Typically, we think of benefit rides and fundraising runs as the work of big nonprofits, of a team engaged in pulling off a major event. The MS Society of Eastern North Carolina and the 2,000-plus-rider MS 150, the American Diabetes Association’s likewise behemoth Tour de Cure.
Two weeks from Saturday I will stand in front of about 50 people at Umstead State Park and tell them that their lives are about to change in ways they can’t imagine.
Those 50 folks will be about to take their first steps on an epic adventure called the Ultimate Hike. You could be one of them.
When I saw the flier tacked to the bulletin board at the neighborhood Starbucks, I had one question. So I jotted down the name and number of the local contact and gave her a call.
“This 545-mile, 16-day Murphy to Manteo run that the three of you are doing,” I asked Lisa Tew, who lives in Fuquay-Varina, “this is a relay, right?” The flier touted a bodacious event involving three women — Tew, who is 43, Shay Mendes, 39, and 32-year-old Kristy Tomicki — who planned to run from Murphy to Manteo, a distance of 545 miles, in just 16 days starting Sept. 6. Certainly it was a relay; otherwise, that would be 34 miles per person, per day. That’s like running a marathon and a third every day for 16 days straight.