Friday, July 31, 2009

Eddie Izzard once again raises the bar for both awesomeness and lunacy

In January, Eddie Izzard raised the bar for human awesomeness everywhere.

Now he's just outdone himself. He is running over 1,000 miles around the entire UK to raise money for a charity called Sport Relief. That's a marathon a day for over a month.

The man is well into his 40s, has been in training for only four weeks, and apparently already has a hamstring injury going in.

He's a looney.

I must send money.

This is particularly interesting as a fundraising strategy because it's so excessive. If Eddie hadn't done anything at all for this charity, no one would have noticed. If he had donated some money or done a benefit gig or autographed some spare merch and donated it to be auctioned off, people would applaud his generosity. If he had run a single marathon and tweeted a sponsorship link, he would have gotten a huge wave of donations (he has half a million twitter followers and a marathon is inherently impressive) and that would have been considered above and beyond in and of itself. But instead he's Terry Foxing it (plus one leg, minus cancer, plus 25 years of age, minus years of athletic training = you do the math) with insufficient preparation. This is ridiculous. He's going to be miserable. He probably already is miserable. He might do permanent damage.

And this is why I feel moved to donate.

Not because I want Eddie to suffer, but because I like Eddie and I don't want his suffering to be in vain. I'm not so very into athletic charities, and I never feel particularly inspired to donate when people (even people I know personally) are running marathons or climbing the CN Tower. That's suffering too, and I don't want those people to suffer either, but it's a reasonable amount for self-inflicted suffering - a few hours and then you can go home and go to sleep and never run again in your life if you don't want to. But Eddie runs a marathon, then has do it again the next day, and again the next day, for an interminable month.

So he's getting a donation out of me (and I'll probably donate more out of sympathy if he ends up having to quit early), but I'm also going to have to reflect carefully on my donation standards. I don't want to make a world where you have to do something this crazy and painful to move people to raise money.

Which, now that I think about it, might be the intention behind this lunacy in the first place.

You can stalk follow Eddie's progress here and here, and donate here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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