What goes into making Run For One Planet?

Alec, the online intern at Ode, posed this question to me a few weeks ago when we stopped by for a lunch-hour hello and some awesome eats with the rest of the amazing gang at Ode in Mill Valley! First off, it was really great meeting everyone and thanks for welcoming us in like old friends, complete with local, organic fare from within 100 miles of the sunny spot we enjoyed eating it together!

Alec’s question is one Steph and I get asked a lot in our presentations, a lot like some of the honest questions from our pint-sized eco warriors, the elementary school kids! Since they're curious about the run's details, they ask “where do you guys sleep” or, “where do you go to the bathroom?” I love the straight-shooting questions of an 8 year old. We also get asked, how long do we run each day, how much food do we eat and our personal favorite, how many days did it take to get ready for the biggest journey of our lives, thus far?

After considering Alec’s question and reflecting on all the others, I think it’s time to offer some details on just what it takes to make a typical Run For One Planet day happen.

• 4:00am (on average), I wake up and write these blogs, consuming a lot of organic coffee from Level Ground Trading, writing thank you letters. I am the team’s go to gratitude guy and chief of all things Racy Verna (our evolution RV).
• 11:00pm - Midnight (on average), the evening prior, Steph has pounded out a marathon’s worth of team emails, organizing everything from school presentations to our other partner events. She is the tour’s trusty organizer-in-Chief. Along with Steph, Amber is also organizing other areas of the tour, like the monthly newsletter.
• Amber and I share the tour’s cooking requirements. This is a shared, equal opportunity position because we are both “foodies” and the term “get out of my kitchen” would be heard every day if this most coveted position were not an equal opportunity situation. On average, Steph and I chew through three or four thousand calories (depending on terrain and weather). We are lucky to eat mostly organic, lean proteins (20% animal and 80% vegetarian sources), lots of eggs, cheese, nuts, avocados, veggies and fruit, tofu, we're suckers for dark chocolate and ice cream, Steph loves natural chips, and I have been known to consume 3 massive protein shakes in one tour day. Basically, it takes a lot of food to keep our running machines going and we know that upon return, we will have to curtail about half of what we eat in a day, or we’ll be known as Fatty Matty and Stuffed Steph.
• Our incredible, wouldn’t-be-anywhere-without-them R41P volunteer team (25 people committed to our cause) keeps us booked with schools, rested with accommodations and partnered with like-minded organizations like Whole Foods, local organic grocers, Lululemon Athletica and our other tour partners. The team also keeps us inspired beyond belief with our weekly team calls and gets us invited to some pretty cool sports events and unique eco opportunities along the way.
• Our running goal is to complete one marathon each per run day. This means simply, each day the tour moves forward, Steph and I run the equivalent of one marathon each for a tour-day total of 52.4 miles. Amber (our road crew) pulls ahead 6-10 miles at a time. This has us running on average 3-5 days in a row and stopping to do school presentations and partner events for a day, sometimes two. We tried to keep it at 3 days running, one day off for events, but it quickly went 7 days on, 1 day off. We’ve even run 9 days in a row after a few breakdowns and having to get to already-scheduled events. Our record to date is 10 run days with only 7 run days to make it from Regina to Winnipeg, Canada last summer. It took several 100-kilometer days between us to make it to Winnipeg with 45 minutes to spare before another 10 km run event with the local run group :)
• We ran relay-style all the way across Canada at 6-mile run pulls, which took us anywhere from 10-14 hours to complete (anyone who’s gone through Northern Ontario knows about the hills). We continued this until daylight savings occurred in November, when we switched over to running our marathons step-for-step because of only having 8 hours of light per day. Now that it has switched back again, we are back to doing half the day relay and half step-for-step to cover the double marathons.
• Last week had us break into new mileage territory as we make a run for the border and our scheduled completion date of May 8th back in Vancouver! We have been asked to unlace our 14th pair of runners and finish the journey, to officially open the 2009 Epic Expo. So this means we are covering 44km for Steph and 55km for me, in order to make our tour goal of 11,000 miles (17,700km) by the 8th.
• So with exactly 4 weeks to go, just over 10,000 miles under our feet, just under 800 miles left, we had the biggest run week of our lives to date, a record for Steph (204km’s) and for me (260km’s) to end our week’s total of 464 km’s combined! Please check out the video of one night's final steps.

Thanks for reading my long blog. Hope it helps to give you a taste of what it is like to plan, present and to run the Run For One Planet :)