Published: Friday, February 22, 2008
It was an idea so big, so far-reaching, that when Matt Hill finally worked up the nerve to tell his girlfriend Stephanie Tait about it, he figured his sanity might be called into question.
After all, who would actually follow through on the concept of running enough marathons in one year to circumnavigate North America, beginning with the BMO Bank of Montreal Vancouver Marathon on May 4?
“I said, ‘I have something to tell you and I hope you don’t think I’m crazy,'” Hill recalls of a project that would soon become Run For 1 Planet, an initiative aimed at making our planet a healthier place.
“But she said, ‘I think you’re crazy, and I love crazy people.'”
By December of 2006, Tait, a 26-year-old business and life coach, had come on board with Hill, a 40-year-old actor, to be co-partners and the event’s sole runners.
Each has substantial prior marathon experience, and Hill has completed several Ironman triathlons.
Their aim: To run a marathon a day to create one million actions for Earth and raise $1 million for the Run For 1 Planet foundation.
And the way the pair of South Delta natives figure it, they will each run around 220 marathons over the course of the next year on a schedule that has them running three days on and taking one day off.
The pair have launched a website (www.runforoneplanet.com) where you can follow them as they run from Vancouver to Newfoundland, down the eastern seaboard, then head west, through the U.S. southwest and finally up the west coast from California back home.
“We call ourselves ‘The No Speed Required Tour,'” laughed Hill. “Any marathoner would agree — if we tried to blast out three-and-a-half hour runs, we’d been done after five days. We’re not trying to do this as a speed record.”
In fact they peg their run days at about nine to 10 total hours.
“We’re not scientists and we don’t understand the intricacies of what’s going on from an environmental standpoint,” Tait explains of the run’s inspiration.
“But we’re human beings and we notice the change that is going on in the world.
“I think we’re just at a point where we as people can choose to step up and really show our greatness for future generations.”
Nothing crazy about that.
View the article online at: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/sports/story.html?id=0856895f-9837-407f-9064-b5e8459d8557
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