Some Big Shoes to Fill

In addition to nursing a wee bit of a hangover, I spent part of Saturday working at a pre-registration table for next weekend’s Balboa Boogie cross-country 5k at Morley Field. When I showed up to Road Runner Sports, I immediately saw giant shoes and assumed it was some attention-grabbing gimmick.

I was kind of correct.

It was a promotion, but the concrete shoes were on display to raise awareness for an event that just ended called Blue Planet Run. It began and ended in New York City and covered 15,200 miles in between – the distanced covered by 20 “ordinary athletes” who must have been pretty tired. They crossed 16 countries and three continents to spread the message that the world needs to do something about the scarcity of drinkable water in the world.

Some facts from the web site:

--1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water, roughly one-sixth of the world's population.
--2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die every year from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
--In the past 10 years, diarrhea has killed more children than all the people lost to armed conflict since World War II.
--An estimated 25% of people from cities in developing countries purchase their water from vendors at a significantly higher price than piped water. In some cases, at the cost of more than a quarter of their household incomes.

I wish the kid taking a picture with his cell camera had stayed in frame to provide some scale for these shoes. Each was designed by a celebrity, from Chris Kattan of Saturday Night Live and television personality Damien Fahey to Ben Harper and Laura Dern, he of music and her of movie fame. There were many more names, but I just can’t recall them at the moment.

For more information on the run and the cause, go to www.blueplanetrun.org.