If you don’t already know about Wings for life world run, check them out here . All the money raised by the participation fees or donations made goes for research to find a cure for spinal cord injury and their motto for the run is ” Run for those who cannot”.
Race Format
This race was unique compared to the usual half marathon or marathon. Rather than running a certain distance as fast as you can, here you run as long as the catcher car doesn’t overtake you. The race is over when the car overtakes you and it’s the distance your covered till then, is what counts.
Also what is unique, that it is not limited to one location. People from all around the world participate and start running at the same time 11AM UTC (1300 CEST). And that’s why the name world run.
Like all the other racing events this years, this one too was cancelled and was only possible to do it via app virtually with a virtual catcher car.
Our Experience
We both being running enthusiasts, decided to take part in this good cause. We usually start running before noon and this one was supposed to start only at 1300 local time, which ofcourse brought some unusual feeling in the stomach but it’s the effort that matters.
I, for one, is not a super fast runner and as per the Goal Calculator, the catcher car would catch me at around 18 KM. So we finally decided to aim for a half marathon distance.
At 1300 we were ready with our airpod pros, our Garmin watch and World run app.
The world run app was overall really nice. In the beginning you had to manually press the “start” button to start the race and it didn’t start automatically at 1300 as expected. Apart from that, there were regular updates on each kilometer. Also when the catcher car started and increased its speed, there was an audio experience.
The catcher car caught me finally at 19.39Km which was much more than expected initially and we both finished our half marathon successfully.
And the winner of the race ran almost 70KM before the catcher car caught him, crazy right?
Would we do it again?
Even though the timing of the race was not we are used to and 13:00 in May can be really warm around here in Germany, for the great cause we would definitely take part in it again.
What’s next for us?
We will continue our love for running by following our schedule and when something for a good cause comes up, well, we will be ready to lace up again 🙂
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