Donate, Help Turtles, Win A Prize!

I passed the $200 mark today in my efforts to raise money for Wildcoast by running the Mexico City Marathon. I’ve got a blog all about my effort – you’ll notice it has lots of weird posts that have nothing to do with anything. They are the adverts that helped me raise most of that $200.  I reckon I can easily add another couple of hundred dollars to that figure by the time the marathon actually comes around in the second half of September. But I’m writing today because I’ve been inspired….

I’ve raised a few hundred dollars for Wildcoast over the last few years, because I like turtles. The fact that I have ten of them in my back yard testifies to that. But I came across a post by Canuck in Cancun about a visit she made with her family to Akumal near Cancun. The photos are wonderful, and I’m going to have to make the effort to visit there one of these days. She also posted me a link through Twitter of a charity that helps protect the turtles there, called Centro Ecologico Akumal. And a thought occurred to me.

Seeing as I’m almost certain to reach my original goal of raising $300 for WildCoast, and as I’m confident I can get another $100 on top of that, why not make a donation to them as well? They do seem an extremely worthy cause, and one I am interested in. So I will. I’ll donate $100 to them. Or, to be more precise, I will adopt a turtle family. And that is when I got the idea for a competition.

The Competition.

I usually get a few fellow bloggers donate a few dollars to my causes each year. But only a few. It would be nice to have lots! But I need to be sneaky and offer something in return. A prize.  It’s not easy to convince people who have never met me in the flesh to part with money. It’s not always easy to get people who have met me to part with their cash either, it has to be said!  This year I am going to run the half marathon in the Mexico City Marathon event (my knee just won’t take the full thing.)

How long will it take me to run the half marathon? Have a guess, and leave your guess in my comments section. Then donate $5 to my cause by clicking here. The ChipIn widget utilises PayPal, and is safe,  so anyone with a credit or debit card can play. And you can have a guess for every $5 you donate. Donate $10 and get 2 guesses, $15 for 3 guesses and so on.

Whoever guesses closest to my actually finishing time will win the prize – the turtle family will be adopted in your name, and you’ll get the official, personalized Certificate of Adoption from them! Woohoo! I know. This isn’t the most exciting prize of all, but it is something.  A nice souvenir of my efforts!

So no need to wait around. Donate, guess my finishing time, and wait and see how quick I am in September. If you have no idea what sort of time to guess, here’s a couple of clues. I ran a half marathon a few weeks ago in 2 hours, 23 minutes, 10 seconds. But I do hope to substantially improve on that time. I ran that coming off a couple of nasty injuries, and was still smoking 20 a day. I still am, but I will quit soon! Really! I think. I am hoping to get under 2 hours in September, but that’ll only happen if I give up smoking. Any guess between 1 hour 40 minutes and 2 hours 40 minutes stands a chance though.

Needless to say, please feel free to post this post on blogs, tweet it, facebook it or whatever else!