. Home to the dirt roads where we were raised - rural red districts often written off by the political establishment. 

At 25, Chloe decided to run for office in Maine and enlisted me to manage her campaign. In 2018, she became the youngest woman in the Maine House of Representatives. As a freshman legislator she succeeded in passing the Maine Green New Deal, one of the first successful pieces of GND legislation in the country. Two years later, she became the youngest female Senator in Maine history with a stunning upset against the Senate Minority Leader, the first such victory against an incumbent Senate leader since 1992. As The Washington Post noted at the time, her victory stood out even more “because of where she was able to win: in a district that contains the most rural county in America’s most rural state.”

Those victories were important, but they were about more than just one person winning an election - they were about challenging the flawed strategies and inertia of the Democratic Party leadership and its cabal of consultants and building a movement in rural America focused on listening and building power with regular people. As we traded blows with party leadership, we quickly realized that the challenges we faced and overcame in these rural Maine districts were the same dynamics holding progressives back all across the country. So we dug deep to distill the lessons we’d learned and create a playbook to share with people doing this important work across the nation.

Chloe’s story and our playbook struck a nerve. As it hit the mainstream with features in outlets such as The New York Times, Bill Maher, and The New Yorker, people from all over the country began reaching out to us for help. We supported everyone we could, spending hours every week on the phone and zoom calls giving trainings and coaching folks, but the need was overwhelming. So we decided to build a home for these folks in the form of an organization that we hoped could meet the moment and become a national incubator for rural candidates and organizers.

We started Dirtroad Organizing in 2022 to galvanize the next generation of leaders in rural communities, where organizers, candidates, and voters often feel abandoned by progressive organizations. So far we’ve trained 72 leaders from 29 states, all working to shift the political landscape of rural America. This political cycle, most of our alumni ran for office and either won or outperformed their predecessors in an election that saw most rural districts move even further to the right. This work is a deep well of hope for me, but there’s no denying that the times feel dark as we turn the page into a second Trump presidency.

We clearly have so, so far to go. It’s hard not to draw the parallel to the lowest parts of a long mountain race: mile 80 of a hundred miler perhaps, cold and dehydrated, trying to focus on the in and out of warm breaths illuminated by headlamp, the miles ahead feeling impossibly long and dark… Don’t go there. Stay with the rhythm of breath, the steady momentum of one small step after another.

Through the campaigns and then Dirtroad Organizing, running has become my outlet, my way to stay grounded. I began to see the natural bridge: trail runners are primed to be activists. Teams like the Green Racing Project, brands like Patagonia, organizations like Protect Our Winters, athletes & race directors & journalists like Clare Gallagher, Peyton Thomas, Jenny Jurek, Dakota Jones, Jared Campbell, Zöe Rom and so many others. We’re all connected by a love for the land, a love that must be the locus for action. As trail runners, so many of us are connected to rural America. If it’s not where we live, it’s a place we go to enjoy our favorite trails, to connect with place, others, and ourselves. Trail running has taught me to embrace the discomfort, to find joy in the struggle, and to keep moving forward.

One day running up the mountain behind my home in North Carolina after a big winter storm, ducking through rhododendron branches laden with snow, I followed my own footprints from the day before overlaid with the fresh pawprints of an animal I couldn’t identify. Near the top of the mountain the prints diverged, mine continuing along the old logging road over the mountain, the animal’s tracking off through the woods to follow the ridgeline. In that moment it felt like an invitation, to go a direction I’d never considered. The tracks ended up leading me on a several mile traverse with a fair amount of bushwhacking around the head of the valley I’d grown up in but never really explored off the beaten track. That day led to afternoons poring over old USGS maps of the area spread across the dining room table, which over the following years led me to all kinds of exploratory running and bushwhacking linking up many forgotten logging roads that crisscross the mountains I call home. 

Recently I was running up the road through the cow pastures that form the center of the valley. I took in the mountains around me, gazing up at the ridgeline where I first followed those snowy prints, and registered for the first time the gradual yet profound shift this intimate exploration of my backyard has had on the way I see the landscape around me. My sense of place has expanded in a way I didn’t know possible. Sure, I’ve always seen and loved these mountains, but used to see them in a way that was more akin to a painting on the wall. Moving to behold, but set apart, taken in as a whole, almost two-dimensional. Now it feels as if I've reached in and run each brushstroke of that painting, such that when I look upon the mountains I experience the vista completely differently: I’m able to place myself and feel myself overland within them, identifying drainages, judging distance and terrain, and seeing in my mind’s eye beyond my line of sight from the road I plod along. 

My experience with politics and activism has not been dissimilar. Coming home I connected in a new way not only with the land, but with the decisions we must make together. Attending county meetings, strategizing with local candidates running for school board, commissioner, state legislature, and U.S. Congress, and ultimately co-founding Dirtroad Organizing. Coming to understand how each of us is part of the political landscape of our communities and beyond, whether we have eyes for it or not. Realizing that we can reach out and touch it, can influence it, and be influenced by it. I feel myself beginning to develop a sense of place in the political and social sense that mirrors the sense of place formed through running. And through our participation in both those things - the running and the political - we go outward and connect with community in meaningful ways. Nourishing one another’s spirits, and accepting nourishment.

A favorite story of our Divest Harvard days often recounted by my dear friend Henney is a candlelight vigil we held outside the university president’s office. As we sang songs together arm in arm, a stout breeze blew through Harvard Yard. Every minute or two some candles would be snuffed out. Each time one did, a neighbor turned and held their flame out, creating a wind shelter with their hand, to relight the candle. One of the most important things that can be accomplished with this work is to be that flame for other people to become engaged or relight their flame.

People often ask me what gives me hope. It’s not some ideal - it’s movement, it’s action, it’s taking part. For me, hope isn’t a passive feeling; it’s a living thing that we cultivate through effort, through community, and through setting audacious goals and showing up for the long-distance grind of chipping away at them. The hope work that I’m recommitting to is about supporting others who are engaging vigorously with their communities, passing on hard-won strategies and experience we have gained along the way, while continuing to learn and strive towards something better. It's about recognizing that change only ever comes through the hard, joyful work of building community and organizing strategically for a better world, one step, one stride, one conversation at a time. It’s the kind of slow, steady work that we know intimately as runners: you might not always see progress in the moment, but with dogged commitment to putting in the work day after day, eventually we look up and realize we’ve made it further than we could’ve dreamed when we first got started. And from that vantage point hopefully we can appreciate more than ever the sweetness of those miles and the joy and meaning created with our companions along the way.