Blue Planet Run (around the world) for safe drinking water

Travelers think about water a lot. But not nearly as much as the local residents do in many developing countries. One billion of Earth’s inhabitants have no safe drinking water. Each year, 2.2 million people around the world die of waterborne disease, 6,000 every day. Twice as many people die of diarrheal diseases in China, Indonesia, and India, than of HIV/AIDS.

Women and children in the developing world walk long distances (an average of six kilometers) in search of water that is often polluted, tainted by sewage, and laden with parasites and bacteria. The LifeStraw can help with some of those problems, but Blue Planet Foundation aims for a more permanent solution.

These facts have prompted the Blue Planet Run, where a team of 20 international runners will take turns running 10-15 mile segments, 24 hours a day, covering a total of 15,200 miles in a mere 95 days this summer, raising money and awareness for the cause of safe drinking water.

Blue Planet Run Foundation was founded by Jin Zidell in 2002, with the mission to “provide safe drinking water to 200 million people for the rest of their lives by 2027—cooperatively, efficiently and openly.”

The eco-friendly “race without a trace” began on June 1 in New York City, and is scheduled to conclude back in NYC on Sept. 4. The route has runners traveling through 16 countries on four continents, including: the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Mongolia, China, Japan and Canada.

For those of us who don’t have the time, stamina and inclination to relay all the way around the world, Blue Planet Run offers the 10 Mile Challenge where people can raise money for clean water causes, run 10 miles in their hometown, and then virtually “run” a leg of the 15,200 mile race online, helping provide some of the world’s inhabitants with safe drinking water.