by Jonathan van Geuns, June 26, 2025
In an ultra, there often comes a point when the legs go heavy, the stomach turns, the trail seems to tilt uphill in every direction. You crawl into an aid station, to gather, regroup, get what you need, and carry on. What if trail running itself had that kind of infrastructure, not just water and watermelons, but solidarity? What if our entire sport were a kind of “mutual aid station:” built to meet real needs, shared among everyone, and rooted in the belief that no one gets left behind?
When I wrote Edward Said and the Question of Running, I wanted to unsettle the idea that trail running exists outside of politics. That the trail is simply a place to escape. I tried to show how we carry power, in our shoes, our skin, our stories. That every step on “public land” echoes with histories of displacement and denial. Even our desire to disconnect is itself shaped by who has the privilege to do so. I was trying to tug at a thread that many of us feel but rarely name, that our running lives don’t exist apart from history, politics, or power. We cannot separate trail running from the world we’re running through. These are not separate issues. This is the space we run in. Noticing isn’t enough. So the next question is: what do we do with that awareness?
If my first piece chafed a little, well, time to lube up and keep moving. We’re only at the first aid station...
The idealized runner is often cast as lean, rugged, cis, white, able-bodied, with a deep gear closet and the freedom to train long hours. Myself included. Everyone else is, by implication, an exception. Train harder. Pay your fee. Carry your weight. Don’t complain. Don’t get political. It mirrors the world around us: atomized, unequal, unsustainable. When something does go wrong, when fire shuts down a race, it becomes clear how little collective infrastructure we have. Our safety net is thin.
Trans and queer people are being criminalized. Across the U.S., more than 30 states have passed laws that criminalize trans identities or severely restrict queer rights, including participation in sports. Homelessness is skyrocketing, and rural public lands, often used informally by displaced people, are policed as zones of exclusion rather than refuge. The same public lands that so many romanticize are under siege: by privatization, resource extraction, settler violence masked as conservation. Migrants cross the same mountains we chase a Strava segment on, and are met not with aid stations or trail angels, but with surveillance, detention, and sometimes death. I say this not to make anyone feel guilty for chasing joy, but to ask: why is that joy not shared? Why do I get to enjoy aid stations and others get armed checkpoints?
Black and Brown runners still face disproportionate risk in rural spaces. Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man, killed by armed assailants in Georgia lays bare the lethal risks faced by Black people in “open” spaces. BIPOC runners report harassment on trails and rural roads. FBI data shows hate crimes in parks rose in 2020 and 2022, ~ 3.3% occurred in these public spaces. Residents in racially diverse neighborhoods often lack access to forests, wetlands, and trails. Majority non-white neighborhoods have 44% less park acreage, serving almost 5 times more people. Across North America and Europe, less than 1% of participants in mainstream trail events are Black.
States like Utah and Idaho are pushing bills to transfer millions of acres of federal public land to state or private control, a move that would slash access and weaken environmental protections. From designating over 2 million acres of national monuments to opening lands to oil, gas, timber, and mining, the public lands we run on are increasingly eyed for profit. In 2025, over 3,400 Forest Service, 1,000 Park Service, and 800 BLM workers were laid off, throwing trail maintenance, wildfire mitigation, and permitting into chaos.
As the sport we love continues to grow, with more races, more people, more strain on land, more labor, the imbalance is stark: who benefits or bears the cost. If we pretend running exists in some apolitical utopia, we miss the point, and the chance to build something together.
I’ve been thinking a lot about mutual aid. Dean Spade’s short, brilliant book on the subject changed the way I think about my work and about running. In a time when social bonds are thin, when races sell out in seconds, when public lands are on fire, and queer, trans, and racialized people are under attack, what does it mean to show up for each other, not just ourselves?
Spade writes that mutual aid is participatory, solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors. What if the most radical thing we could do as runners is to slow down and turn toward each other? Mutual aid doesn’t mean charity (or charity bibs). I don't mean to say these are meaningless. But they can’t be the endpoint. They have to be the doorway to something deeper. To building shared systems of care, survival, and seeing our runs as chances to steward land. It means volunteering not out of guilt but out of belief in collective possibility. It means refusing to let rugged individualism be the default, and instead ask: how do we build a sport—perhaps a movement—where no one is left behind?
What Mutual Aid Is Not
The term mutual aid has been readily diluted. The running world is not exempt. Mutual aid is not a gear giveaway posted by a major shoe brand. It’s not donating a running vest to a diversity initiative while continuing to race on lands stolen from the very same communities. It’s not an influencer-led trail cleanup where selfies are more carefully curated than the routes themselves.
These are acts of charity: hierarchical, image-driven, temporary. They assume that some have what others lack, and that the primary role of those with resources is to bestow them downward. Spade writes that charity is designed to help improve the image of elites who are funding it, and put a inadequate Band-Aid on the massive social wound their greed creates. In a sport where wealthy hobbyists often dominate the cultural narrative, charity maintains that order.
Running is saturated with these logics. You see it in how “giving-back” is marketed as a box to check. An afternoon trail day, a repost of an Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, a few free race entries for underrepresented runners. These gestures rarely challenge the system that created the disparities to begin with. In fact, they often reinforce it. They allow race directors, brands, and companies to appear benevolent while maintaining control: over who gets what, how much, and at what cost. They require no fundamental shift in how power or how wealth is distributed.
Mutual aid, by contrast, is not a transaction. It is not saviorism or helping “the less fortunate.” It also is not tidy, not marketable, and almost never profitable. Mutual aid is about building horizontal relationships of care and responsibility, where we recognize that our well-being is bound up with others’. Like checking in when someone’s injured, or joining someone for a late night run when they fear going out on their own. That we all have needs and capacities. That survival, joy, safety are collective projects.
Charity tells us the problem is the person; unfit, unprepared, underprivileged. Mutual aid sees the system. It sees the underfunded public lands, the inaccessible trails, the medical racism that endangers Black and Indigenous runners, the immigration laws that criminalize movement. It does not ask whether a person is “deserving”; it asks how we can organize together so no one has to earn their right to run.
We, in our trail world, love to talk about community. And I get it. “Community” sounds good. It’s comforting. But comfort alone doesn’t build justice. The question is what kind? Community that performs generosity for clout, or community that digs deep, risks discomfort, and redistributes power? If we’re serious about the latter, then we need to stop mistaking charitable gestures for radical solidarity. Charity is a sparkler. Mutual aid is a slow burn. One flashes, one endures. Mutual aid begins where hierarchy ends.
What Mutual Aid Looks Like
Some aid stations look impressive but serve nothing but sugar and long queues. Mutual aid, by contrast, stocks what people actually need, because those people built it. No hierarchy. No photo ops. Just the real work of getting each other through. Maybe you're not starting a nonprofit. Maybe you're just trying to get in your weekend run. If you're wondering where you fit in all this, start small. If you’ve ever offered your poles to a stranger, if you’ve stayed with someone who bonked, if you’ve felt safer because someone noticed you on trail. That’s the beginning. Mutual aid isn’t something extra. It’s already in you.
Mutual aid starts from the premise: we keep us safe. Not companies or nonprofits beholden to grants or PR optics. Just people, working together to meet each other’s needs and build power that outlasts the next crisis. This looks like grassroots crews working with Jeffco Open Space in Colorado, not as volunteers doing charity, but as athletes working shoulder to shoulder to clear brush, fix tread, repair damage from storms and fire. They don’t separate trail work from trail use. They see themselves as part of the land’s life cycle. Their model is mutual aid, not service.
Mutual aid exposes the reality that people do not have what they need and propose that we can address this injustice together by cultivating solidarity across differences and imagination to build new ways of living. You can see that at work in the Poudre Wilderness Volunteers in Colorado, formed in response to Forest Service budget cuts. Instead of lamenting government abandonment, they organized. In the wake of the Cameron Peak Fire, they restored many trails. It looks like Runners for Public Lands, a decentralized network that empowers trail communities to care for the lands they run in. Not just with cleanups or gear swaps, but through policy campaigns and ecological advocacy. This isn’t volunteering as optics. It’s stewardship as resistance.
Ventana Wilderness Alliance patrols, maintains, and restores Big Sur trails, the Sykes Hot Springs post-fire, and launching youth stewardship programs. It looks like West Fork Conservancy, where volunteers haul out trash, extinguish fires, and support forest staff. In areas where systems have withdrawn, mutual aid steps in. It doesn’t wait. It mobilizes and builds “people’s infrastructure.” Like the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, where runners, hikers, and local residents create shuttle systems, water caches, and advocacy structures across dozens of “gateway communities.” They map, repair, and defend the trail, for everyone.
Mutual aid looks like The Venture Out Project, which creates backpacking trips and education specifically for queer and trans people. LGBTQ+ outdoor orgs like Brave Trails, Feminist Bird Club, Kindling Collective, Athlete Ally, Queer Nature, and Wyn Wiley’s Pattie Gonia’s Outdoorist Oath are building gear-libraries, skills programs, hikes, and environmental advocacy, grounded in intersectional justice. International Frontrunners, organizing LGBTQ+ running clubs around the world. Black to the Trails in the UK, where over 70% of participants are POC and women. These are lifelines. Networks built from a truth too many races ignore: safety is not evenly distributed, and joy is a form of justice.
In running, that might mean sharing gear not as hand-me-downs but as collective resources. It might mean rethinking race formats, centering care, building in structures for childcare, medical access, or community grief rituals after climate disaster. It might mean helping a runner you don’t know get to the start line. It might mean calling out racism in your running group when it’s uncomfortable. It might mean holding the darn shovel instead of the camera.
Spade puts it clearly, mutual aid is also the work of building the world we want to live in. Not one day, but now. Mutual aid doesn’t mean we all do everything. We do what we can, together, without hierarchy, saviorism, and without delay. We stop waiting for the sport, or the world, to change on its own. We become the change, with love, rage and blistered feet, and radical hope.
How the Trail Running World Blocks Mutual Aid
The problem is, a lot of our infrastructure isn’t a mutual aid station. It’s a checkpoint, designed to weed people out. You don’t arrive depleted and find support. You arrive already expected to be self-sufficient. Our culture is full of rhetoric about resilience and community. Yet often, our structures undermine the very solidarity it claims to prize.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about noticing what’s baked into the structures we’ve inherited and asking: is this really the best we can do? What would we build if we started again, with different values? It’s painful to reckon with how deep these patterns go, especially in a sport that’s brought so many of us joy and healing. And yet, maybe that’s exactly why we need to look. Not to tarnish the beauty, but to make sure it’s something we can all access, safely, fully, freely.
Mutual aid does not thrive in systems built on competition, scarcity, and individualism. Across North America and Europe, trail races grow more expensive and exclusive, rewarding speed (also online). Permits are harder to secure unless you “know someone” (I had hoped to run the original course this year), and gear requirements function as economic gatekeepers. A $1600 race entry, a $250 hydration pack, a $500 GPS watch: these costs tell us who belongs here and who does not.
We like to imagine trails as "open to everyone," but the reality is stark: the Majority non-white neighborhoods have 44% less park acreage and serve almost five times more people per acre. Less than 1% of participants in mainstream trail events are Black! This isn’t coincidence. It’s design. The same romanticized public lands are sites of exclusion for many: policed for the unhoused, surveilled for migrants, and hostile to BIPOC, queer, and disabled bodies. This is a sport built on a geography of unequal access.
Spade writes, "Today, many of us live in the most atomized societies in human history… we are put in competition with each other for survival, and we’re forced to rely on hostile systems… for the things we need." The running world mirrors this dynamic. It’s easy to tell ourselves that what we love is separate from the harm around it. I’ve done it. But trail running is not apolitical. Our time on trails can not be detached from the systems that make access possible. "The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements." When we relegate activism to hashtags or charity bibs, rather than integrating care and justice into everything, we stay numb.
The professionalization of "community" within our culture has deepened this. Spade cautions that nonprofits and elite institutions "frame their message around ‘deserving’ people... and use tactics palatable to elites." We see this in marketing that centers sanitized narratives of inclusion. Black runners on brochures but not on start lines, Pride flags in June but silence when trans athletes are demonized. The most vulnerable people are left behind, not because they’re unwelcome in rhetoric, but because they were never invited into the actual structure of the sport.
Meanwhile, genuine efforts at inclusion—like gear libraries, transportation collectives, or alternative race formats—are rarely funded or replicated at scale. Instead, organizers compete for visibility, grants. Spade writes, "we end up with disconnected groups, working in their issue silos, undermining each other, competing for attention and funding, not backing each other up and not building power."
It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that we’ve been taught to care alone, to hustle, perform, survive, but rarely to build with one another. A system that turns community into branding and solidarity into tokenism. Result? Trail running remains one of the most unequal and unacknowledged athletic cultures! Yes, I said it. A sport born of freedom and movement, is fenced of for most.
If we want mutual aid to thrive, we have to name what’s blocking it. We have to move beyond the charity model of community, where support is offered from above, in doses small enough not to disrupt the order. Instead, we must commit to building these networks of shared care, decision-making, and survival that endure beyond a race season or a forest fire. We cannot build solidarity on trails that were never meant to hold us all. But we can reroute, and start now (and rerouting doesn’t mean we throw everything out; it means we pause, take stock, and ask better questions: What’s working? What’s missing? Who’s not here, and why?).
How Mutual Aid Transforms Us
When you’ve spent hours at someone else’s side, guiding them through heat stroke or heartbreak, you realize: the aid station isn’t a detour from the race. It is the race, the connection, the care. That’s the point. Mutual aid is a way of becoming, of practicing who we want to be, together. It changes us. Just as running teaches us that transformation happens through repetition: you show up, go through discomfort, and become someone who can do what once felt impossible. Mutual aid is no different: as Spade wrote, we “help people develop skills for collaboration, participation, and decision-making… By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together.”
This is some of the deepest work mutual aid offers. Not just addressing material need, but inviting us to unlearn the conditioning that says we are alone, or that we have to earn our right to belong, to be cared for. Most of us have been shaped by institutions that demand obedience and performative gratitude: jobs with bosses, schools with rankings, races with cutoffs. There’s always someone faster, leaner, more dialed. It’s easy to internalize the idea that value comes from performance; you’re only as worthy as your latest PR or finish.
Mutual aid doesn’t ask you to be ready. It asks you to show up. You are enough because you are there. Whether you're cooking for volunteers, or helping carpool for an inclusive race, your presence is part of the fabric. You matter not for what you produce, but for what you offer in relationship. Mutual aid enlivens us. It gives purpose rooted in shared need. It invites us into what adrienne maree brown calls relationships of accountability and care, rather than dominance and control. As Spade wrote: “Being more engaged with the complex and painful realities we face, and with thoughtful, committed action alongside others for justice, feels much better than numbing out or making token, self-consoling charity gestures.”
This could look like radically rethinking how we organize races: entry fees scaled to income or exchanged for labor (based on income, with options to pay via trail work, logistics, childcare, translation, art; where all contributions are valued, not just cash, but time, skills, and care). This could be a multi-day gathering with teach-ins, gear swaps, grief circles, and story nights. Where people camp and cook together. Where movement is part of a larger practice of collective survival and joy. Knowing your friend’s dietary needs better than their splits. Offering childcare during long runs. Showing up for a fellow runner’s eviction hearing with the same urgency you’d bring to crewing a runner.
A race created with the Nation whose territory it moves through, shaped by tribal sovereignty, protocol, and consent. Routes shaped in conversation with Indigenous stewards and knowledge holders. Sacred sites protected, not bypassed. Compensated, not tokenized. Some income rerouted toward land rematriation efforts, language revitalization, youth programs. Mutual aid here doesn’t just flow between runners. It flows between peoples. It begins to undo the extractive logic that says we’re entitled to move across any landscape we can afford.
A race where gender categories are self-defined and community chosen. Where non-binary visibility isn’t a checkbox but embedded. Safety and affirmation aren’t features, they’re the foundation. Trans runners don’t need to out themselves to get a bib that fits their name or identity. It's built into the course design, not added after criticism. Volunteer training could include harm reduction and how to intervene if someone is harassed. There’s a crisis-care tent with peer counselors, because running intersects with trauma, and some are carrying more than physical fatigue.
What if we built crew infrastructures for solidarity? Imagine if a race came with a built-in support network for runners most at risk of exclusion. Like a Black woman traveling solo to a distant race: someone to pick her up, offer safe housing, run a section with her, ensure she’s not navigating unfamiliar terrain alone. Local run clubs and mutual aid groups could organize care crews to pace, support, and protect. This isn’t a nice extra, it’s what real access looks like.
A cooperative race infrastructure, where a network of runners, organizers, and communities share resources: radios, banners, trail tools, timing equipment. No one has to start from scratch. Everyone brings what they can. Races are not brands, but gatherings. The logistics are built not for “efficiency,” but for collective access and wellbeing. We normalize interdependence: not just carrying your own gear, but learning to share what you’ve got. We can create pre-race systems where runners can request or lend gear (hydration packs, shoes, headlamps). No policing, no “deserving” checks. Just trust and a spreadsheet. Like a trail-running library.
Mutual aid builds new ways of being together. When we engage with the pain around us, as tragedy, as fuel, we become part of something bigger. As Spade reminded us, “Solidarity and an ever-expanding commitment to justice emerge from contact with the complex realities of injustice.” Something more durable than a buckle. More connective than a finish line hug. We aks, “Who else is coming with me?” If the answer is “not enough people,” we slow down, and built the kind of systems that let everyone keep moving forward. Mutual aid transforms us by reconnecting us with each other, and with the radical possibility that the world can be remade.
A Call to Action: Toward a Mutual Aid Ethic of the Trail
The future of running isn’t found at the finish lines, but at the aid station we build together; one where everyone arrives as they are, and everyone leaves stronger than they came. If trail running is going to mean anything beyond personal escape, if it’s going to offer more than a high-altitude pause from a burning world, it must become something rooted, relational and reciprocal. The climate crisis is here. Rising authoritarianism is targeting our trans siblings, our migrant neighbors, our collective right to move freely. The violence of exclusion doesn’t stop at the trailhead, it follows us. If trail running is going to survive, not just as a sport but as a culture of meaning, it must be re-rooted in mutual aid. Not as a charitable sidebar or a “give-back” campaign, but as a foundational ethic: this is how we show up, for the land, each other, the futures we believe in.
That means organizing. Changing the questions. Not just “What do I need to finish this race?” but “What do we need to make sure everyone gets to start?” We need races co-governed with First Nations, not merely approved through bureaucracy. We need registration models that recognize economic injustice and redistribute opportunity. We need care crews who walk beside those carrying grief, trauma, fear. We need trail work to become celebration, community, not obligation. We need queer-led race formats, youth-led trail days, grief circles to hold what’s been lost, gear libraries, language justice so that no one has to decode the race alone. What if we stopped pretending the sport is apolitical, and started treating it like the site of possibility it already is, a site of resistance, healing, and collective repair.
And we need each other. Maybe you’ve never joined a group like this. Maybe you think someone else is more qualified. More radical. More equipped. You’re not too late. You don’t have to be perfect. I for sure am not. None of us arrive fully equipped. Most of us are improvising care as we go. That’s what makes mutual aid powerful. You just have to begin. That’s the invitation. Not to be rescued. Not to post. But to join something. Something that will outlast us. To stretch what running can hold, with emotional depth, shared power, and collective possibility.
We need to become the kind of runners who don’t just pass through aid stations; we need to become them. Reliable, nourishing, ready when things fall apart. Not just finishers, but builders of the spaces that hold others up. That’s the ethic the trail is asking for. That’s the race worth running.
Because in the end, the trail is not neutral.
Neither are we.
But we get to choose what kind of runners we are.
What kind of community we build.
What kind of future we run toward.
Let’s make it one where we don’t leave each other behind.
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