Wings For Life World Run - Running for those who can't - Personal Twist At The End

Wings For Life is a non-profit organization with the slogan 'Running for those who can't' and an ultimate goal of 'Spinal injury must become curable.'

For the last 4 years the organization is backing up Wings for Life World Run together with Redbull's sponsorship. Initially World Run was in 33 different cities worldwide. There are 33 vertebrea in human spines and each location was representing a vertebrea. People all around the world sign up for this event and make a donation in order to be a registered runner.

The race has a great gamification. All the registered runners have runner I.d's with RFID chips on them. Half an hour after the race begins, a car named catcher car starts moving as well. The car starts to move at a speed of 15 km/hour and speeds up to a maximum speed of 35 km/hour. Catcher car has RFID chip readers on them and once the car passes a runner, the race is over for that specific runner.

Catcher car speed chart

The fees collected to join the race go to Spinal Cord Research. There are no fundraising or administrative costs at Wings For Life. 100% of the donations go to medical research. This is a big deal when considering the heavy fundraising costs of other charities. Big kudos to Wings For Life Sponsor's, mainly Redbull to make it 100% charitable.

Below you can see charts of the upfront costs of some charities, I am glad to be making my donation reach as it was made by donating to Wings For Life. (I couldn't find a good global charity chart, there were usually charts of charities by country, I used Australia's chart to give some ideas)

Lucky for me one of the designated cities for the event was İzmir, Turkey. I had the opportunity to contribute to this magnificient event 2 times. (2016 an 2017) I am going to be present in 2018 as well.

If you like running and donating for a good cause, this really is the right event for you.

We all have ones that we run for :D

Highlits from 2017 Wings For life Run

-Aron Anderson was the winner of the Wings For Life World Run, he is the gentleman who is in the first picture. He travelled 92.2 km's before he got caught by the catcher car.

-Aron Anderson raced on a wheelchair, and his victory made him the first Wings For Life World Run victor on wheelchair.

-For more information about this truely inspirational person : http://aronanderson.se/en/

-Dominika Stelmach was the winner of the Female category, running exceptional. She ran for 68.21 km's before getting caught, this was also approximately 5.84 km's more than the runner up.

-2017 was the 4th consecutive year of Wings For Life World Run.

• 155 288 people attended the World Run

-7.5 million USD was raised

So here comes the personal twist as promised.

Photo of me before the race

Photo of me after the race