Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a sponsored
athlete? Follow along with my team – the Charity Miles All-Stars – at the GO! St Louis Marathon and we’ll show you how to run for sponsored money for a wide
range of charities. With the Charity Miles app on your phone, you’ll be able to
improve the world as you improve your body one step at a time!
We are the Charity Miles All-Stars marathon relay team…four do-gooder
girlfriends who enjoy running and saving the world, each in her own special way.
On April 6, we’ll divide up the 26.2 miles of the GO! St. Louis Marathon to
raise awareness and sponsorship money for our favorite charities. But how can
four women, passionate about vastly different organizations, agree on what to
run for? The answer is that we don’t HAVE to decide! With the magic of the
Charity Miles, we can each select our favorite charity.
Charity Miles works like this: Using your iPhone, go to the
app store and download the Charity Miles app for free. Then, every time you
walk, run, bike, jog, skip, or meander, you can activate the app and choose a
charity from a pre-set list of Charity Miles partners. Charity Miles uses the
GPS on your phone to track your distance and money earned: 25 cents/mile
for runners, 10 cents/mile for walkers, 10 cents/miles for bikers up to the
initial $1,000,000 sponsorship pool. It will even tell you the impact you are
having as you run. For instance, it will tell you how many anti-retroviral
pills you provide for AIDS patients or how many polio vaccines you provide for
children in impoverished nations. When you’re finished, you accept the
sponsorship and spread the word on Twitter or facebook. As long as you are
moving through a distance, just do what you are doing anyway, and make the
world a better place!
Our merry band will be training and racing using Charity
Miles for each of our favorite causes.
- Jen DeFranco will be running for the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life Campaign for global vaccines for children.
- Myrdin Thompson will be running for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
- Kerry Galson will be running for the Nature Conservancy.
- …and I, Cindy Changyit Levin, will be running for (RED) to benefit the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria
In the next weeks, you can see us (@ccylevin, @myrdinjt, and @jendefranco) tweeting updates to @GOfitnessSTL and
@CharityMiles. By the way, on top of all of this, we registered for the race
using a discount code “STLFOOD14,” so not only did we get a cheaper rate, but
the St. Louis Area Foodbank will also get a donation from the race
organization itself!
It’ll be a great run to benefit ourselves and thousands of
others in need. If you are participating in the GO! St. Louis races this April, I encourage you to:
- Use “STLFOOD14” code to give the food bank a donation at lower cost to you
- Download the Charity Miles app and use it while you train
- Use Charity Miles in your training and on the race course
- Look for us in our Charity Miles logo shirts at the marathon & cheer for us!
