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Around the Globe in 950 Miles

HarringtonWas it the hard-boiled egg at breakfast or the dumplings at dinner? Thirty-eight days into a 15,200-mile, muscle-punishing, round-the-world relay run, Sean Harrington, MBA ’07, didn’t know what had caused his food poisoning, but he was happy to have a recovery day to finish reading Anna Karenina before he left Russia.

Harrington and his wife, Brynn, were the only married couple among 20 international runners taking part in the Blue Planet Run, a feel-good publicity stunt intended to spread awareness of the global need for safe drinking water. Brynn, a nonprofit manager, had heard about the project at the 2005 Net Impact Conference at Stanford, and she and Sean applied, not dreaming both would make the cut. On June 1 the Harringtons made a pre-run PR appearance on NBC’s Today show, then double-timed it down to New York’s United Nations Plaza for the official start of the event. They would each run 10 miles a day, for a total of 950 miles each, returning to New York September 4—95 days and 16 countries later.

If aching muscles and the occasional meal gone wrong were par for the course, Harrington found them minor annoyances compared to the thrill of carrying the baton into Paris and delivering the Blue Planet message in his rusty French; the surprise of finding a sushi bar, of all things, at a truck stop between Krakow and Warsaw; the delight of meeting a bunch of fisherman on Lake Baikal who thrust a pail of freshly caught omul, the local delicacy, upon him; and the sublime joy of running alone through the vast quiet of the Gobi Desert.

Harrington was in Germany when the rest of his Business School class graduated, but he plans to return to campus to work at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies this year while he pursues his own entrepreneurial venture. “Missing graduation was definitely disappointing,” he wrote from Bayan Qagan, China, “but I felt I couldn’t possibly pass up the opportunity to be a Blue Planet global messenger. Sometimes it is hard to pursue idiosyncratic projects that don’t seem to directly advance your career. However, I’ve always found that the experience that comes with such unique opportunities is well worth the effort and—to use a b-school buzzword—opportunity cost.”