Nick Williams OFM Marathon Fundraiser - January 15, 2012

Welcome! Thank you for your interest in supporting the construction of the Operation Freedom Memorial in Wichita, Kansas.

For those who don’t already know me well, my name is Nick Williams and I’m an active duty service member and avid runner. I feel a great debt to those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country, and I’m pleased to announce a campaign to fund a memorial in their honor. Email me at: nick@ofm-ks.com

I completed the Boston Marathon in April of this year, and I was blown away at the outpouring of support during the week before and after the race. However, all of the attention around race day made me pause and consider the impression a majority of people have concerning marathons and marathon runners. Marathons are not accomplished over 26.2 miles. Marathons are accomplished over months and years of daily battles with self discipline and life circumstances. Each marathon represents a culmination of hundreds of hours of planning, pavement pounding, conscious eating, early bedtimes and worry over fitting everything into this entity we call life.

So for the next few months, I invite you on my journey. Provided my deployment schedule complies, I’m traveling to the sunny desert of Phoenix, AZ to run the Rock and Roll Marathon on January 15th, 2012. By reading my posts, you will observe days when running feels great and days when running feels difficult. You’ll observe runs on insufficient sleep and runs where everything inside me clicks and I feel on top of the world. As a part of my team, I ask you to simply donate per mile I run.

If you chose to donate a dime per mile I run, you will donate on average around 20 dollars per month leading up to my marathon. If you chose to donate a quarter per mile, then you will donate around 50 dollars a month. For anyone who donates over fifty cents per mile, I will send you a personalized plaque from the marathon race day with our fundraising total inscribed. You can check my progress and read descriptions of each run on my Facebook page, where I’ll be logging my miles on www.DailyMile.com and re-posting the information to my profile. I’ll be doing a lot of my running while I’m on a deployment to Southwest Asia, so you can keep up with my progress while I’m halfway around the world.

My fundraising goal is to double the amount already donated to the Operation Freedom Memorial Fund to date. As of this month, we have about $25,000 dollars in our coffers, so my goal is to raise another $5,000. By most estimates, the construction of our memorial will cost around $235,434.20, so this campaign is just one step in our process towards creating a lasting impression of our gratitude to the fallen soldiers of Operation Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

As a statement of my commitment, I’m offering to match the first $5,000 donated. All I ask for you to do is let me know your donation pledge per mile by posting on the Facebook event wall, privately messaging me, or just verbally letting me know. I’ll record your information and monthly advise you of our combined efforts, and you can effortlessly donate through Operation Freedom Memorial’s Paypal account. The only overhead involved with your donation is a very small percentage to Paypal, otherwise, everything goes directly to the construction of the memorial. We are a 501c3 organization, so your donations are deductible on your income taxes and your receipt is available through Paypal.

I hope you are as excited about the upcoming months of training as I am! If you decide to donate and join my team, it’s my prayer that the entire effort involved with being a distance runner becomes evident while our team supports the memory of those who don’t have the opportunity to run free anymore.

*Update! Since I'm kind of creatively using a FB Event page as my platform, the "Attend/Maybe Attend/Not Attending doesn't quite make sense in the normal way. However, if you are interested in donating, please mark Attend, and I will focus my future communication only towards those interested.