Tonight was perhaps one of the most inspiring and electrifying nights of my life. I never thought the relay would lead to something quite this spectacular, but I can honestly say the late nights, the seemingly endless running, and the physical and mental drain on my body that was the majority of the 2007-2008 school year has been utterly worth it.

Tonight, the Never Ignore, Never Forget relay team received the SuAnne Big Crow Memorial Award at the National Education Association’s conference in sunny San Diego. This incredible privilege was breathtaking.

The day started fairly normal for our few days here in San Diego. We woke up around 9 a.m. from a fitting night of sleep in our hotel room and almost immediately began to get ready for our 11:30 practice lunch at the San Diego Convention Center. After a filling lunch during which we met the Human and Civil Rights Committee for the NEA as well as the award recipients in the other categories, we went to the ballroom for a practice rehearsal.

I had my roughly one minute speech nicely folded in my pocket ready to pull it out when my turn to speak arrived, but, instead, I had the joy of using a teleprompter (recently made famous by Barack Obama’s abundant use of them) for my speech. At first, the experience was a little strange, but I’ve decided I could easily get used to it. This event, simply a practice, was amazing alone, but it was nothing compared to the festivities that would greet us that night.

After taking a couple of hours to swim and generally relax after the lunch, we prepared for the main event: the NEA’s Human and Civil Rights Award Dinner. We had to arrive about an hour and a half before the event to mix and mingle with other award winners and members of the NEA’s board. Following this, Darham and I were ushered into the ballroom with the rest of the recipients to be announced as honored guests and, I must say, the spotlights were blinding.

The next couple of hours was filled with amazing food (salad, chicken with mushroom, shrimp, a mixture of vegetables, and excellent lemon cake), amazing conversation, and the sharing of amazing stories from the other recipients. The way this worked was each recipient had approximately a three minute video produced about him or her, was then marched on stage to applause, and were given (roughly) one minute for an acceptance speech. Every person was inspirational in his or her own way and each had a unique and amazing story to tell: from the mother whose son came out of the closet prompting her to advocate for fair treatment of homosexuals in schools to an 89 year old African American who marched with Martin Luther King Jr.

When it was my time to speak, I was a little overwhelmed. We were the last awardees, there were 2,500 teachers in the room each paying $75 for a seat, the previous recipients had all done something amazing and spoken eloquently about it, and I felt slightly out of my league.

Luckily, everything was flawless. The video that Jim Hristakos and his Broadcast Services team with the NEA expertly produced was stunning, I managed to get through my one minute (oh, no need to lie, I actually spoke for two minutes!) speech without fumbling words too much, and the standing ovation at the end was perhaps the best show of support the relay has ever encountered.

Without further adieu, here is a rough transcript from my speech tonight as well as our first public declaration of our intention to rerun the relay in 2010 from San Francisco to Washington DC:

I am honored to represent the Never Ignore, Never Forget relay and humbled to receive the SuAnne Big Crow Memorial Award.

All 9 runners from the relay team are with me today: Nathan Alexander, Aaron Gurley, Michael Gurley, Adam Heil, Jacob Heil, Adrian Love, Chris Parker, Kiet Tran, and myself.  Also with us is our coach, Darham Rogers, who put up with us and all of our aches and pains for 1,300 miles and my two wonderful parents, Larry and Robbi Heck, who agreed to drive the vans throughout the trip and offered us constant support.

I wish I could thank every person that played a role in making this endeavor possible by name: those who donated money, those who donated time, or those who offered their advice and wisdom.  Unfortunately, I can’t due to time constraints.  So, instead, I’ll skim over a quick list:

The Genocide Intervention Network and STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition who sponsored the relay.

Davis Moore Auto Groups who sponsored a large part of the relay fiscally.

Our friends and family who contributed generously to help us raise $25,000.

Larry Landwreth, Paul Babich, and United Teachers of Wichita who both nominated us for this award and covered the cost of six of the team members being here.

And, perhaps most importantly, you, our teachers, who have inspired us, cared about us, and guided us along a path to a better future.

In 2010, we plan to run the Never Ignore, Never Forget relay again, but this time, cross the entire country from San Francisco to Washington D.C.  This will be an extremely difficult task and span over 3,000 miles.

If you find our story inspiring, I ask you to visit NeverIgnore.org.  Not only can you read day-by-day accounts of our 2008 run, but you can also find information on how to help us in 2010 and, hopefully, inspire students at your own schools to take similar stands for their beliefs.

So now, I want to challenge you: Take a risk.  Try something new.  Dare to change the world.

Thank you.

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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.

Read on…

Nearing the End
The past couple of days have been utter chaos, not because anything is going wrong, but because we don’t know what is going to happen in the next few days! Today was our first full day in Washington DC, but the relay is not complete yet. Yesterday we ran to the boundaries of the District and stopped there so we could choose a more opportune time to have, more or less, our ceremonial finish! More about that in future blogs, though!

Today turned into a sightseeing day coupled with some meet-and-greets. The first thing we did was suit up for our meeting with the people at the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-NET). These people are amazing and, to a great extent, are the reasons we were able to do this relay in the first place.

Lunch Time at GI-NET!
We had lunch (pizza!) with the wonderful staff at the Genocide Intervention Network. At first it was a bit awkward, as we were all hungry and unsure of what to talk about. However, eventually conversation got rolling; we told GI-NET about our experiences on the relay and they told us more about their organization. Mark Hanis, the Executive Director, gave us a breakdown of how the organization works and even showed us how we fit in!

The most amazing thing about GI-NET is how they manage to operate so effectively and so visibly, yet have a staff of only about 20 people with nobody over the age of 30. Interestingly enough, students at Swarthmore College founded the organization during their senior year. They truly personify our belief that nobody is too young to change the world – hopefully they think the same of us!

A Truly Sobering Experience
A few of us visited the Holocaust Museum after leaving GI-NET. Even though this was probably my fifth or sixth time there, it was just as powerful and sobering for me as it was the first time. I could go on for thousands of words analyzing and connecting what I saw there to the relay, but that is something for another time and place. To put it frankly, the Holocaust Museum defines our efforts completely; in a very concrete manner, it serves as an immutable monument to the idea that genocide should never be forgotten and, through this tribute to the past, it reminds us that we can never ignore genocide when it occurs again.

If you ever visit DC, the Holocaust Museum is one place you cannot leave off your tour stops. Be prepared to feel like your heart is being wrenched out of your body though.

A Thunderstorm Worthy of Kansas
After our small group left to catch up with everybody else, I ran into a truly epic thunderstorm: lightning, thunder, horrifyingly big rain, oh my! I dodged for cover in a lovely coffee shop to avoid getting soaked, while everybody else was dodging for cover in museums, apparently. Although I didn’t witness this personally, I was told that the Museum of Modern Art was quite “interesting.” The guys who went there especially enjoyed the blank canvases worth millions of dollars.

The rest of the night has been rather unremarkable. We ate a nice dinner, worked on some media stuff, and tried to figure out exactly what would happen tomorrow. But, alas, every day is a new adventure for us!

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Old Money
Nothing spells Southern history out more clearly than the old plantations and towns. Running through, it’s pretty obvious that the people of good old rural Virginia take pride in their property, and have the money to show it off. We saw acres upon acres of luscious, neatly-cut grass– a definite indication of wealth, considering gas prices. The extravagant estates themselves also sent a strong message: “yeah, I could afford this.” Even the guest houses that we spotted along the run were impressive, with many of them two stories and equipped with a garage!

A Learning Experience
There is nothing quite like running across the country with a history teacher as your partner. As soon as we hit this one small town, Coach Rogers went historical on my butt. But I didn’t mind it at all. I told him this, and I’m saying it again in case he didn’t believe me. Hearing him describe the setting to me as only a history teacher can was a fun diversion from counting how many steps I take in one mile (which I professionally counted out to be 1207 steps). Plus just seeing a cobblestone house made me giggle.

Stop and Smell the Roses
So this town that Coach and I ran through. It had to be inhabited by some really high-strung people. For when you go through their city, they make sure you see just how much history and money is held there. Upon reaching the city limits, the speed limit dropped from 55 to 25. And then just to really make you mad, they lower it again to 15 mph. Talk about a crawl. If Coach and I ran just a little bit faster, we could have gotten a ticket. Even Eastborough has nothing on this town. And you want to know how they got away with such a ludicrous speed limit? By saying the roads were “under construction”. Guess what. There wasn’t a worker in sight, let alone any heavy equipment or wide load trucks.

Capture the Moment…Not
Soon after leaving Slowbieville, we entered DC. And just as quickly as we entered, left it. We had to get hotel accommodations squared away first. So the team took some time to unpack, and I took my chance to charge up my camera battery for what was sure to be a big day of clicking. Hundreds of photo opportunities awaited upon our reentering DC. Once everyone was cleaned up from running, the team got back into the vans and headed out to begin our sightseeing. It didn’t take long for me to find a good location for a photo. So I pulled my camera out and turned it on and . . .

Oh wait. Black screen. OH WAIT. I forgot the battery. I was thunderstruck. My first chance to take pictures of the many monuments and sites of D.C., and I forgot the battery. I would soon find out that for many of the monuments and memorials, that one day was my only chance to see them. It’s a shame I don’t have photos of some the amazing places I visited on our first day, but by not having a camera to take pictures, I forced myself to remember as much as I could. In a way, I’ll still have memories that will last a lifetime.

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