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Marathoner collects shoes for Africa Reston Runners help Tanzanian athletes
The shoes were contributed by the Reston Runners, a local running club with more than 800 members. Over the next week, Dowling will send the shoes to Tanzania for a project called Shoe4Africa.Dowling is a professional runner, racing in two marathons each year and a myriad of other shorter races in between. He came in 15th place overall in the 2002 Boston Marathon, but was the first American finisher, with a time of 2:13.28.
One day, he said, he was surfing on fellow runner Toby Tanser's Web site and noticed mention of the project. Tanser had gone to Kenya on numerous occasions for training opportunities from Kenyan racers, which resulted in a book called "Train Hard, Win Easy: The Kenyan Way."
Dowling said he believes Tanser's Shoe4Africa project, started in 1995, was probably born of seeing the poverty while in Kenya, including seeing athletes running in shoes without soles.
Dowling said that after reading about the project, he looked around his own house and realized he was a prime candidate for helping out.
"I saw shoes everywhere I wasn't using anymore," Dowling said. "Then I mentioned it to the folks at Reston Runners, and they thought it was a great idea--it was just a logical thing to do."
He said he didn't quite realize what he'd gotten into until the day he picked up all the shoes the Reston Runners contributed. Dowling said he had a slight moment of panic when the running club's president, Anna Bradford, told him he had about two truckloads' worth of shoes to deal with.
"I was completely inundated," Dowling said. "When [Bradford] said I might have two pickup loads, that's when I started thinking about how I was going to handle them and pay for shipping them all."
Runners always have more than enough shoes, and, Bradford added, runners tend to be attached to their shoes.
"We have a hard time giving up shoes that have been a part of our training and careers," Bradford said. "But we have a harder time just putting the shoes in the trash. There's no trouble giving them up to help someone else's life and knowing someone will run with them who may not have had the opportunity to otherwise."
Dowling said collecting the shoes was the easiest part of the process, since he just stuffed the bags and bags of shoes into the back of his Honda CR-V and carted them home. Once home, he enlisted the help of neighbors Rich and Sheri Kenah to find boxes for all the shoes--Rich is a two-time gold medalist in the 800-meter dash.
Rich Kenah's father works for a boxing company, so procuring the 30 boxes in which to pack the shoes wasn't too much of a problem.
The cost to send all the shoes, though, turned out to be more of a problem than just packing them up. To send them all would cost about $1,200, Dowling said.
After a little looking around, however, he got some help from the business community. Acumen Solutions donated $700 to help defray shipping costs, and Neil McLaughlin, of Commonwealth Chiropractic Center in Reston, helped out with a few hundred more.
Five boxes of shoes, each weighing roughly 15 pounds, went in the first shipment, and Dowling said he is going to space out his visits to the post office in order to stay in the postal workers' good graces. It will take each shipment four to six weeks to arrive in Tanzania, where they will be cleaned and distributed.
Dowling has lived in Reston for only a year but said a pleasant side benefit of the Shoe4Africa collection has been meeting new people.
In fact, he's inspired others in the Reston Runners to go out on their own collection campaigns.
"One of our members has taken two weeks to collect T-shirts for Miriam's Kitchen in Washington, D.C.," Bradford said. "He was so inspired by Keith filling an entire truck with shoes."
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