Alan Levine (AKA Cogdog Blog) - Flickr Photo
Alan has been raising money for American Diabetes Association by participating in an annual marathon. Last year, I supported his charity because he won my birthday challenge. This year, I was one of his sponsors.
I started this site training for the 2006 Rock n' Roll Half-Marathon. Having never run more than 3 miles in my life, I did it as a personal challenge and to raise money for the American Diabetes Association. The experience was great, and maybe found out, I did not really "hate" running.
That's a photo of Alan (on flickr) and posted to his running training blog right before he started the race. I love that he twittered during his breaks while running the race. He crossed the finished line! Congrats.
Cross this one of my life list. I completed a full marathon. It was not heroic, fast, not really “fun”. The final time was 5:26:01 just withing my secret, unblogged goal of 5:30. I came in 5264th place! That New Zealander in first place could have lapped me (he finished in something like 2:15, how do people do that?).
Congratulations!
Thanks Beth for the blog post and the donation.
FWIW, I had done this the last two years, running the half marathon on 2006 and 2007. For each of those years, I solicited all friends, family, anyone in my email address book.
This year I was acutely aware of the spot you can put people in, like the reason you know Dave is contacting you in October is because he wants some $$ for the ______ charity bike ride. It's not a bad thing, but I wanted to give my contacts a break.
I was going to pony up the minimum amount myself ($1000) but got lucky and got a one day software review gig that more than got that amount.
But in December I thought, "hey all you did was raise the minimum". So I decided to go for mostly strangers, doing one blog post and sending out a few twitter messages:
http://cogdogblog.com/2007/12/12/aint-to-proud-to-beg-sponsor/
Wow, what a response- I raised my total funds raised to nearly $1600, and a number of them were from people I've never had contact with.
It was a great experience all the way around (well except for miles 22-25, ugh!)
Posted by: Alan Levine | January 15, 2008 at 05:09 PM