Friday, March 21, 2014

Charity Miles goes the Distance for the GO! St. Louis Marathon




Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a sponsored athlete? Follow along with my team – the Charity Miles All-Stars – at the GO! St Louis Marathon and we’ll show you how to run for sponsored money for a wide range of charities. With the Charity Miles app on your phone, you’ll be able to improve the world as you improve your body one step at a time!

We are the Charity Miles All-Stars marathon relay team…four do-gooder girlfriends who enjoy running and saving the world, each in her own special way. On April 6, we’ll divide up the 26.2 miles of the GO! St. Louis Marathon to raise awareness and sponsorship money for our favorite charities. But how can four women, passionate about vastly different organizations, agree on what to run for? The answer is that we don’t HAVE to decide! With the magic of the Charity Miles, we can each select our favorite charity.

Charity Miles works like this: Using your iPhone, go to the app store and download the Charity Miles app for free. Then, every time you walk, run, bike, jog, skip, or meander, you can activate the app and choose a charity from a pre-set list of Charity Miles partners. Charity Miles uses the GPS on your phone to track your distance and money earned: 25 cents/mile for runners, 10 cents/mile for walkers, 10 cents/miles for bikers up to the initial $1,000,000 sponsorship pool. It will even tell you the impact you are having as you run. For instance, it will tell you how many anti-retroviral pills you provide for AIDS patients or how many polio vaccines you provide for children in impoverished nations. When you’re finished, you accept the sponsorship and spread the word on Twitter or facebook. As long as you are moving through a distance, just do what you are doing anyway, and make the world a better place!

Our merry band will be training and racing using Charity Miles for each of our favorite causes.
In the next weeks, you can see us (@ccylevin, @myrdinjt, and @jendefranco) tweeting updates to @GOfitnessSTL and @CharityMiles. By the way, on top of all of this, we registered for the race using a discount code “STLFOOD14,” so not only did we get a cheaper rate, but the St. Louis Area Foodbank will also get a donation from the race organization itself!

It’ll be a great run to benefit ourselves and thousands of others in need. If you are participating in the GO! St. Louis races this April, I encourage you to:
  1. Use “STLFOOD14” code to give the food bank a donation at lower cost to you
  2. Download the Charity Miles app and use it while you train
  3. Use Charity Miles in your training and on the race course
  4. Look for us in our Charity Miles logo shirts at the marathon & cheer for us!