Running for a cause
By Francois Pesce on Wednesday, September 10 2008, 14:44 - Sport - Permalink
Running for health is good, but, when you've got a chance, running for a cause could be better!
And the chance happened for the Nikeplus community, the 31st of August, when we collectively ran the Nike Human Race. We had got the possibility to participate to a charity program. Three "noble cause", according to the website of the Human Race:
And last, but not least:
- The Lance Armstrong Foundation.
Sometimes, the image of a celebrity can be used to give visibility to one cause; usually, when an exemplary person disappears, a foundation is named after him (or her).. Undoubtedly, Armstrong took EPO in his career, as shown by results of about 6 different frozen urine samples. And, even if EPO has been medically used in the treatment of anemia (resulting from other cancer treatment), EPO is, whatever can be said by this "exemplary" person, one performance enhancing drug.
It would be absolutely inhumane to not feel sensible of the fight against cancer. And that problem is not the point. But, amongst those proposed by Nike, my choice was restricted to support UN Refugee or WWF, because I simply refuse to be a part of the improvement of the image of that cyclist, and I think it's unbelievable that Armstrong could take the occasion of the next Tour de France 2009 to demonstrate his ethic - period -.
However, because I have chosen the UN Refugee cause, and I don't want Mother Nature being jealous of my decision, I hope that this other website defending the cause of the Nature, will have some success::
Back to reality, and, to make you sure that I am a doping-free "athlet", here came my (horrible) results in the Human Race. By the way, I ran it twice, because the first time wasn't good: My first 5km were too fast, and I've exploded after that. So here came the profile of "my" Human Race that took me 1h08min (shame on me!!!):
For the records, I have computed this by adding to a GPS capture of the path, the precise altitude informations from this website, it uses data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, freely provided by the NASA. One of the other cool features from Clickroute.de, is the direct edition of your path (I've tried several tools, but nothing is easier)
Then, by simply opening GPS XML file (.gpx) with Excel, distance between each GPS record can be computed, with the help of trigonometric formulas provided here.
Thanks to Clickroute.de, here is the KML to open in google earth of my race.
