Changing Plans

I've been promising to reveal my plans for the Chicot Challenge replacement. Keep in mind it is not my intention to permanently do away with the swim. It is just that I have gotten a little bored with it of late. Judging from the amount of money raised this year (a little under $2,400) so has the public. People are not responding to it like they have in the past.

To do anything physical like this, a long endurance event, takes copious amounts of training over a long period of time. Plus, it takes something that moves you from the inside, i.e. that captures your imagination, that gets you excited, fearful even. This past year, Chicot did not do that for me and training became a chore.

So I set my mind to searching. This is what I came up with.

Somehow I hatched on to the idea of running from our home in Greenwood to the Diabetes Foundation of Mississippi office in Ridgeland. This idea caused me to think, to lie awake at night and plot, to look at Google maps everyday, and to try to solve problems. In other words, it moved me from the inside.

I have done something a bit like this in the past, not as a fundraiser but as a personal adventure. In 2016 (I think), I ran from Greenwood to Noxapater, Mississippi over a five day span. It was a challenge, an ordeal, and a blast, something I think of often and fondly.

To pull this off, however, would require lots of running miles over lots of months. Lately I have had my training hampered by a mild inconvenience (I don't want to use the work injury) that busted all of that up. My thoughts were to do this as soon as we get out of school in May. Then it is warm enough to get rained on, but not so hot as to need copious amounts of liquids. From right now, I have five months. I am not sure that is enough.

Besides the training issues, this run would require huge logistical problems to be solved. I have not worked all of those out yet. Consequently, I have been doing some thinking and have come up with something else. Soon, maybe tomorrow, I will reveal what that something else is.