site.btaWings for Life World Run: Bulgaria Joins Fundraising Run in Support on Research on Spinal Injuries Treatment

For yet another year, Bulgaria joins the Wings for Life World Run, a global fundraising event, with 100% of the proceeds going for medical research to make spinal injuries completely treatable. The charity run will begin simultaneously around the world on May 5, at 2 p.m. EDT, organizers said. 

After the appointed time on Easter Sunday, May 5, registered participants in Bulgaria will be off at the start and will be free to run at the pace they want and for as long as they want or are prepared for.

What is unique about the format is that wherever they are on the planet, professional athletes, amateurs and absolute beginners will start at exactly the same time - 11am UTC. This means that competitors in the UK will start at 12:00, in Germany at 13:00, in Florida at 7:00, Bulgaria at 14:00 and so on. There is no finish. There is a virtual chase car that starts 30 minutes after the runners and as soon as it "catches" a runner, the run is over for them.

Usually, people running for fun run go about 5 km before the car "catches" them, and professionals manage to run well over 60 km. The "race" is interactive, making the experience multilayered. It works through the Wings for Life World Run app, which will report what distance they ran and include everybody's performance in the rankings of runners from around the world.

In the upcoming 11th edition of the Wings for Life World Run, participants from Bulgaria will run in Sofia's Borissov Garden on a course that is suitable even for participants in wheelchairs. The route course includes 1.8 km of asphalt paths, 1.2 km of gravel and then, until the end of the tour, another 1.8 km of wide asphalt path.

The first Wings for Life run in Bulgaria was in 2017 with the support of the Bulgarian Olympic snowboarder Alexandra Zhekova, actor Stefan Shterev, runner Kiril Nikolov-Disela, paragliders Veselin Ovcharov.

Wings for Life Foundation is a research non-profit established in 2004 by two-time motocross world champion Heinz Kinigadner and Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz. The foundation's goal is to find a cure for spinal injuries, which affect more than three million people worldwide who are paralyzed due to trauma, and 130,000 new patients each year injured due to traffic accidents, falls or sports accidents. Wings for Life works with teams from award-winning and respected institutes such as Cambridge University (UK), Harvard Medical School (USA), Karolinska Institute (Sweden), Charité Berlin (Germany).

To date, the foundation has funded 299 projects in 20 countries.