This group that became 80 runners accepted the 500 mile challenge June 6th and achieved it
Yesterday, June 6, was Global Running Day. A day celebrating running. It is exciting to have our own day. Celebrating what many of us do daily or at least regularly. The day is also about inspiring people to log miles, maybe even for the first time or to do more miles than normal. At noon the day before I had just finished doing my daily run to lunch few miles. I was enjoying an avocado toast and the best ice in town before heading back to the office. Knowing that Global Running Day was the next day, I was thinking that My Best Runs needed to do something. Something to bring attention to running. I knew there were already a lot of well thought out programs taking place June 6. I wanted to do something different that would be just for fun. It would be run like a road race back in the 1970's. We would use my Facebook account to get the word out. I would record everything by hand and to add to my challenge I was flying down to our MBR office in Mexico in the middle of the day Wednesday. (I would be out of touch for nearly five hours but I like challenges.) There would be no entry fee and no prizes. There would be no official results. It was all about running. We would not be raising money for a cause. Each of us would run on June 6 and log in miles on my FB account. Just to see if we could do it, my goal was for our group to run at least 500 miles and hopefully have 100 participants. Everyone had to post their miles by midnight. In the end, 80 people posted 560.12 miles for our My Best Runs Global Running Day 500 Mile Challenge. We did it. We showed the world that a group of people can come together (with no notice) from all over the world and run the equivalent distance from San Francisco to San Diego. All types of runners from slow to fast join our challenge. I am very proud of each and every participant but I would like to mention some of our gang here. We had two time Boston Marathon winner (Geoff Smith) post 10.5 miles, Co-owner of Worlds Marathons Malin Andersson from Sweden posted 6.2 miles, Bertrand Newson who heads up a popular bay area running group (2L2Q) posted 8.45 miles and Willie Korir from Kenya posted the most miles with 22.5. Verity Breen posted the most miles for a female hitting 19 miles and Boston Marathon historian Tom Derderian ran 5 miles. The youngest female to win Bay To Breakers (age 11) who ran her first marathon at age 5 Mary Etta Britano now 55 posted 10 miles, Julie who we met at the front desk of our hotel in Paris ran 5 miles, Ram VenKatraman who heads up a major running group in Mumbai, India ran 4.69 miles and super ultra-marathon star Michael Wardian ran 12.5 miles. Phil Camp who among other things won the 4th annual Marine marathon (1979) posted 8.3 miles, Roger Wright used to weight 278 pounds a few years back before he started running marathons logged 13.5 miles and ultra runner since the early 1970's superstar Frank Bozanich ran 9 miles. Joshua Holmes Ultra runner and Run It Fast founder posted 2 miles, Brent Weigner who has run more marathons in more countries than anyone posted 1.5 miles, and the list goes on and on. One common thing about our group of 80 runners is that everyone loves running as much as I do. Until our next challenge! Run on... I ran 6.6 miles which I thought was only fitting.
posted Thursday June 7th
by Bob Anderson