another walk of note

Reader and blogger Daeguowl (i.e., the owl in Daegu, as he's not from Daegu) sent an email linking to this article about a kid in the UK who's on a 6000-mile sponsored walk of repentance to make up for a misdeed that cost the UK public 20,000 pounds. Per the article:

Seb Green, 18, was 15 when he and a friend stole a rigid inflatable boat from a harbour. They rowed out to sea but became grounded in a lagoon and when they clambered out they got stuck in deep mud.

A passer-by heard their calls for help and two helicopters, two land-based coastguard teams and two lifeboats, comprising dozens of rescuers, went to their aid.

The boy was prosecuted and he was sentenced to a supervision order but Seb decided to go further and raise £20,000 to "pay back the community".

He decided to spend nearly a year walking 5,821 miles (9,367km) around Britain with his border collie Flash.

He has now covered 1,000 miles but said wryly: "I've realised the country is bigger than it looks."

It's a great story (despite the article's inconsistent US/UK punctuation), and I wish Seb and Flash the best as they continue their journey.

Of particular interest to me is the meta-issue of media coverage. I've noted it before, but it bears repeating here: most of these treks don't get much coverage at all until the trekkers have gone a significant distance. Note that Seb's case didn't reach the international news until after he had already gone a thousand miles. I expect much the same to be true for me, just as it was true for Steve Vaught (see The Fat Man Walking, on the sidebar), and was true for Curan Wright, who's been cycling backward across the US for various humanitarian causes (thanks, Tom, for alerting me to him).

I suppose this only makes sense: a person who promises to do something won't always follow through with his promise. Americans believe the proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof, so it makes more sense to cover the story of a dude who's already a thousand miles into his trip as opposed to covering a dude who merely proposes something grandiose, then falls flat on his face at the get-go.


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