ha born to run for a good cause
SPRING HILL –
He lost 13 pounds in three days, ran along a darkened street where an armed robbery had occurred minutes earlier and rolled his ankle when he stepped in a pothole.
Brandon Bessette, 23, was undaunted. He overcame all injuries and obstacles and ran the full 125 miles from Tampa to Orlando last summer.
In doing so, he raised more than $5,000 worth of school supplies and donations.
He’s challenging himself the same way this weekend. He will have more support this time. Five of his friends will join him. He hopes to collect many more donations compared to last year. He also hopes to avoid many of the same interruptions.
Bessette remembered in vivid detail running near Haines City and seeing police cruisers careen past him. An officer approached his friend who was pacing him in his truck and asked why he was jogging in the pitch-black night in what is known by locals as a dangerous neighborhood.
His friend explained he was running from the University of South Florida campus to the University of Central Florida campus. It was for charity, he said.
“We’re looking for armed robbers, so you might want to tell him to watch out,” said the officer.
His mother, Debbie Dunsmore, sat across from Bessette and laughed as he told the story.
“It’s funny now … but it wasn’t funny at the time,” she said.
Bessette will have more strength in numbers for his upcoming run. Five of his friends will join him. He also is more familiar with the route.
“You have to train before you do it,” he said about the task of jogging nearly five marathons in less than four days. “There’s no way around that.”
He and his friends will run in intervals. He will play it by ear, but he expects the group to run for 45 minutes and walk for about 30 minutes. The runners will drink fluids as they walk.
They are doing the run for the sake of awareness. It might be difficult to remember donating pencils and crayons to needy children, but it’s even harder to forget the image of a group of young men jogging the 125-mile stretch from Tampa to Orlando, Bessette said.
The collections have already begun throughout Hernando County and the Hudson area.
Dunsmore said bins have been placed in 10 locations.
Bessette is an accounting major at USF and is a 2004 graduate of Springstead High School. He didn’t run track or cross country while at Springstead, but the 157-pound student has long been an active runner.
He runs up to 20 miles per week and abides by a strict nutritional plan.
His seasonal job is at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, where he is a valet. His day consists of him taking customers’ car keys and sprinting toward the garage and driving their cars back to the center. He goes back and forth throughout the morning and afternoon.
“It’s like six hours of running,” he said.
The idea to collect school supplies came to him last year while volunteering as a mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program in Tampa. He saw firsthand the number of students at Shaw Elementary who would arrive at school empty-handed. They could not afford supplies.
“You know there are people who live at the poverty level, but you just don’t see it every day,” he said. “You expect people to succeed at school, but how do they succeed if they can’t have basic supplies?”
At that point he realized he wanted to do something. His next move was to figure out a way to make people notice his efforts. Better awareness means more assistance, he thought.
While working as a valet at P.F. Chang’s China Bistro in Tampa, he encountered a tired-looking man. The stranger asked him the distance to Hernando County.
He told Bessette his story. He was robbed and he had no money and no means of transportation, but he really needed to get to Hernando County. He had spent the previous eight days walking the distance from Orlando to Tampa and he still had another 100 miles to go.
“That was the ah-ha moment,” Bessette said.
He decided then he would run the distance from Tampa to Orlando. Because it was a school-centered project, he chose to run from one college to another.
The name of the project is 100 Miles for a Needy Child. The money and supplies will be for needy children across the Tampa region.
Bessette also piqued the interest of a few educators in Orlando. If he is able, he would donate some supplies to Ivey Lane Elementary, a Title I school in Orange County.
A Title I school, as designated by the U.S. Department of Education, has at least 40 percent low-income students.
There are currently eight Title I schools in Hernando County.
The supplies that are the most needed are backpacks, rulers, notebooks, erasers, pens, pencils, crayons, glue sticks, folders, markers, kids scissors, pencil sharpeners and index cards, Bessette said.
The group will run from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m.
They will try to sleep in hotels, but last year they were prepared to stop anywhere at a moment’s notice for a few hours of rest. His grandfather picked him and a friend up one morning and let them sleep at his house. He drove them back to the exact place he picked them up so they could finish the run, Bessette said.
Bessette will be joined by friends John Demutiis, John Doyle, Matt Haskedakes, Matt Carroll and Brandon Ariagone.
All six of the runners still live in Hernando County and attend college in Florida. They are spread out from Gainesville to Orlando, but they made sure their schedules allowed them to participate in the run.
“We’re just a group of kids from Springstead High School who just want to help out,” Bessette said. “We want to help out in the area where we grew up.”
A group of Ironman triathletes asked whether they could participate. Bessette turned them down because the program is still in its early stages and he does not want it to grow beyond his control.
He does, however, have lofty goals for future runs.
“By year seven or eight, I could see a lot of people doing this,” he said. “It will be an event. It’s just not set up for that yet.”
Those who participate must also realize what they are getting into, he said. The satisfaction of finishing the run is part of the reward, but knowing he is helping needy children is of much greater importance to him.
“None of us is in it for the glory,” Bessette said. “There’s no glory in running 125 miles.”
West Pasco bin sites
Avon Store – 3513 U.S. 19, Hudson
Perkins – 11929 U.S. 19, Hudson
3D Golf Carts – 14803 U.S. 19, Hudson
(Donations will be accepted until start of school year.)
