After years of working on building community, we officially organized our first big project by running 100 miles in Cambria, CA. This place being so meaningful to us, because it was where this passion to run and build community developed, made it easy to commit to run 100 miles for no reason.
Two things really showed us this was meant to happen. First we connected with Steve Kniffen from Cambria (a son of Mario’s middle school history teacher), who had been planning for many years to bring an elite ultra runner to Cambria for a 100 mile run. He had just read an article on Mario the crazy homebred ultra runner and reached out to us. Not only was it a perfect fit, but we found out that Steve had planned the run for years and recently the roadblock he kept running into was that the bridge had fallen on the route he had planned. Coincidence?
The other amazing coincidence is that Mario had just been contacted to do a film for Central Oregon Daily. They had read the article ‘Building Bridges‘ about Mario’s passion to build bridges and Eric noticed Mario had been flying under the radar for many years. What started out as a 3 minute story, turned into 7, then 15, and then a full on 30 minute film that you can watch here:
This event was so organic that we truly cannot say more than just watch the film. Film was nominated for two emmy’s and everything that happened really just happened on its own. We did not expect so many people to show up, nor for Mario to never run a step alone after 30 miles. But that was the amazing thing about this day. From running through the night, to seeing the smiles of these kids running with Mario, and the incredible finish at his high school, it’s hard to describe how truly special this day was.
