Crewing for RAAM

So I found out today that I get to crew for Team HOPE in the Race Across America 2012. I'll have the general job of navigator and a bunch of other stuff. It starts out from Cali in mid June and goes 3,000 miles back to Annapolis, MD. It'll be a great experience to see a lot of the country plus learn a lot about RAAM and about endurance racing in general. The team is competing in the 4 cyclist division and my friend Sara from the Kent State Running Club is one of the 4. More info on the team is at http://www.theteamhope.com/ .

This is the Team and Crew from 2011

The biggest part of all of this is that Team Hope is teamed up with the Blue Planet Network to promote clean drinking water around the world. Show your support : http://blueplanetnetwork.org/

• 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water, roughly one-sixth of the world’s population.

• 2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die every year from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

• Half of the world’s hospital beds are filled with people suffering from water related illnesses.

• In the past 10 years, diarrhea has killed more children than all the people lost to armed conflict since World War II.

• Despite the size of the problem, we have made little progress against it. There were only 181 million fewer people living without safe drinking water in rural settings in 2004 (899 million) vs. 1990 (1.08 billion)*1.

• 50 percent of people on earth lack adequate sanitation. Another way to look at it: Nearly half of the world’s population fails to receive the level of water services available 2,000 years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome.

• Lack of sufficient funding. It is estimated that, in 2004, only US$4b in overseas development assistance was provided to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) around water*2, versus a projected need of approximately US$10b annually for basic water and sanitation services and an additional US$15b to US$20b annually to provide a higher level of service and to maintain existing services.*3 Note that the MDG goal, reducing the number of people living without safe drinking water and sanitation by half by 2015, still leaves hundreds of millions of people without water and sanitation.

Speaking of all this water, I swam 1000m today at the pool before dinner and found it much quicker and easier. Practicing all this form and technique is starting to pay off it seems. Thanks Laura <3