Last March I was going to run from LA to Boston. There's two pretty well known marathons in those cities and an idea Charlie Engle and I hatched, was to run them both, including all the ground between. The idea was to break the running and wheelchair records by going 3,100 miles in just 44 days, which is what it would take to make the start in Boston. We road some blog posts on Runner's World.
If you go to those posts, you'll see it starts with a post from each of us explaining that it wasn't going to happen. It was devastating and no fun at all.
Right now is a good time to review the mistakes, that I feel we made, so they don't screw up my current plans - to be the first Handcycle to solo RAAM. I'll be leaving from Oceanside, CA and traveling 3,000 miles by bike in 12 days. In reaching Annapolis, MD by then, I'll do 700 more miles than an average Tour de France in half the time. SO, it is going to be a special race, and even more so because my sister, Bianca Kajlich, is going to produce a documentary film based on it!
I think it's crucially important for me to revisit what wen wrong last year so 1) I don't hate myself if I repeat them 2) because I want to save myself the heartbreak of losing another opportunity, and 3) to learn. I don't want to be overly critical, we tried hard and the timeframe was very short. Still, I'm determined to make it work this time and feel this is a worthwhile exercise.
Mistakes we made:
Not asking enough people for the money. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to ask for, how to ask it, how to present, what our message was, what we could offer, and many other details. I think we needed all of that stuff, but not at the cost of not seeking funding which is the number one thing we needed. In the end we didn't have the funding and we didn't go.
Taking too long to figure out what we were doing. I think it would have been better to commit and adjust if necessary, rather than being indecisive and changing our minds every week. There wasn't going to be a film and then there was. We were going for sponsors and then investors and finally crowd sourcing was a last option, but there wasn't time to launch a campaign.
Being Afraid to Pick up the Phone. After some time of launching off emails, I realized that nobody is going to respond to a random email, if they even look at it. I figured that the best thing to do was just call. It is very hard to get up the nerve to call and the first few lines are the worst. However, if you are passionate about something, you need to try to communicate this to them. Even after a few good calls with people in companies as big as Volkswagen, I didn't just have a change in mindset that would have enabled me to make hundreds of phone calls. I should have been doing it every day. Chances are it would have led to something.
