marathon stuff

Dear Fellow Consumers,

Let me first congratulate you for opening this email. I understand how busy everybody is and with the influx of spam received in email inboxes in today's economy, it is a wonder how anything gets read. Currently, I have 308 unread messages sitting in my inbox and I do not expect to get to them in this lifetime. I will try to keep this email brief and to the point so I will move on. If you would like to unsubscribe from this email (expect 2 more similar emails in the next to months) please click repeatedly on the following and shout:

UNSUBSCRIBE

For those of you aware of my existence, you may know that I have spent 2009 getting back into the fine sport of running. Running was a sport I (kind of) enjoyed during my high school days, but quickly gave up at the first opportunity. Ten years later, I decided to get back into the sport because I have finally given in to the fact that I will never make it into the NBA and most likely won't make it into professional baseball or mixed martial arts. Since I love sports I decided to get back into the easiest sport there is and run.

It's been about a year since I started to get back into running, and I've progressed pretty steadily I think. At first I had difficulty running for 20 minutes, but I am now able to hit 15 and 16 miles at a time twice within one week. Running a marathon, which seemed impossible to me 6 months ago, now seems like an accomplishable goal and as a result I have recently decided to spend a decent amount of money to register for the SunTrust National Marathon that will be held in Washington DC on Dan's birthday (March 20th). The point of this email is not to remind you how awesome I am, but instead I am asking you to consider the following:

The Back On My Feet organization is a charity that is linked to the SunTrust National Marathon. I am familiar with the organization since they originated in Philadelphia and they were featured in a Runner's World article at one point in the past year. I'm going to recommend you check out their site (www.backonmyfeet.org) for a better definition of what they do, but to sum it up briefly, they basically try to boost homeless people's self esteem by getting them involved in running. At first, that probably seems completely idealistic and I can understand how there can be doubts in how a program like this could work. However, in a short time, the organization has opened up a second chapter in Baltimore and are planning to expand to Washington DC and Boston within the next few months. Sure the program doesn't work for everybody, as there are possibly as many failures as success stories, but I think that could sum up just about anything. So I think it's worth checking out.

After discussing this issue with my wife and my liver-shunted cat (I don't intend to be Bono), I've decided to get a fundraising page going. If you feel like helping Back On My Feet get their Washington DC headquarters established, please visit this link: http://www.active.com/donate/BOMFNatlMarathon2010/safetyrope . If you're wondering how much to donate, I suggest donating the cost of two beers (nondrinkers, please donate the cost of three burritos). If you don't want to donate, I suggest you just reply to this email and insult me mercilessly.

Please feel free to forward this to as many frenemies as you want.

Take care,
Todd