Helping The Oceans One Step At The Time

Why I #Run For The Oceans

by Clare Snow  (original) - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic  - edited

One day while starting the runtastic app, it told me that with only one small button I could Run for the Oceans. 

Uhm, okay? I thought, and clicked on close. After all I wanted to think of something else at the moment, like most people when they open the app: going for a jog. But while I ran down the forrest tracks I thought about it. In short: Run for the Oceans raises awareness about the amount of plastic that is dumped in the oceans.

If there is one thing I am allergic to it is plastic. I am brutally aware of how often it is used when it just isn't needed: Think about the plastic bottles you throw away without thinking - instead you could simply buy a glass bottle and re-use it again. Or what about apples that are wrapped into plastic for some reason? If that's not a convincing argument: have you ever bought a pair of scissors you couldn't open because it was wrapped into hard plastic? Because I have, and not only did it end in almost losing a finger and mind, I am pretty sure that it was the start of a life long grudge against plastic.

After all, it is so easy to omit most of it. I have two glass bottles (one big, one small) instead of constantly buying plastic ones. You can use actual soap instead of the stuff that comes in bottles - which in addition makes air-travel a tad easier. And of course, you can recycle, which is pretty much what addidas Parley are trying to do. They're working towards using recycled plastic only for their new products.

http://www.adidas.at/parley

At the moment my shoes have reached above 500km which means they're starting to wear. Even though I seem to have a life-long relationship with aesics when it comes to jogging shoes, I am really tempted to go for a product from this collection next.

However, you don't even have to go this "far." In fact it is quite simple. All you have to do is ... join. That's all.

Join the +38,000 people to help and raise awareness. It doesn't matter if you're a slow jogger, or someone with a lot of commitments who is only going to manage 5k this week. Or be enthusiastic and go with 40k!

Personally, I want to reach around 20k - and why not dedicate those kilometers to the oceans. I do like them clean after all.

www.runtastic.com

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Run For The Oceans Diary:

Start Slow And Finish Strong

Monday - 4,14km

What can I say? I was oddly motivated to do something worthwhile with jogging, and I calculated how far I would need to jog now to reach 20km during this week. After all I was tied to a training schedule - indicating 30 minutes today - and four jogs this week. So this demanded an odd mixture of stamina and tactics. Hence I decided to start slow and finish strong! 

Oh, on another note: try to take fancy #instafitness pictures after your jog, if you do it in the middle you're going to have to warm up again. It's awful - just like the photo. Lesson learnt.

Wednesday - 3,18km

Long day at work? Correct. Stressy? Yep. A ruined back? Indeed. Not exactly the best conditions when you still have to jog. Luckily, my schedule was light and it told me that it would only be 15 minutes with five sprints at the end. So I did it, and it was NICE! 

Friday - 8,37km

This was the weirdest training I have ever had to do. I had to jog for an hour, and every five minutes take a one minute walking break. To say the least, once or twice I may have simply not done it. But in the end I had 8,37 km - and an overall of almost 16k, which meant I was close to my goal!

One more time to go - this is going to be a big one.

Sunday - 12,67k

It's been a while since I jogged this route but next I want to tackle 10k in a race. So I thought it would be a great way to see if I can do it without any pressure. It was not easy at times, there were slight death wishes as my legs didn't seem to warm up and felt stiff for the first third.

However, in the end I managed it. And I could prove to myself that I can still run 10k and a tad more. Furthermore, I cracked the big 1,000km with runtastic. But most importantly, I managed to collect 28k for the oceans!