Skip the runs and give all of that travel related $ to the charity. Done. Now get back in the kitchen and make your husband a sammich.
Skip the runs and give all of that travel related $ to the charity. Done. Now get back in the kitchen and make your husband a sammich.
Whoop-dee-damn-do
Pete Kostelnick just averaged double this daily mileage for almost 100 straight days. While doing it self-supported...but I guess when you just love to run and push your boundaries, mentally and physically, it's not the same to the media as "doing it for charity".
You better check your source for the details about Pete's run. Guli has said quite clearly what she's attempting has never been done before. From OP's article: The response to her activism hasn't all been positive, Guli says. "I've had a lot of people tell me, 'You're not an athlete. How can you possibly do this? Nobody's ever done it before. You can't do it. Who are you to think you can run 100 marathons and change the world?'"
MeHereYouWhere?! wrote:
Whoop-dee-damn-do
Pete Kostelnick just averaged double this daily mileage for almost 100 straight days. While doing it self-supported...but I guess when you just love to run and push your boundaries, mentally and physically, it's not the same to the media as "doing it for charity".
Was that Guli who said that or was it Guli saying that is what people have said to her?
Either way, it's been done before ;)
Yes, I was trying to make a joke. Note that what the article suggests are negative responses to her announcement of the challenge are claims that it's too difficult a challenge, she's insufficiently prepared, not talented enough a runner. Her response is to say that she will get through by sheer willpower, noting that she's old, slow (not by my standards), injury prone but committed.
One of the downsides of having new media who can now publish anything for which they have bandwidth is you get articles like this, that would never make it onto a newscast or into a print publication. They're not newsworthy and they have no check to them. News organizations used to--and probably do still--keep lists of go-to experts to consult for stories where people are making significant claims.
Someone claims to have found a new Shakespeare play? Call the university's English department to see who can comment. Cold fusion? Find a nuclear physicist who can weigh in on the feasibility. Untrained runner wants to burn untold resources while walking many hours each day to advertise the earth's dwindling resources? Meh--just run it in the Lifestyles section.
I gotcha. I was actually just talking to my father about this the other day. It's just the day and age we live in. Our discussion was more on how channels such as ESPN and CNN, et all, have to fill programming 24/7 so they talk about stupid stuff non-stop and beat everything into the ground 10 times over. As you said, this is the same type of thing. Gotta have "new and exciting" content for when people come back to the site, so crap like this gets publicized.
Well, that and the average American relates more to this person than they do Pete. It's the sad but unfortunate truth. They see this person who is "not a runner" doing this and think it's amazing. They see a person like Kostelnick and think "well, he's a runner so of course he can do that"...not realizing the work he had to put in to get that point and during the run.
lol. Another person that's going to do her challenge on sheer willpower.
What happened to that woman who was going to do 50 Ironmans on sheer will power? Although I suppose you don't need a great deal of preparation or talent to walk 26.2 miles a day.
She wont raise enough money to offset the expenses but as a marketing exercise it will good for her and her company so mission accomplished I guess.
Don't see any sign that she is documenting her runs through sites like Strava or Garmin Connect. I guess we just have to take here word for it.
She’s a water expert: she pees on us & says it’s raining.
Those crazy Aussies... LOL
I don't like the self-promotional s**t on her website but she clearly is a runner, and a self-identified ultra runner. And, she has money, so I guess she can spend it the way she wants to... It is a little self-indulgent to but who am I to judge;)
Old And In The Way wrote:
Don't see any sign that she is documenting her runs through sites like Strava or Garmin Connect. I guess we just have to take here word for it.
But she is tweeting the hell out of it... LOL
https://twitter.com/minaguliKawauchiFTW wrote:
But she is tweeting the hell out of it... LOL
https://twitter.com/minaguli
About a dozen tweets down from the top (probably 200 by the time you read this) she tweets, "Each t-shirt is 2,700 litres of water or the equivalent of 2 hours in a shower. We cannot afford to take water for granted. Water is #RunningDry. We must protect it." and also, "Pictures from the street market en route this morning. All I could think about was how much water went into these trousers, shoes, bags and t-shirts etc. Over 2 trillion made each year and they end in places like this or in landfills. We must act to ensure #EveryDropCounts."
Yet in nearly every photo, and there are a lot, she is wearing a different outfit.
Raddison wrote:
About a dozen tweets down from the top (probably 200 by the time you read this) she tweets, "Each t-shirt is 2,700 litres of water or the equivalent of 2 hours in a shower. We cannot afford to take water for granted. Water is #RunningDry. We must protect it." and also, "Pictures from the street market en route this morning. All I could think about was how much water went into these trousers, shoes, bags and t-shirts etc. Over 2 trillion made each year and they end in places like this or in landfills. We must act to ensure #EveryDropCounts."
Yet in nearly every photo, and there are a lot, she is wearing a different outfit.
It's for the kids, damnit!!
Yet not blogging it. I guess there are only so many hours in a day. She described running NYC; then posted a blog about "marathon number 3" in London, on November 7. Nothing about the day before and marathon number 2. She does encourage people to come out and run with her, with about 40 stops identified across the globe. I guess we just accept that she's running 26.2 mile on the other days? Her cause is a great one. I just wish people communicated more clearly and effectively. How much money is this trip costing? Are donations to her charity going to offset the cost of the trip? You could read that two ways: "Support an international education campaign to draw attention to this global crisis." or "Fund my round-the-world trip and I'll take pictures, Tweet, and walk/jog a bunch." And even if the donations don't go directly to fund the trip, that's just an accounting sleight of hand waiting to happen. The donations go directly into the charity's education and marketing fund to raise awareness of the cause. So money from that fund probably pays for her trip. I guess I'm too cynical but it just seems a way to pay for her to go around the globe. For the same amount of money could they fly representatives from these countries to a central location to give them some sort of immersion training experience then send them back to their home countries to try to get them to develop grass roots problem solving in their own locations?
KawauchiFTW wrote:
But she is tweeting the hell out of it... LOL
Donations aren't going to charity, they're going straight into her bank account. Click on the donate button on her webpage and it takes you straight to PayPal...
She's not running marathon distance every day and is also failing to raise awareness of her 'cause', this thread is getting more attention than her ridiculous social media posts.
Paging Doubler.
Time to investigate wrote:
Paging Doubler.
Derek won't be interested. She's not running actual races (apart from NYC, which she walked) and is not making any claims for world records or FKTs.
Mina Guli is a nobody with no followers and the only people who care are a small group of haters on letsrun dot com.
I emailed Mina Guli's Thirst For Water website about what their registered charity name and number was and whether I could review their financial reports since their about page says they are a registered charity when I viewed it a few days ago. This is part of the reply they sent me:
We’re a non profit based in Hong Kong and are currently undergoing an audit by the Hong Kong tax office which is common practice. While this process takes place our charitable status is placed on hold. During this time we have been very careful to refer to ourselves as a non profit. Thank you very much for pointing us to the references to charity on our website. This was old language and an oversight on our part’
So currently, Guli's Thirst For Water is not a charity.
As for why they are being audited, it looks to be a general industry crackdown in Hong Kong. The "charity" industry in Hong Kong has had very little oversight, zero enforcement or consequences, and have had many cases of extremely damning actions by so called "charities" lavishly spending money on their owners/directors as indicated in the links in this news article:
https://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/community/article/2157875/charities-hong-kong-forced-reveal-finances-critics-say-newWhere Mina's Thirst For Water falls in the spectrum of Hong Kong "charities", I do not know since Hong Kong charities have not been required to even report finances in the past, such is the extremely damning state of affairs in Hong Kong.
This is not to say charities in North America are much better.
I need to add to my above post that I don't know if it is normal for an organization to be delisted from the HK Gov charity website while they are being audited (doesn't make sense unless something is flagged). Someone more familiar with Hong Kong can check it out and find more details about it since Thirst For Water does not show up for me at all when I search on the HK Gov charity database:
scam_watcheroo wrote:
I need to add to my above post that I don't know if it is normal for an organization to be delisted from the HK Gov charity website while they are being audited (doesn't make sense unless something is flagged). Someone more familiar with Hong Kong can check it out and find more details about it since Thirst For Water does not show up for me at all when I search on the HK Gov charity database:
https://www.ird.gov.hk/eng/tax/ach_search.htm
I thought this person was just a complete joke until I read your analysis. Now it looks likely that she is doing this entirely for personal financial gain and not just because she's a narcissistic idiot.
Her social media posts are getting very little attention so she's clearly not as good at self promotion as she would like to be.
She claims to be sponsored by Colgate for this pretending to run holiday - anyone got any detail on that, surely they can't be funding it?