Some, though, are pulled off through the vision and drive of one key person. The Raven Rock Ramble, instance, an annual May century ride that Cary’s David Cole, a kidney transplant recipient, started in 2002 to raise money for the UNC Kidney Center (it’s raised more than $150,000 in its 12 years). Or the Miracle Mile, held every September in downtown Raleigh to raise money to cure motor neuron diseases such as Primary Lateral Sclerosis and ALS, a k a Lou Gehrig’s disease. The remarkable Sarah Witt, a former runner who has PLS, started the Miracle Mile in 2006; it as since raised more than $450,000.

And, on Dec. 13, we have the 5th Annual Tour de Toys, which Camye Womble started to  raise money for kids who might not otherwise have toys to unwrap this holiday season. Price of admission: one new, unwrapped toy that will be given to families at The Women’s Center of Wake County.

While the goal of this ride is worthy enough, another recommendation for this ride is that it’s a ride for everyone, not just the hammerheads who can crank out 64 miles in a couple hours. There’s a 12-mile route, and if that’s too much, you have the option for a six-mile-ride as well. The rides start and finish at Natty Greene’s Brewing Company in downtown Raleigh, each has a ride leader to make sure you stay on the course, each has a sweep to make sure you don’t get left behind. The unwrapped toy admission includes two adult beverages for adults at the finish, kid-appropriate beverages for the under 21-set. You need a bike, you need a helmet, you need a cool, unwrapped toy, you need to show up around 9:30 a.m. (the ride starts at 10 a.m.). Is there a better way to spend the second Saturday morning in December?

Learn more about Tour de Toys and register, by going here.

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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.

Ultimate Hike is the chief fundraiser for CureSearch for Children’s Cancer. CureSearch is a nonprofit that traces its roots back to 1987. Though its name has changed over the years, its mission has not. The nonprofit funds research efforts to fight children’s cancer.  If there’s a more noble effort to support, I’m pressed to think of it. The primary way these newbie hikers lives will change is through the stories they’ll hear of children and families touched by childhood cancer, the No. 1 cause of death by disease among kids. The very children and families they’ll be raising money to help. More about that shortly.

The lives of these 50 hikers will change in another big way. That’s especially true for the roughly 50 percent who come into the program having little if any experience on the trail. For many of the others, it’s likely been 10 or 20 or 30 years since they last hiked. Yet here they are, bodacious in the assumption that in just 12 weeks they’ll be able to hike 28.3 miles in the mountains. But before they can hike that 28.3 miles on the Foothills Trail of North and South Carolina, they’ll have to start with the 4.5 miles planned for that morning. For some, that 4.5 miles will be more challenging than the 28.3.

Which is just fine, because I have a plan to get them into shape.

Since Ultimate Hike came to the Triangle three years ago I have been the local hiking coach. My job is make sure each one of these 50 hikers is ready come Hike Day, which this year is Nov. 9. I’ve devised a hiking and fitness plan for the hikers, with the highlight being our every-other-week group hike. Our first hike will be a truncated 4.5-mile version of Umstead’s Company Mill Trail. We’ll start with a brief meeting, maybe with bagels and coffee, before hitting the trail. It will likely be hot and no doubt humid. (The first year the temperature reached a comically — and record — hot 104.) I will tell everyone that while the hikes will get longer, the weather will cool. Eventually.

Every other weekend we’ll meet to do another group hike. Our next hike will be eight miles along the Eno River. It probably won’t be any cooler, and people will complain, good-heartedly for the most part. “It’ll get better,” I’ll assure them. “Trust me.”

Over the next couple months we’ll do increasingly longer hikes, at Raven Rock State Park, on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along Falls Lake, on the Uwharrie National Recreation Trail (our longest training hike, at 22 miles), at Hanging Rock State Park (our “elevation” hike, at which unkind words will be said about the coach). We’ll do a handful of midweek hikes, both predawn and post dusk. (Hold that question.)

Along the way, we’ll not only develop impressive hiking legs but some great friendships as well. If that sounds vaguely like the pitch from summer camp when you were a kid, it should. Training hike day is, for most of us, a chance to let go of the day-to-day grind and escape into a fantasy world of indulging a day in the woods with friends. It’s the kind of environment that fosters the kinds of conversations you don’t get to have much as a busy adult.

The journey is a blast. The destination — the the Ultimate Hike — will make your checking-out highlight reel.

On Friday, Nov. 8, our now-buff hiking group will meet at a central location in the Triangle and take a couple of passenger vans to Lavonia, Ga. At one hiker’s instance we’ll stop at Cracker Barrel for lunch, then arrive at the local Holiday Inn Express in Lavonia around 5 p.m. We’ll check into our rooms and mingle with other Ultimate Hikers from Greenville and Columbia, S.C. We’ll gather for a big pasta kick-off dinner, at which we will be reminded what it is we’re hiking for. Afterward, after hearing the stories of families and little kids battling cancer, our challenge the following day will seem trivial.

The following day will begin around 2:30 a.m. In the morning. We’ll stumble through breakfast, then pile into vans for the hour-long drive to the trailhead. We’ll arrive where the Foothills Trail transitions from North Carolina to South Carolina, pull into a gravel parking lot, pile out, take a group picture, then start going out in waves — slowest hikers to fastest — beginning at 4:30 a.m. For a good two hours we’ll hike by the light of our headlamps (hence, those midweek training hikes in the dark).

We’ll be pampered and fed at three rest stops by volunteers and the stellar Oconee County EMS crew. (Expect the latter to tell you there are more bears in Oconee County, S.C., than anywhere else in the country.)

Some will finish the hike as early as 2 p.m. I will be with the last hiker, finishing up around 7 p.m., just before it becomes necessary to get the headlamps back out. We’ll have a big celebratory dinner back in Lavonia. Most of us will fall asleep before 9 and sleep really, really well. A few will toast one another into the wee hours and have a rough ride home the next day in the van.

If history is any indication, all will easily make their fundraising goal of $2,500.

Two quick hiker stories.

The Sunday morning after the 2011 hike, hiker Candi Barnes told me with authority, “I’m never putting these hiking boots on again!” She and her husband, Chris, had both done the hike on behalf of their daughter, a cancer survivor. Last summer, at our first recruitment meeting, the first person I saw was Candi. Must have scored a new pair of hiking boots.

Christy Griffith wasn’t quite as vocal after the 2011 hike, but she didn’t need to be: her hobbled body spoke volumes. At the midpoint of a remote 10-mile stretch of trail along the Chattooga River, it looked like Christy might have to abandon. I began scouting escape routes out of the canyon, when Christy decided she had the last eight miles in her. I’m guessing the thought of her daughter, Eve, also a cancer survivor, had something to do with her rally.

Christy, too, returned the following year. She offers this advice for anyone skeptical of their prospects.

“I’d like to say for anyone who is afraid they can’t do it that I had never hiked before UH. Or exercised since high school.”

Looking for a great challenge on several levels? Keep reading … .

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Be an Ultimate Hiker

Curious about the Ultimate Hike? At least enough to learn more about it? Then come out to one of five information meetings I’ll be doing in the Triangle over the next two weeks, between :

Tuesday, July 30, 6:30 p.m. — North Raleigh: REI, 4291 The Circle at North Hills (Six Forks Road at the Beltline/I-440).

Wednesday, July 31, 7 p.m. — Durham: Bull City Running, 202 W. NC 54 (just off Fayeteville Street north of I-40)

Monday, August 5, 6:30 p.m. — Cary: REI, 1751 Walnut St. (off US 64 at Walnut).

Tuesday, August 6, 7 p.m. — Chapel Hill: Great Outdoor Provision Co.,
1800 E Franklin St. (Eastgate Shopping Center).

Wednesday, August 7, 7 p.m. — Raleigh: Great Outdoor Provision Co., Cameron Village.

Preregistration is encouraged, which you can accomplish by going here.

Questions? Drop me a line at joe@getgoingnc.com or leave a comment below.

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“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.

“No,” answered Tew. “We’re running together.” After all, the three have been doing “extreme things” together for seven years. They’ve done marathons together and they’ve done ultramarathons, including the Bethel Hill Moonlight Boogie 50 Miler near Rockingham. After all that togetherness, what the heck would be the fun in running across the state in shifts?

Tew says the three got the idea on Memorial Day of 2009 after completing a half marathon in Florida. “We got to talking about what we wanted to do next,” says Tew. These shorter events are fun, sure. But after a while you want a real challenge.

“Then someone said, ‘Why don’t we run across a state?’ recalls Tew. Though Mendes and Tomicki lived in Philadelphia, the three had met while living in North Carolina. Since it was North Carolina they had in common, they decided it would be a good state to run across.

What began as something of a lark started gaining traction. If we’re going to do something as ambitious as run across the state, why not do it for a good cause, something we believe in? they thought. Finding a worthy endeavor wasn’t hard: Tew’s father has had Parkinson’s Disease for 15 years. Shortly, they became affiliated with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and they had a goal: raise $1,000 for every mile run — or $545,000.

“It’s really escalated into something more than we had imagined,” says Tew, who has spent what free time she has — between working working 55 to 60 hours a week as director of sales for Pepsi Bottling Ventures and running 60-65 miles a week — as a fundraiser/event coordinator/travel agent.

Fundraiser: “We’ve done a lot of different things to get the word out,” says Tew. She’s approached a number of companies about contributing, set up an expo booth at the inaugural Tobacco Road Marathon and spent countless hours forging partnerships with elementary schools along their route to promote being active and to raise awareness about Parkinson’s.

“We’re trying to get the school kids to walk 545 miles [collectively] during a given time frame to raise $545.” And even after putting running 34 miles every day, the women are looking at making appearances at schools along the way.

Event coordinator: Charting a safe running route across the state is no easy chore. “We can’t exactly follow I-40 the whole way,” Tew notes. In charting a route, she got input from a variety of sources. A couple months ago she drove the route and made alterations.

Travel agent: Since this isn’t one of those fundraisers where a third of everything raised goes to overhead (all contributions go directly to the Fox Foundation), keeping costs down is key. Thus, the three will bunk with friends, family and whoever else they can find with floor space to spare. Fortunately, once they’re on the run, Tew will hand off travel coordinator responsibilities to a point person who will act as an advance team. She’s also gotten Pepsi to chip in a company Avalanche that will serve as a SAG wagon, carrying their gear, nutrition and hydration.

When she can, Tew goes for a training run. She uses a novel approach that keeps her from growing bored on her long runs. “I go out my front door and just run,” she says. Maybe an hour out, then back. Maybe more. And she runs iPod free, using the time on the road to let her mind escape the daily grind.

“I know I’ve solved the issue of world peace on runs,” she says. “I just can’t remember how I did it when I’m done.”

She downplays the novelty and challenge of the run: “There’s a guy running across the state barefoot right now,” she says, trying to redirect my awe. But she also recognizes that running the equivalent of nearly 21 marathons in 16 days is something that requires serious preparation. In addition to putting in the miles, she’s picking the minds of other endurance runners.  Charlie Engle of Greensboro — who among other things has run across the Sahara Desert and set a record in 2009 at the 135-mile Death Valley Cup http://www.badwater.com/dvcup.html — perhaps gave Tew her best bit of advice. “He told me, ‘If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen during the run.’” (More specifically, he told her to make sure her feet stay dry.)

Tew expects to burn 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day on the run, making for plenty of guilt-free milkshakes. She expects to maintain an average pace of 10 1/2 to 11 minutes per mile. And she plans to use three, maybe four, pairs of running shoes along the way. She would love to reach their goal of $545,000 dollars raised in the name of Parkinson’s research, but realizes that’s extrememly ambitious. (Currently, they’ve raised about $30,000, making them the Fox Foundation’s eighth largest fundraiser.)

While she can’t guarantee the $545,000, she says there is one thing you can take to the bank.

“I can tell you with certainty that we’ll get the run done. One way or another, we’ll get the run done.”

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For more information on Murphy to Manteo: A Journey to Benefit Parkinson’s Disease Research, go here. You can also donate to the three runners’ fundraising effort through this site.

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