To achieve these lofty goals, you just gotta have heart
Bill Spence's journey on foot will span six months and cover 2,190 miles.
Bruce Weiss' goal is to cover almost four miles in 10 days.
Spence has youth on his side: He's 61; Weiss is 75.
Both have significant medical issues.
Oh. Did I forget to mention that Weiss' four-mile journey is almost straight up? It involves climbing to the 19,336-foot summit of Mount Kilimanjaro? He'll start in the sweltering heat of Kenya, and, if all goes well, end up on top of the world's tallest free-standing mountain, where temperatures and conditions are described as arctic-like.
Spence will be carrying a 40-pound backpack as he attempts to traverse the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail, which runs from Maine to Georgia. His big challenge: Taking care of the new heart he received on New Year's Day, 2014.
He has some memory problems and residual numbness from the lifesaving surgery, but Spence, as he acknowledged to staff writer Elena Ferrarin, is grateful just to be alive.
"My organs were failing and I didn't think I was going to make it past New Year's," he told Ferrarin. "I had made my peace with that. I had made arrangements."
Weiss, meanwhile, has a bad back and atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can lead to blood clots, stroke and other complications. He also suffered altitude sickness on one of his two earlier attempts on Kilimanjaro.
One of them came agonizingly close: He was just a day's hike from the summit.
The parallels don't end there. Spence is from Carpentersville; Weiss is just a stone's throw away in nearby West Dundee.
But motivation means different things to different people, and Spence is making his arduous hike for, you easily could argue, mankind.
His goal is to prompt 2,190 people to register as organ donors, one for each mile he'll be walking. "I've been given a gift that I am not going to waste," he said. "I'm going to make every use of it that I can and honor my donor by respecting my heart."
You can register as an organ donor via Spence's Donate Life America registry page at registerme.org/campaign/tinman. His website is at-tinman.com.
Weiss' challenge is more personal.
He grew up in Africa, and as staff writer Lauren Rohr reports in today's editions, was the son of missionaries. No TV, no video games; just long hikes, scaling smaller mountains and sleeping on top of them.
He and his childhood buddies dreamed of someday scaling the big mountain, Kilimanjaro. But then life happened. Weiss returned to the states with his parents, finished school, got married, and had pretty much written off what he came to think of as a childhood dream.
But at the age of 69, he read a Daily Herald story about three people in their 60s who had climbed Kilimanjaro. Game on.
After two failed attempts, though, he figured he was done. He also figured Esther, his wife of 52 years, wouldn't tolerate another try. She seemed to sense his passion for this, though, and told him as long as it was in his blood, he might as well not abandon that childhood dream.
One more coincidence: We found out about these men and their amazing goals almost simultaneously.
As a guy who falls between them in age, and one whose idea of outdoorsing it is golf and "Masters" league softball, I can only shake my head in wonder and offer this parting thought:
These guys have heart.
Jim Davis can be reached at jdavis@dailyherald.com. Follow him on Facebook at JimDavis06 or on Twitter, @dhjimdavis.