Welcome to another week of quarantine or lockdown. With billions of people on lockdown, quarantine, or under a stay-at-home order, many people are doing some, well, unusual things to keep fit. Here is my attempt at getting some exercise as well as using it to raise money for our hardworking staff at the frontline of the coronavirus outbreak.
The Quarantine Marathon PLUS – Over 1,000 Laps for Charity
So, here is how this will work. First of all, I am observing all social distancing rules and quarantine/lockdown rules! I am currently in Greece where we are not allowed to go out in public except for a few exceptions (which have to be filled out on a police form before leaving). But, I will be running this in the yard where I am so I am all good with that! 🙂
On Friday, April 10, I will start around 11:30AM (which is 7 hours ahead of NYC time) and running around a homemade course. This course is 130 feet in circumference. That means that, to run the full 26.2 miles of a marathon, I will circle this course 1,064 times.
If you have ever run in circles before, you know it is not like running in a straight line – as far as pace, stride, etc. This means that I will almost certainly not be doing this in less than 4 hours! I had been training for the Jerusalem Marathon that was to have been run a few weeks ago. After that, I had planned to run my own 30 miles out on the roads but with the lockdown, I am not supposed to go out of my area of the municipality so this is why I am doing this!
Running for Good
I had been looking for some charitable efforts to use for this little crazy run of mine and I found or heard of three that I want to highlight (let me know of others in the comments!):
- BStrong – This is run by Bethenny Frankel (who I had seen on Shark Tank) and she is actively working to get the essentials to our medical workers in the US. Go HERE to her page for this effort to help out – 100% goes to help in this work! Here is a tweet from her about the latest:
We have access to another million vetted, inspected, authentic masks tomorrow. The cost is several million dollars. We need large donors that want to make a difference in the world. We can’t lay out millions every day. Even governments pay us afterwards. 💯 goes to the effort.
— Bethenny Frankel (@Bethenny) April 6, 2020
- First Responder’s Children’s Foundation – There are a lot of first responders out there helping in this crisis. This fund helps the families of those workers. You can donate here.
- Feeding America – There are a lot of people heading to food banks with the economical impacts being very real, due to COVID-19. If you would like to help in the effort to feed those that need it, donate here.
Let Me Know!
Listen – running 26.2 miles on your own can be a hard mental challenge! I know as I have done it well over 30 times in the last 10 years! But, running on a 100+ foot loop course (about 10 times smaller than a regular school track) is going to be really hard!
So, HELP ME OUT! Let me know in the comments or on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram about your donation! I will be doing regular video updates on social media and sending out updates on Twitter as well so follow along for the ride!
The hashtag will be #quarantinemarathonplus so hit that up and let me know that you have donated! It can be to one of the organizations about or to another organization that is helping out during this crisis. Leave it in the comments of the post here or the one that will come out Friday if you have donated to a charity above or a similar one!
About That “PLUS” Part…
Ok, so now let’s get to the real fun part! I want you to make me keep going. That means that you should let me know about your donation throughout the run. As we get to the last 5 miles of the marathon part, every time we hit a new threshold (will talk about that in the post Friday), I will keep running past the 26.2 miles.
If we are getting a bunch of donation notifications, I will add like one mile or 20 minutes for maybe like every 5. Either way, as long as the donations are coming in, I will keep running. Let’s see if you can keep me running for like 8-10 hours on Friday! 🙂
Bottom Line
There are some incredible people out there working so hard at trying to help those who are sick to recover. Not only are they putting in long hours and exposing themselves to the virus, but they are having to even be quarantined from their family members. I have family who are in the healthcare industry so I know that this is a real challenge.
Running 1,000+ laps on 130 foot course is nothing in comparison but I would like to use this little effort to help those that could really use it.
Hey, let me know in the comments of other charities that are helping our medical staffs and I will add some more to the list above!
