OK, I have a deal for you. On July 31, I’m running the San Francisco Marathon. Just in case you’ve never been here before, I’m a charity runner. I use my legs to raise money for special causes. Last year, in honor of my son Jack (who is severely autistic), I ran 61 full marathons to raise money and awareness for a charity I’m a part of called Train 4 Autism.
In San Francisco, though, I’m running to raise money to fight cancer. A friend of mine, Sue Dailey, died from cancer on January 30 and I knew I wanted to do something to raise money for that cause. I blogged about this during the spring. I can’t really put into words about her being gone, because it’s just so unreal. I’m raising money for two charities — the Be Aware Foundation and the American Institute for Cancer Research.
The San Francisco Marathon invited me to run as a charity chaser. I’m starting dead last and collecting pledges for each person I pass. The more pledges I collect, the more money I raise. The faster I run (and, consequently, the more people I pass), the more money I raise. The more money I raise, the more lives get saved. It’s a big deal and I’ll be as determined to run hard during this race as I’ve ever been.
I was incredibly motivated to have an amazing training cycle. I wanted to have a killer cycle and killer race more than ever. But my body didn’t respond. I tried and tried and it’s been a terrible training cycle, one of my worst ever. Under any other circumstances, I would have dropped from this race. But the people at the San Francisco Marathon have been good to me. And I can’t quit on raising this money.
I’m not as optimistic as I was at the beginning of all this, but I’m still doing everything I can to show up as ready to run as possible on the 31st of this month.
That all being said, beyond all this running and fundraising, I’m a guy with a job. I work as basically a one-man IT department for a small company called Apriori Beauty. My company is a multi-level marketing company that sells skin care products for women, plus an elixir. I’m a tech guy, not an MLM guy. When I started Operation Jack two years ago, I had this great idea to set up my foundation as a distributor so that I could build residual income. The one problem with that, as I mentioned, is that I’m a tech guy, not an MLM guy.
So I’ve got to be going somewhere with this, right? Well my company was very nice to donate $5,000 worth of gift cards to my foundation for me to use to help generate donations. So here’s the deal that I mentioned in the first sentence of this blog. Make a pledge of at least one penny per runner that I pass and I’ll send you a $50 gift card. At this point, I think I’m probably going to pass about 4,000 runners. So, that would be a $40 donation.
There’s a bonus catch to this. If you’ve never purchased from Apriori Beauty before, you can easily purchase online through my foundation and Operation Jack will earn a commission of 30 percent. So, to sum it up:
– You donate about $40.
– You get $50 worth of products.
– The great causes I’m running myself into the ground for (cancer and autism) net $55.
If $40 is too steep and you’d prefer to make a 1/2-cent donation and get a $25 gift card, I’ll do that, too, but you might have to spend a few extra bucks to get the products. I know $50 more than covers the cost of an order.
Call this my latest creative attempt at fundraising. To make a pledge, click here! If you can’t afford to make a pledge, can you at least help spread the word? Thank you!
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