No I’m not an Ultramarathoner, nor even a marathoner. I’m very happy to be a middle distance runner. However, in the last 8 days I have run 80k along with a team of others. It was Pam’s idea. She has a friend, Sally, in the Peace Corp Volunteers in Ethiopia. Sally’s fellow Peace Corp Volunteers decided to raise funds for Ethiopian education and to do this they would run a distance of 282k from Hawzen to Alamata in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The trek would take place over 8 days (from Oct 31 to Nov 7) and at each stop the group would give a seminar on HIV/AIDS awareness in the local villages.
The group completed the trek on Thursday this week. Here’s a photo from their Facebook page showing the finish. Not spectacular or showy, but an amazing accomplishment they can be proud of.
Tigray Trek 282 finish line (from TigrayTrek282 Facebook page)
Getting back to Pam and Protection Island on the other side of the world… she suggested to her running buddies that we also run 282k, in support of the Tigray Peace Corp Volunteers, but we would do our run cooperatively. There were 5 or so of us in the conversation and doing the math we roughed out that we would each have to run 56k over the course of the 8 days or about 7k per day. We all agreed to do our best. Then we thought the rest of the island population might want to get involved.
So Pam posted a notice about the event on our local email list and we started running. The first day we clocked over 60k, thanks to Penny’s 35k marathon training run. I posted this result on our community email list and others started sending in their distances. Walkers asked if they could contribute too. We welcomed them gladly! By the time we reached day 4 our island walkers and the runners – up to 20 of us – had clocked over 300k collectively.
Protection Island Runners (photo by Pam Murray)
As the days progressed, I passed on to our community daily posts of our total distance, number of participants, as well as news from the Tigray folks and Pam passed our news back to the Tigray folks. At the end of the 8th day, our Island had collectively run or walked over 600k, with 37 participants! I’m not sure how much money we raised for the Ethiopian educational cause, as we encouraged individuals to submit online, but the community spirit was very high and hopefully it was felt on the other side of the world.
Our community seemed to really rally to the whole fun event. People chatted about it and sent me emails with the distances they covered or they told me where they walked or ran and I calculated the distance. On it went to a Google Drive spreadsheet and I replied to each email with an thank you and words of encouragement. It really paid off. Now I’m thinking about the next fitness program to offer in order to keep the wonderful fitness effort and spirit continuing. Yeah team and thank you Pam!
I am a runner.
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