History is about to be made, Atlanta! A team of friends from Chicago is setting out to set a world record for ‘the fastest time to travel all of the Atlanta metro stations’ on MARTA tomorrow. And you can actually be a part of this crazy plan. Keep scrolling for all the details.
Hold up… what’s going on?
Yes, you read that right. Tomorrow, January 8th, 2026, a team of three friends is setting out to visit every MARTA station in record time. And spread awareness for the importance of public transit while they’re at it.
Who’s trying to set this record?
Wait… who’s setting this record? Three friends from Chicago: Joabe Barbosa, who was born in Brazil and grew up in England and now lives in Chicago, Matthew Plese, from Chicago, and Omar Yousaf, who was born in New York and grew up and Mexico and now lives in Chicago to play soccer.
This isn’t their first rodeo, either. The team, except for Yousaf, who was recovering from knee surgery at the time, set the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to travel all of the stops on Chicago’s CTA. The goal: hit all 146 stops in less than 9 hours and 15 minutes. And they did it in 8 hours, 58 minutes, and 55 seconds.
And even cooler than that–this whole journey started from a dream. Literally. Plese says that the whole ordeal began because he saw Barbosa on the news, talking about a niche goal they both have: to run every single street in the city of Chicago, which is thousands and thousands of miles. From there, the two became friends, and Barbosa had a dream about visiting all of the 77 community zones in Chicago. One thing lead to another, and what started as a dream turned into visiting community zones, turned into running an ultra marathon, turned into visiting every train station. Poof. Here we are. World Record…