Hi this is Blaine Moore from Run To Win.com, and this years topic for Blog Action Day is all about “Water”. I’d kind of like to contribute by just telling you exactly how lucky you are that you get to run marathons, or run shorter distances, or you’re just in the circumstances to watch this video.

Because every week there’s 42,000 deaths that are directly related to either poor water supplies, or poor sanitation. There are more people in the world who have access to a cellphone than have access to a toilet.

Every day, women and children are walking a combined 109 million hours just to get their drinking water, and the water that they’re going to use for cooking and cleaning and everything else. The water that they’re getting is probably polluted, and it’s not going to be safe to drink. That comes down to carrying about 40 pounds of water for each return trip, and having on average about 8 gallons of water per day. For comparison, in a first world country, you’re probably using over 150 gallons of water every day between cooking, cleaning, eating, and the water that you drink.

And as a marathoner in particular, we have to stay hydrated in order to do the kinds of things that we do, and it’s really something that we just take for granted.

Just to compare with those numbers, there is fewer than 1 in 50,000 deaths for everybody participating in a marathon. And that actually balances out with a smaller death rate once you take into account the fact that putting on a marathon actually leads to fewer deaths due to traffic accidents from the roads being closed.

In terms of access to a toilet, most races will usually have somewhere between–for every 60 to 75 runners there’s going to be a porta-potty. So the Chicago Marathon which has about 45 thousand runners, you’re probably looking at between 500 and 600 porta-johns just at the starting line. And that’s compared to people who don’t have access to any sort of toilet facilities other than just going outside, which leads to polluting their local water supplies.

In terms of how much water is available in a marathon, in the 2008 Chicago Marathon they gave out 54,600 gallons of water. And that’s just for one event in one local spot in just a few hours.

Now granted they ran out, so I guarantee you with the warm conditions that they had this year in 2010, they gave out even more water than that. But just compare that to the kind of conditions in the developing countries where you only get the 8 gallons per day, and all the water that you get isn’t handed to you as you’re running along, you have to go out and get it and then lug it all the way back.

If you have a few minutes, go over to Water.org which is a US based non-profit organization whose mission is to provide safe drinking water and safe sanitation to developing countries, and just take a look around at what they have on the site. There’s a lot of information.

They accept donations. A $25 donation can provide safe drinking water to an individual for their entire life. So it’s something you should certainly take a look at, and just take a few moments to think about how lucky you are to have access to safe drinking water, and the circumstances where you can do something like go out and run a marathon and have people pamper you the way that they do.

So thanks for watching. Once again this is Blaine Moore from RunToWin.com, and this is my contribution for Blog Action Day, and you’re just one of the 28 million people that are going to be reading something about water today, as over 3,000 people have agreed to write or film something on the topic. And hopefully you learned something, and hopefully you’ll have an opportunity to just kind of sit back and appreciate what it is that you do have.
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