Sean and Brynn Harrington of Menlo Park are celebrating their first anniversary abroad. But it won’t be your typical road trip.
The Harringtons will be the only married couple on the roster of runners on a 15,200-mile, three-month relay course, spanning Europe, Asia, Canada and the United States, to publicize the need for safe drinking water for one-sixth of the world’s population.
The first leg of the run will commence on June 1 in New York City, with 20 runners. The athletes, coming from all over the world and ranging in age from 26 to 60, will each run 10 miles a day for four days and then have one day off to rest while they are transported to the beginning of the next leg. They will each cover about 760 miles of track before they cross the finish line back in New York City on September 4.
Divided into five teams of four, they will pass batons at over 1,500 exchange points, including Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.
The Harringtons are two of the citizen runners, chosen from among 300 applicants. Sean, 30, is studying for his MBA at Stanford. Brynn, 29, works for a nonprofit in San Francisco. Both of them have been involved in track since childhood. The only thing they have needed to do differently to train for this event is to run more 10-mile courses, rather than sprints or marathons, per week. Ten miles, or 16 kilometers, is roughly the distance from their home to the Stanford Dish and back.
In a telephone interview, Brynn said that she hopes the publicity of the race will encourage people to dedicate “some part of themselves,” whether financial or physical, to the work of bringing clean water to those who don’t have daily, immediate access to it.
“The solutions are there,” added her husband. “We just need the resources to implement them.”
Sean said he was motivated to be part of the solution when he witnessed the devastating effects of drought in the Draa River Valley of Morroco, where he used to lead bicycle trips.
The event organizer, the Blue Planet Foundation, is a nonprofit that says it distributes 100 percent of donations from individuals to grassroots, rural water projects through its online Peer Water Exchange (PWX). The foundation’s goal is to provide safe drinking water to 20 million people by the year 2015.
INFORMATION
For more information about the foundation and the run, or to make a donation, log on at www.blueplanetrun.org.
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