Yesterday, the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) named the Never Ignore, Never Forget relay as their July’s Darfur Heroes! They asked me to write a blog post for them and have featured us prominently on their homepage. This recognition is awesome for us and shows that people truly are paying attention to what we did last month.
Here’s a short excerpt from my blog, you can read the full entry here.
I’ll never forget running down Highway 40 in the heart of Ohio. I think that’s the moment when the magnitude of my idea finally sunk in. Michael Gurley, my friend and co-runner, said to me between the typical ragged breath of a runner, “This is crazy. We’re on a highway…in the middle of nowhere…running.”
The chances of that being a verbatim quotation are extremely low. There’s something about running over 100 miles in a week that knocks the body’s chemistry off a bit and leaves the memory functions a bit lacking, but the true beginnings of my loss of sanity have roots in earlier times.
Sometime around Thanksgiving break of 2007, a few of my cross country friends and I were talking about the possibility of running across the country. I took the idea and, excuse the pun, ran with it. For seven months, I calculated distances, begged for support, sent out mass mailings, made hundreds of calls, and sent out e-mails to all of my friends, and then some. Slowly, but not so surely, the “Never Ignore, Never Forget” relay came to life.
