This week was spent in the great Midwest, the land of good values, good people, and good sweet corn!

- I felt like an ignorant American as I ran along the gently rolling hills of Kansas. I had no idea there would be so many hills in a state notorious for being flat! From a terrain perspective, one of my favorite runs of the trip was a night run in Kansas. The Kansas hills pulled me down and swept me up underneath a wide, open, starry sky. Blasting my friend Terry’s “Madame Harrington” mix on my i-pod didn’t hurt either!

- As we travel across the U.S., we usually sleep in hotels immediately off major highways in order to maximize our rest time and minimize our time in the van. As anyone who has travelled across the country would report, our dinner decision is usually McDonald’s versus Dairy Queen versus the gas station. However, just outside of Kansas City, we found a Shangri-la: a sushi restaurant! We had a great sushi dinner while we chatted with a welder from Texas who got really fired up about Blue Planet Run.

- Bill Bunten, the mayor of Topeka, Kansas met with us before our run in Topeka. He was a kind man, who was extremely proud of his home state and city. After we spent some time discussing running and the water crisis, the conversation turned to our backgrounds. When he heard that Sean recently finished his MBA at Stanford, he turned to me, winked, and said “oh, he’s gonna buy you a Cadillac!”

- Tom Ehlman, one of my dad’s cousins who lives in St. Louis, came to the St. Louis exchange point with four different types of cookies! Sadly, I had been running the night shift and couldn’t be at the exchange point, but Tom met some of my BPR teammates. Tom, thanks for coming out to show your support. And the cookies were yummy (and needless to say, long gone)!

- The members of Team Orange have ironically become the poster children for McDonald’s. Running the 3am-9am shift, we’re always hungry by the end of the shift, and breakfast is top-of-mind for all of us. Sean’s long-time love affair with McDonald’s breakfast (specifically, the egg mcmuffin meal) has now extended to all of us, and a few times, I finished my early morning run to find McDonald’s breakfast ready and waiting in my van seat. What service!

- We finished our last 3am-9am shift of the Blue Planet Run…whoooo hoooooooooo! This shift is the toughest of them all (even after 85 days, I’m still not used to getting OUT of bed at 1am), and it felt great to know that from this point forward, I will only be running at 3am if I choose to do so (in short, I very likely won’t run again at 3am for a very long time)!

- I had been looking forward to Chicago for a long time, and was so happy to reconnect with my family and best friend Erin on the 22nd. I had a great dinner with my sister Caitlin and her boyfriend Eric at a place called Feast in the city the night before our run, and I was able to spend some quality time with my parents, Caitlin, Erin, and some friends before/after the run. My mom’s cookies were a huge hit with all of the BPR runners, my dad made sure to meet every staff member he could, it felt great to have so many loved ones cheers us on. I felt immensely fortunate to have such a supportive and fantastic family that I’m so proud of.

- My run into Chicago was memorable, and I was happy to have company for the entire 10 miles! Chris, a distance runner from Evanston, met me at the beginning of the run and accompanied me for about 5 miles, telling me all about running in Chicago and hospital safety (his academic work/job). I was then joined by three great runners from Golin Harris (one of our PR firms) and FCB (their sister ad agency) for a challenging stretch along Lakeshore Path. Three miles out, we picked up another lively group of athletes, and one mile away from the finish, another group joined. I was inspired by every runner who joined me in Chicago, and thank all of them for showing their dedication to the cause!

- Lansing and Sean exchanged the baton at the Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, in Notre Dame’s backyard. Rotary International, the Mayor, and a number of employees from the local water company gave us a warm welcome. While Sean did interviews with all three network TV stations (NBC, ABC and FOX), the rest of us answered questions about the safe drinking water issue and mingled with the locals. I didn’t make it inside the Football Hall of Fame, but South Bend’s bright spirit made me want to return to see it another time.

- Rain doused the Midwest for the entire week. Our team escaped relatively unscathed, but many of the BPR teams battled torrential downpours and strong thunder and lightening. It is a timely reminder that people often have either too little water or too much.