All the News That’s Fit

This is the first in a regular FitPlanet blog by Matt Hill and Stephanie Brooke Tait, two intrepid Canadians who ran across Canada and around the US to bring attention to Climate Change. They are living proof that you can “be the change you want to see in the world,” as MK Gandhi said many years ago.

It all started as a crazy dream to run around North America in order to inspire people to take Action for our Planet’s health, one small step at a time. The two of us figured if we could run a marathon each, per tour day, we could inspire 1 million new single actions (from our website’s top 10 action steps list) and raise $1 million dollars, to start a legacy for kids, to fund their “green dreams” in schools and communities we ran through.

So after 18 months of training and planning, we hit the ground running on May 4th, 2008. In the course of a year, we ran about 215 marathons each, destroyed 14 pairs of Asics, and burned about 1.5 million calories (each). And we were privileged to present to over 30,000 elementary school children along our Run for One Planet highway.

Why would a couple of Canadians decide to do such a thing? We believe in action and felt this was how we could channel our energy to make a difference for younger generations as they learn habits and ways of connecting with our Earth. We passionately wanted to reach as many as our two sets of legs would take us and through an amazing team of 30-plus volunteers we were able to reach out to our “pint-sized eco-warriors” in 200 presentations.

The road was long. The hills were many. But the power of the human spirit kept us moving forward. Every single day we met more local hero’s who welcomed us like old friends and proved that the human spirit is indeed alive and well.

Now that we have been home for almost three months, and have had a few days of rest, we are creating a Legacy and thrilled to begin the book-writing process to share our story. And we are speaking to audiences about the journey about the richest, most amazing experience of our lives.

We hope our experience will encourage people to start to think about the impact they have on our Planet’s health. And we ask that you consider taking our Action Challenge and commit to doing one new action for our Planet’s health. It
will make a difference. And you never know what your one action will lead to and whom it may inspire.

If you’re inspired to help fund our “pint-sized eco-warriors green dreams,” then we ask you to donate to our Legacy Project.