Where did it all start? - 07 Jun 2007
I really can’t pinpoint it, because I have experienced it too often, but I know how I felt at the time. It was during the swim leg of an Ironman a few year’s back. While you should be concentrating on your breathing and finding your rhythm, I reached forward mechanically to find some still water to “pull” on and my hand came back with a bag of garbage. For people who participate in open water sports, this is not an unusual encounter but at that precise moment, it changed the rest of my life. Here I was, half way around the globe from home, having invested an important sum of hard earned savings and who knows how many hours of training and other sacrifices to…, swim around in garbage. I won’t dwell on the variety of other things that crept up my nose and hung off my swim goggles and those of my fellow competitors during that part of the race that day, but believe me; it wasn’t pretty. For the rest of my 11 hours of racing that day, I asked myself endless questions. Who’s fault was it? Why did it happen? Was I the only one that cared? And more importantly, what could I do about it? In retrospect, as many endurance athletes know, the fact that I had such a “difficult” equation to answer, actually helped my race result in the end.
I kept this idea alive during the months following that trip and it matured slowly and surely into a serious Project. Oddly enough, one day while traveling down to Biarritz (French Basque Region) with my wife, I started scribbling madly on my notepad. During the 5 hour train trip, I basically sketched out the complete project. As my wife drove us to our friend’s house that evening, I passionately laid out the vision, mission, strategy and all the other operational details to my bewildered chauffeur. From that day on, I knew what I was going to do with my life.
The final piece of the puzzle came a bit later, mid-summer 2005. My wife announced that she was pregnant with our first baby and in those following magical moments when time just seems to stop; I realized for “who” I was going to work for – my son (as I discovered later on) and his soon to be friends. Probably one of the most asked questions I get today is, why? After I explain the above the next statement comes automatically; “cool idea, it should earn you a lot of money right ?!”. When I continue to explain that they’ve misunderstood, I get an all too serious; “sure, but if it goes under, you’ve lost everything.” This is where I systematically make this final point.
Laneo will NEVER be a failure, because it just can’t. Even if Laneo donates only 100€, to only one clean-up action, somewhere in the world – then it has been a success. That’s the only thing that keeps me and the other people at Laneo moving forward everyday – one step at a time. We’re in this for the long haul. We’re not in it for any fame or glory – just the end goal of a clean & beautiful place to play in. I will never let us lose that focus. After all, we cannot let the planet get so dirty that our children cannot go out and play in it, and wonder why we didn’t do anything about it when it was happening. So if you haven’t joined Laneo yet, now’s the time – come on, give us a hand!
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