Last year, my then-2-year-old son (DS2) defeated Cancer after four months of chemo and a major spinal surgery. One way I coped with the stress and grief was to start running. That was almost exactly a year ago. At about the same time, we started planning our big family trip to Walt Disney World (WDW) as a celebration of DS2’s Cancer recovery.
After looking at dates, we decided it would be great fun to go over Halloween. As it turns out, the Wine and Dine races are just a few days later. I decided that my big goal for running would be to run the 2-Course Challenge, which is a 10k (6.2 miles) on Saturday and half marathon (13.1 miles) on Sunday. We’ll be staying at the Boardwalk Inn, which is on the race course, so my whole family will easily be able to watch for me as they eat breakfast and cheer me on. Sounds perfect!
Soon after I started running, I knew it was going to become a major part of my life. Sounds odd, but I love it! I started thinking about how I could combine it with my passion for philanthropy and raising awareness to community and social issues.
When I was getting ready to register for the Wine and Dine races earlier this year, I learned that St Jude was a charity sponsor. It clicked: I would be a charity runner. I was so inspired by this thought that I signed up for the St Jude Heroes team that day, and I committed to raising $2,000 for St Jude. Thanks to my amazing network of family and friends, we reached that goal within 24 hours. Thank you all!
Finally, to the real point of this post. For a while now, I’ve had a unique idea to raise awareness for Childhood Cancer in general, and my fundraiser specifically: give a live report during the races. But trying to do a live report while running a race is not simple, so I’m making no promises that this will actually be “live”.
My plan is to post a picture at every mile marker, along with a short message. I’ve practiced doing this, and it takes me 30-60 seconds for each post. I plan to run about 9-10 minutes per mile. So, quite a burden, and it will slow me down quite a bit overall. But I think it will be fun! If it goes well, I will do something similar when I run the Dopey Challenge in January. That’s a 5k, 10k, half, and full marathon over four consecutive days. I told you I love running!
One issue with this live report will be whether I can get a strong enough cell signal for my phone throughout the race. If not, then I will just be less “live”.
Stay tuned for more details…
PS - If you would like to learn more about me or follow my progress, you can do that at www.RunJordanRun.com or www.facebook.com/RunJR
