Charity Training Groups/Scam?

dunno, but if one has concerns about how much actually goes to charity, he should just donate directly to the cause, not to some training group. eg. donate to the Arthritis Foundation, not their marathon group Joints in Motion.

i certainly wouldnt donate money so someone can go to hawaii and walk a marathon for 8 hours.

Team in training uses 25% of the money raised for the person's trip and adminstration, advertising, etc. 75% goes directly to the charity.

It's a system that works. The marathon is a daunting task and for most people something that seems they can't do. The program provides coaching, training schedules, a singlet and pays for the trip and hotel, plus a guaranteed entry into the event.

The amount to raise depends on the trip location. Whatever the cost is for travel, etc they have the runner raise that much plus the amount to make the charitable contribution 75%. In other words if it cost $25.00 for the trip, etc. then the runner raise $100.00 ($75.00 going to the charity).

Charities raise millions because people are able to get their friends to donate to a worthy charity and also help their buddy achieve a goal. I did Marine Corp and had to raise $1800 ($450 for charity administration, travel, advertising, etc.) and $1350 went directly to the charity. More often than not runners raise more than their requirement making the percent much better towards the charity. The London marathon raised $71 million- a record for an event. If I have a friend that has been out of shape, and he want to do something for himself and help others- that's commendable, wether he runs 10 minutes miles. Charity groups by the way are placed at the back of the pack - unless you prove you belong up front. Their coaches also emphasize that- not to place yourself up front- but in your pace group.

It's a worthy cause to help coach- the people that do these programs are enthusiastic and want to learn and try very hard.

for one guys opinion on tnt see

http://www.davidhays.net/running/tnt.html

The overhead for the program is about 25% so about 75% goes to the charity to support programs and services. The letter linked from the fellow below is a bit of a stretch (guess he learned from Michael Moore). He takes info and manipulates it, IMHO.

A TnT runner/walker agrees to raise $X. In exchange for his/her efforts he is rewarded with a trip. How is this different from a charity paying a company to call people (when they could) to raise money? It is not, it is just that the runner is noticeable to runners at a race.

LLS has found TnT to be the best fundraising and also awareness format ever. In fact, it has virtually stopped all other fundraising activities since this one has proven to be so profitable.

If the person does not raise the required amount, he/she either does not go to the marathon or has to pay the difference him/herself (some charities work out other arrangements such as paying for airfare but not lodging or vice versa if the person falls short).

Also, there is no need to be a jerk and call the person a tubby. In answer to the $3000 question, in general 75% goes to the charity and 25% covers the expenses of the program.

David Hays seems to have an axe to grind.

The people sending out the letters obviously were not accurate in the issue of the amount of money that goes to research. I am guessing an honest mistake/misunderstanding. The 75% goes to programs and services. Many charities also work to raise awareness and prevention in addition to medical research.

Another argument is that it is better to have the money through this program than not to have it. Even if only 50% goes to the charity, that might be more money in absolute terms that smaller programs like golf tourneys and dinners would raise even if the overhead were lower.

BTW, there are several watchdog groups that monitor such things and set standards for overhead. TnT and JIM generally fall into these standards (although in a given year they might fall short).

For full disclosure, I have run as a TnT runner and coached for Joints in Motion (Arthritis Foundation).

First, the disclaimers: I have not run for a charity, but I've regularly donated when asked. I have no professional involvement with any charities.

I, like David Hayes (sp?) in the link above, have mixed feelings about making a donation so someone can travel to a distant place to run. My feeling is that if you want to raise money by running a marathon, run your local marathon, keep expenses low, and see that more gets to actual charitable uses. If you're involved in your local marathon as a volunteer or otherwise, pick something nearby in the region. If this is done, perhaps 90% or the money will go to the charity, not 75%ish, and while you're at it, pay your own entry fee. Then tell your donors of the choices you've made - I bet they'll give more generously knowing that you've made a contribution, especially on that was not a requirement.

By the way, I can't think of a time I've been asked to sponsor someone doing a distant event - I don't know if that's a reflection on my friends / acquaintances or just chance.

David Hays may have an axe to grind, but he's go a point. After you take out the 25% of your donation to the trip, there's other stuff that doesn't get to the front line, making it very inefficient(56% of donation goes to helping in one way or another).

Charity running is fine by me, but I draw the line when people use it as an attempt to equate themselves with much better runners. Raising money for charity is a noble and heroic task, but trying to exchange that recognition for a noble and heroic athletic effort is deceitful, disingenious, and hurts the sport. Unfortunately, too many people can't tell one from the other, and charity runners capitalize on that ignorance.

It is true many people who join TNT are beginners but these are people who are looking to give back. I participated in my first marathon a year ago in honor of my best friend because I was tired of standing around helpless watching her go through treatment. I joined becasue this was my way of giving back. It was tuff but not as difficult as what my friend was going through. Before I join TNT I made sure that they were true to their 25% to 75% ratio. Because I was so mission driven I paid my own expenses and had 100% of my fundraising goal go directly to the mission.

Since then I continued my involvement by volenteering my time at the office helping with patient service mailings, going to patient service meetings, and attend family support groups and seminars with my friend.

The Society offers alot of patient support and TNT helps fund these program along with funding research. I would learn about the Society and Team In Training first before criticizing it.

I give to charity, but I will no longer give any money to any organization which supports or tries to raise money via a group like TNT. I am sick and tired of dealing with throngs of TNT'ers every time I try to go to major race. I am tired of having to register a year in advance for an event I used to register for a month in advance, because TNT runners have filled it. I now avoid any race which TNT uses. I thought I was ahead of the game when I switched to triathlon some years ago, but now I see TNT is doing that, as well. Great.

I wonder how the brains behind TNT would feel if we, runners and triathletes, showed up at whatever event the TNT brains are passionate about (perhaps a book talk, bird watching expedition, etc), and clogged it up, kept them from enjoying it, and generally made a mockery of it by doing the absolute minimum to get by, and then taking an all-expenses paid trip paid for by charitable contributions.

Fuck TNT. My money will NEVER go to a charity that uses TNT.

And why is their name abbriviated TNT? Wouldn't Team In Training be TIT? Too PC I guess :) But wouldn't that be fun....."Honey, I am going to do a marathon for TIT" "I'm raising money for TIT!".....

Go ahead..add to the list...you know you want to! ;)

Yeah, what was the Dennis Miller bit from SNL? Re: tit for tat..

"What is tat, where do I get it, and how do I exchange it for the other thing?"

Race for life - A womens only race in the UK supporting a breast cancer research charity. They have about 30/40 races a year. My local race got 3,000 women last year average is about 2,000. £10 (16 dollars) to enter. Race tee shirt is another £10. The race is over 5km and is run on a shoe string - like really crap!!

So thats 2,000 times up to 40 races = 80,000 women x £10 = a stack of cash. 5% goes to the actual charity - i.e. the hospitals, doctors and to research. The rest goes to the administration.

A friend put one of the races on two years ago and he said some of the management from the charity came to watch. And they all drove Bentleys. He isn't going to do it again.

London Marathon makes an absolute fortune for charity. I hope more than 5% of the money each charity raises actually goes to welfare of the people they are caring for.

I too dislike the charity marathon programs - basically youre donating money so (a usually very slow runner) can go on an exotic trip. Sure some goes to charity but more could go if you bypassed this high overhead. One could argue that if the event werent there, then less would go to charity - but hey, charity begins at home. I too hate it when the chsrity crowd clogs marathon entries.

My favorite charity is giving $ directly to a friend of mine who lives in the US but who's family lives in Uganda - I'll send cash there, no middle man, and it goes right to work.

I was approached by a fat couple who wanted me to give them money for TNT to go run, I think, the Honolulu marathon (it was in Hawaii, for sure). Told them I would give them $10 for every minute they went under 3:15, never heard back.

I have several disparate feelings on this issue:

1) I think the link above is a legitimate complaint. I have given money to co-workers who did TNT - and I knew that they were getting some of their own marathon costs paid for out of my buck. I ignored the inaccurate schpeal (isn't every organization full of crap when you look at them carefully enough?), figuring that it was worth it to support a friend who was getting into running.

2) I seriously considered doing TNT for my first marathon, several years ago. For a variety of reasons, I chose not to. Later, when a colleague at work did TNT (this was the first TNT person in my life), I was eager to see how she'd do. Well, she may have been a special case, but she had a pretty tough time. She had IT band problems, got injured, tried to train injured, did her 20 mile workout while her IT band was still messed up, making it worse, was stressed that she wasn't going to be able to do it after all her effort and raising all that money, etc. The actual race was ok for her - she had the euphoria of finishing a marathon (in just under 6 hours, if I recall correctly), and of having everything turn out ok in the end.

Sure, her original goal was 4 1/2 hours, made impossible by the fact that it was Honolulu heat, and her IT band was still not fully healed by the day of the race.

After it was over, she said she'd never do that again. She stopped running.

Maybe she's a rare exception to the rule, I don't know. Of course there are many with different experiences. The others I've known had different experiences, though they also had slightly different expectations and/or backgrounds.

I have no problem with slow runners at marathons (hell, if you're reasonably fast, you can get a seed time, no? plus I imagine they will get better about race etiquette over time). I also think the net benifit to the sport at least has the potential to be positive: it'll be interesting to see how many of yesterday's penguins become tomorrow's local masters race champs.

But I know that for my friend the whole experience basically scared her off from running; even though she voiced no complaints to TNT, I feel like in some sense they failed her. Makes me just think that it's a foolish undertaking to tell people to go from 0 to 26.2 in 4 months.

If only we could inspire folks to first run decently through a 5K or 10K. The idea of a couch potato planning to within 4 months run a marathon, where they'll working at near aerobic capacity for 8 hours straight, seems like something that is really ill-advised. I have a hard enough time running at my aerobic capacity for 3 hours.

I assume that you have luv2run on your license plate... how freakin cute!

You also must be a tubby, a penquin. pear, wide load and hope to break 8 hours some day, sorry to touch that nerve Richard Simmons warned you about.

Notice how the events you train so hard for (one day a week, probably saturday morning) have no time limit, to assure more tubbies finish, but force others to pay more for race fees because rent a cops are forced to work triple time on a Sunday.

But to take it further, some events such as R&R San Diego have cut off roads to eliminate those extra miles so you can finish and get your finish line photo. The majority don't even do 26.2, they just collect all the pledge money and allow corporate suits drive Lexus.

I'm somewhat skeptical of these programs myself. I was a coach for the American Diabetes training program and it was a frustrating experience. I was told that if there were 10 people in the group that I would get a trip to Kona, HI. I live in a mid-sized town so there was a hard time getting people to join (I was told I didn't have to recruit but did go to a couple road races and hand out flyers). We ended up with 8 people. Two of those dropped out after a month. I had open training sessions scheduled for the group and during the entire three months two people showed up. Everyone was scrambling to get their donations and spending their free time doing that rather than training. We had garage sales, swap meets, sold valentines candy, etc... and people still couldn't get enough money. Not ONE person made it to the Kona marathon that we were gearing for. The person I reported to from A.D. was over her head, dealt with me very unprofessionally and in the end completely blew me off. I spoke with a couple of group members a YEAR after this and they were still trying to raise money to get to a different marathon.

I'm cynical about charity foundations. Why are there so many Breast Cancer research foundations for example? Aren't they working towards the same cure? These are companies (albeit "non profit") that have paid CEO's that make big bucks and stand to make bigger bucks for medical breakthroughs. Many charities, like leeches, are clinging to road races that were already successful before these groups existed and i've noticed that the quality of these events has diminished.

My advice... donate a big wad of your cash directly to the charity of your choice and join your local running club to train for the marathon. I tithe 10% of every paycheck to whatever I feel like giving to (school groups, family, organizations, sportclubs, etc...) and it's the best habit I've ever learned to do with my puny paychecks.

Slow Geezer,

About a year ago, Running Times did an article on charity fund raising. They indicated that something like 80% (I haven't looked at the article recently) of charity marathon participants never participate in another race. To me, that was a real eye-opener.

I think the marathon is a brutal event, and far too much for most people on limited training. If the charities were looking to be realistic, they should set up a series of progressively longer races (i.e. 5K, 10K, half-marathon) and have people pledge for the series. This would allow for a more appropriate gradual build-up without the extreme demands of the marathon and allow these participants to see the cameraderie of runners in the "more normal" running world. This would improve the odds of their having fun and decrease the likelihood of injuries, etc. Unfortunately, it lacks the mystique of of the marathon (though the half still contains the magical word).

One of the other things that came out in the article was how much money was raised by the charity participants in races, and it was astonishing - again from memory but something like $2 billion in 2002. So, even with the high expenses a lot of good work comes from it.

I do think these groups make a mistake by using the marathon, rather than the half-marathon as their goal races, but as someone who's never qualified for Boston, what do I know.

Finally, for the poster a few up, I think most of us who have issues with the charities do not think what they are doing is bad, rather that they get these people in over their heads and don't educate them adequately about running ettiquete (sp?), also that they can be a logistical nightmare for race management, both in terms of cost and other headaches.

Also, the person who alleges that at RnR San Diego charity participants are encouraged to take shortcuts - if that's true, and I hope it's not, that is fraud, while the donations are not usually tied to completion, if that is done, it is unethical as can be and debases these types of programs. It is up to the charities and race management to quash this if it occurs - nothing will work faster to destroy the ability of these people to raise funds than evidence of this type of thing occurring.

Most people have no idea the positive results of some of these programs. Check into the progress that has been made in the treatment of leukemia over the past 10 years. Doubters would quickly change their tune if they had a close friend or family member who was stricken and then they found a new cure that saved their life. Who do you think is taking advantage of the system? Get some facts before being negative.