It’s a really cool concept. We pick one day – Sunday, August 31 – and find out how many people around the world can lace up their running shoes and put in a whole bunch of miles.

The Olympic fanfare will be history by then and it will be time for the rest of the world’s athletes – that's US – to take center stage. There will be organized Human Race events with major league A-list headliners in Austin, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles; but the point here is that The Human Race goes way beyond any organized event. And that’s where all of you come in.

We are working to get everyone out there running, not only on August 31, but on every day leading up to The Human Race… starting now.

You see, we have regionally-based fitness publications under our Gen-A umbrella in Florida, Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Arizona, Texas, Washington, Georgia, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. That’s almost one million total magazines every month. We’ll all be using our assets to work with the local training runs in all of our markets to get people on board with the Human Race program. We will have folks from all of our publications around the country going to local training runs, logging on to www.nikeplus.nike.com and becoming part of the challenge we’re putting out there.

If you like to run with music, the Nike+ system is the way to go. If not, the brand new Nike SportsBand gives you all the same great features – pace, distance, total miles – that you can get from Nike+. You can purchase either system from your local retailer or directly from www.nikeplus.nike.com. Every time you run a mile and upload your chip, those miles are added to our total. Wait – our total? Yep that's right. The state of California is hereby challenging all endurance athletes from Texas, Florida and the rest of our Gen A states to bring it.

Starting in July, the race is on. We’re going to see how many folks can run how many miles by the time August 31 comes along. In places like San Diego and San Francisco where we don’t have an organized Human Race event, we will be counting on the local running and triathlon clubs to step up and put in some miles during their regular Sunday training run.

You will see a ticker whenever you go to www.competitornorcal.com or www.competitorsocal.com, which will be keeping track of all of our California miles. It doesn’t matter if you run a five-minute mile or walk a 16-minute mile. We want you to be a proud member of our team as we set out to dominate the country.

Get yourself hooked up with whatever you need to keep track of your miles on www.nikeplus.nike.com as soon as possible, and mark down "August 31, 2008" on your calendar.

How many miles can we run, as a group, in the next 60 days or so?

It’s time to find out.