I just want to lend a loud
I just want to lend a loud shout of support. (As you all know, I have a penchant for such ideas.)
I am with Jimmy: Virtual is cheesy. We want a baton that gets sweaty and dirty and stuff. The baton should be filled with Water from the Pacific that then get's dumped in the Atlantic.
Here's an idea that might make it workable, but this would cost money and especially time for the participants:
You could set it up as a relay like the Hood-To-Coast in Oregon.
- You would set up a team of runners (60 to 100 people total).
- Each runner would run 10Km at a time, then recover while others ran.
- Support vans would ferry the resting runners (but not all of them at once, see below).
- Each runner would commit to joining in for a specified stretch--like the equivalent of his/her state.
- New runners could join as it got closer to their home. That way the van would only have to be big enough to carry, say 10 runners at a time, although you might have 100 or more total participants.
Playing this through...
The US is about 5000Km wide, but let's add a 1000Km, since we are runners not crows. So, we would need 600 10Km legs. If each person runs 10 legs (100 Km = 60 miles), we would need 60 total runners. We divide them into groups of 10 people. Which means that a group would cover together 1000Km.
It would mean that a runner runs about 1 hour* (10Km), then gets 9 hours of rest before running the next leg. It would, therefore, mean a total time commitment of 100 hours (as the group of 10 covers their 1000Km), plus the time to get to the start and finish. Well, that means 5 days time.
I think that would work. You could raise the number of runners and vans to make it perhaps more workable.
Let's keep working on the concept in this thread.
Oh, how I wish I could join in. But, my home is also not exactly on the map, as I live in a town called Bonn (Germany).
Cheers,
Paleo
* I am aware that for some people a 1 hour 10K is a fast pace. I am just using the number because it is easy to calculate with (and it's not totally unrealistic, on average).