Run for your Life

The always awesome Mary Elizabeth Williams has an article on Salon.com today called "Run for my Life!" She discusses the marathon craze -- the increase in the number of people who are running marathons (and half marathons), and her attempt to join them.

Williams has long been a runner, usually topping out at 5 miles, but she found herself, for some reason, signing up for the NYC Marathon in the fall. Williams is a cancer survivor, currently finishing up a very successful trial for her stage 4 melanoma, and she learned that the group Gilda's Club was sponsoring people who wanted to raise money for them by running NYC. Gilda's Club is named for the comedian Gilda Radner, and provides support for cancer patients and their families in lots of ways. (These include a place for kids with cancer, or who have a family member with cancer, called Noogieland, which is awesome.)

And so, Williams is going to run. It seems like it's partly to benefit Gilda's Club, and partly to benefit herself. As she says so eloquently,

But I think for most of us, the real joy and the passion are there in the steps and the miles and the weeks along the way, in the purposeful pursuit of that something powerful within ourselves. They’re there within the singular beauty, in a messy, complicated, often harsh world, of simply putting one foot in front of the other, again and again, until it adds up to something meaningful. Just like life itself. As Shorenstein told our team in that first meeting, “Your achievement isn’t just in getting to the finish line. It’s in getting to the starting line.”

Amen, sister.

I started running a couple of years before I was diagnosed, and I'm convinced that some part of my body was telling me -- someone who hasn't run in years -- that I needed to get ready for a fight. It's not an easy thing for me some days, but, like Williams, I do it for the sense of accomplishing something. If you've read Lympho Bob from the beginning, you know how much my running and my cancer are tied together. Two weeks after I was diagnosed, I ran the fastest 5k I'd ever run, on the hardest course I'd ever run, up a big hill. It meant a lot to me to conquer that hill, physically and mentally, and there are days when it feels like putting in my running shoes helps to conquer some other hills.

I can honestly say I've never had a desire to run a marathon. Probably because I can't imagine finding the time to train. And now, as I slowly build my mileage back up again after a foot injury, I look forward to more races to run, more hills to conquer -- physically and mentally.

(One more link, for Gilda.)