Jamie McDonald dipped his hand in the Pacific Ocean two weeks ago to mark the start of his latest test of human endurance — a 6,000-mile run from the westernmost point of the continental United States to the easternmost point. On Monday, he got another hand from Microsoft.
To go along with the technical expertise the company and its partners are lending McDonald, a few hundred employees of the software giant gave him a rousing applause as he made a stop in Redmond, Wash., to deliver one of his motivational speeches.
McDonald, a 31-year-old native of the United Kingdom, has scheduled a year for his run as Adventureman, the alter-ego superhero persona he assumes during his efforts to raise awareness and money for children’s charities and hospitals. The distance he’s running, down the West Coast, across the Southern U.S. and up the East Coast, is equal to about 230 marathons. On a map, he said, the route looks like a big smiley face.
Three years ago, he completed a 5,000-mile solo run across Canada and raised £250,000 ($348,000). In the time since, he co-founded a charity of his own called Superhero Foundation and he wrote a book about his adventure, called “Adventureman: Anyone Can Be a Superhero.” It was during a tour for that book that he decided to run again, this time in America.
After starting in Cape Alva, in Washington’s Clallam County, McDonald spoke to GeekWire this week about how he’s feeling with so much road ahead of him.
“I put my hand in the ocean and I just got running,” McDonald said, describing a moment captured in a video (below) posted on his Facebook page. “I was feeling really, really overwhelmed. I went a bit crazy in the brain, ‘What are you thinking? This is a long way.’ … I don’t know if your body can ever be prepared to run across a country, and I guess especially America. I didn’t realize how big it is actually. It’s ridiculously big isn’t it? Each day that I run I’m hoping, fingers crossed, my body gets stronger, and of course it can deteriorate in places, but I’ve just got to believe that it will get stronger.”
McDonald runs without a support team. Dressed in a superhero costume designed by a young boy, he pushes a three-wheeled stroller loaded with supplies and camping equipment. And this time he’ll have some tech along for the journey.
McDonald met Craig Joseph, CEO of intY, the cloud services company, when Joseph was booking McDonald for a talk in London. intY is a Microsoft partner and together with folks from Acacus, another Microsoft partner, solutions were developed to make McDonald more trackable, social and safer on his run.
A tracker uses GPS to relay information in real time, showing location, speed and distance information, including useful features like weather and danger zones. Users also gain the ability to opt in to notifications so they can be alerted when McDonald is close to their location. They can also get automated pings on new social media posts and more.
“Their technology that they’re helping with, it’s incredible,” McDonald said. “I’m not much of a geek, but, in a nutshell, people can see exactly where I am, live, which is a game changer because for me, I need to connect with the kids and the families at the hospitals and just the everyday people in America. The more connections I make the bigger the difference I can make.”
Clearly delighted and genuinely thankful for the help and the technology he’ll be using over the next year — a time frame dictated by the length of his visa — McDonald called the world we live in “just nuts.” He also boasted about the ability to send an emergency alert from a special “button” even if he doesn’t have a signal.
“From a safety point of view it’s awesome. It keeps my girlfriend and mum happy,” he said. (Check out the live tracker here, and register here to get special notifications.)
Following his talk in London and his eventual arrival in the U.S., McDonald was invited by Ted Eisele, director of partner development at Microsoft, to speak at the company’s headquarters.
“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, I’m just a boy from Gloucester in England. How did this ever happen?’ I’ve got to say, I’m used to doing talks around the world, but I have never experienced anything like it.”
McDonald said his talk on Monday complemented themes promoted by Microsoft vice president Gavriella Schuster, about having clear goals and visions, and believing that anyone can achieve the impossible. Before he went on, the crowd was encouraged to bring the energy of an American football stadium. McDonald said he ran in and everyone stood up and went “absolutely bonkers.”
After shedding a costume with outsized muscles, and continuing his talk in street clothes, McDonald said that his point was to encourage his audience to find the superhero within themselves.
Born with a rare spinal condition called syringomyelia, McDonald spent the first nine years of his life in and out of hospitals. A very weak immune system and epilepsy combined to give him very poor health. Eventually, his symptoms eased and later in life he made a commitment to give back to the hospitals which supported him.
With the run across the U.S., he hopes to raise another £250,000 from his U.K. followers, with 100 percent of those donations going to his Superhero Foundation. The target amount in the U.S. is $1 million, with plans to split that amount between the foundation and children’s hospitals in each state that he runs through. (Donate here.)
McDonald will stop at children’s hospitals and schools along the way, delivering talks and meeting the children he hopes his donations will help. Monday afternoon he did just that at Seattle Children’s Hospital as part of Superhero Day, an event that previously attracted film stars Chris Evans (Captain America) and Chris Pratt (Star-Lord).
McDonald laughed when asked about the similarity between his quest and that of fictional film star Forrest Gump.
“It’s one of my favorite films. It’s an absolute classic. I’m a big Tom Hanks fan. What a brilliant movie,” he said. “I probably do end up running a bit like Forrest Gump, which is hilarious, but I think it’s important that people know that I ended up spending most of my life in hospital as a kid.”
And now he’ll be out running through towns and cities across the country, meeting lots of strangers and hopefully being encouraged to run, Jamie, run!
“It’s quite lonely because I’m out there on my own, I don’t have a support crew or anything like that. People just kind of took me in and took me into their homes and gave me good meals,” he said of his Canadian experience. “I’ll be surviving off tin fish and butter, so any hot meal I can get to top off the calories would just be incredible.”
