Four months ago, my best friend coerced (okay maybe that’s a bit of a strong of a word, but we’ll roll with it) me into signing up for a Tough Mudder. Let it be known that while I was admittedly excited for a challenge of this caliber (I mean, who doesn’t want to run through a jungle of live electrical wires and jump 12-foot walls?) even the mere thought of myself running induced a sort of phantom case of asthma (not that I have asthma, but I really had no running ability whatsoever; nada, zip, zilch). And so I consider today, May 4th 2013, a day in which the force was very much with me. Today, I ran my first 5K. And I even won a medal for finishing 3rd in my age group. But that’s not really what’s important.
What’s really important is how I made it.
I didn’t make it because I’m suddenly a good runner, or because I have the endurance of a racehorse and the willpower of a triathlete. Because I’m not, and I don’t. It’s easy to give up, to phone it in when you’re on your own schedule. It’s easy to say “I can’t do this today; I’ll try again tomorrow, maybe.” But it’s impossible to ignore the sinking truth that almost 1 billion people don’t have access to clean water, and that it causes more deaths every day than you probably want to know. Water. The thing we most likely take for granted every single day. We brush our teeth, wash our clothes, cook our pasta, and fill our swimming pools with it. Sometimes we even avoid it because it’s boring and “it tastes like nothing.” So instead we pour a glass of some sugary, delicious substance and pour that fresh, clean, life-sustaining substance down the drain. “There’s more where that came from.”
Maybe for us.
But for them, it’s not such a pretty picture. They walk miles and miles and miles. Every single day. And if they’re lucky, they might return with a bucket of some water-like substance that might be safe, but it’s more likely teeming with one or more life-threatening diseases. But because of this project, this picture is becoming less and less prevalent, and is being replaced with an indescribably beautiful image of hope, and of love, and of laughter, and most importantly, of life. Long, beautiful life.
The scenic, winding route of the Running Water 5K was sprinkled with lawn signs that reminded us that we were running with a purpose. Some presented us with the dry facts: “Approximately 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean water. That’s 1 in 7 of us.” Others cheered us on: “A community here for a community there.” But the ones that pulled me up the hills and pushed me to the finish line were the photographs; the ones of very real, very alive people–many of them children–that had just seen, touched, tasted clean water for the first time in their lives. Those are the ones that wouldn’t let me stop, even when it hurt, even when it was hard. I was running for a purpose greater than myself, and it emotionally wrecked me when I realized that after two miles, I was thirsty. Thirsty. I don’t know the meaning of the word thirsty. But because of Let Them LOL, these beautiful people know the meaning of hope.
Click here to learn more about Let Them LOL and how you can help give water and spread hope.
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