Running for Others
Day 17
October 3, 2006
San Francisco Marathon
San Francisco, California
Elevation: 29'
Weather: 70 degrees; partly cloudy
Tme: 4:08:22
Net calories burned: 54,179
Number of runners: 50
On a Sunday morning roughly fifteen years ago, I went surfing at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Also enjoying the waves that day was an athletic-looking man who appeared to be about my age. When two surfers meet for the first time on their boards, their conversation always begins with a few comments about the waves, and this case was no exception.
He introduced himself as David Ames and told me he worked as an attorney. I read him instantly as a man with a huge appetite for life—the kind of person I have always been drawn to. David must have liked something about me too, because when I told him I was a runner he invited me to run with him sometime.
David was not an ultrarunner, but he was very strong at shorter distances. Fast. He pushed me hard the first time we ran together, and he continued to challenge me in each of our many subsequent runs. After a few years, however, David began to lose his edge. Without going any faster, suddenly I was the one pushing him. Although he was approaching his fortieth birthday, forty’s not very old for someone who takes care of himself the way David did. His lifestyle hadn’t changed, so he thought perhaps he had the flu or a lingering cold. Something that would eventually pass.
Then, while surfing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in the early winter of 2002, David suffered the terrifying experience of not being able to muster the strength to stand up on his board—something he’d done in the past as easily as he tied his shoes. His chest and arms were now too weak to push his body upright. Soon thereafter he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative condition that affects the brain’s motor neurons, slowly robbing the patient of the ability to move—and eventually to eat and breathe. It’s a horrible disease for anyone to experience, but especially so for a gifted and passionate athlete who places the highest value on the active use of his limbs.
David has faced his disease with fortitude, courage, and dignity. Determined to fight ALS tooth and nail when traditional therapies failed him, he relocated to South America to seek alternative treatments. In the many times I have seen David since his diagnosis, he has shown no anger or self-pity, but remains free-spirited and outward-looking. After setting up a part-time residence in Brazil, he founded an organization called Heaven’s Helpers, which provided assistance to people who are confined to wheelchairs, as David himself has been for the past few years.
In 2005, during a visit to his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, David called me up and asked if I wanted to run with him again, like old times. I met him at his house in Corte Madera and pushed him for twenty-five miles. It was his best workout in a long time, he told me afterward, half joking, half serious.
As The North Face Endurance 50 approached its seventeenth day, on which I was scheduled to run the San Francisco Marathon with a full-capacity group of fifty runners, I found myself thinking more and more about David. I traded some e-mails with his sister and was able to set up a special event-within-an-event that meant a lot to me.
The San Francisco Marathon racecourse has a number of scenic sections, but none is more breathtaking than the double crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge. At mile six, we merged onto the bridge heading northbound, out of the city. There’s a small parking area just over the north end where motorists can stop and enjoy the view. Awaiting us there was David, who sat smiling in a heavy metal wheelchair. He was surrounded by a small entourage of family, friends, and handlers, including our own Garrett Greene, whose strength had been called upon to help get David down a flight of steps. I grabbed the handles of David’s conveyance and began pushing, as I had pushed him for twenty-five miles a year ago and as he had pushed me—in another sense—during so many unforgettable runs that had taken place in a past life, as it now seemed.
Grabbing hold of the handles on the back of his wheelchair, I powered him from the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge across to the south end, joking that, just like old times, I was trailing behind him. We bid farewell on the south end of the bridge and David was once again absorbed back into his loyal entourage.
During the remaining sixteen miles of the event, I had the pleasure of sharing stories and laughing with many of the other runners, and I finished feeling satisfied that each of them had gotten something out of the experience. It was important to me that all of the Endurance 50 participants walked away from the finish line feeling proud and inspired, and on that day the happiness and appreciation I saw in David’s face as we glided over the bridge impacted us all. Marathon number seventeen was our biggest yet, with fifty energized official runners and perhaps another fifty “bandits” who joined in along the way. It was a brilliant tribute to one great man who may never run again with his legs, but whose spirit will continue to run in each of us who was touched by the experience that day.
Ways to Run for Others
There are lots of ways your running can benefit other people. Here are a few:
• Join Team In Training (www.teamintraining.com).
• Ask your friends and co-workers to pledge a dollar per mile for your next marathon, then send the grand total to your favorite charity.
• Participate in races that benefit charities (as most do).
• Volunteer for Girls on the Run (www.girlsontherun.org) or one of the many other great youth running programs.
There is something special and almost unexplainable about running for others. It has become quite a phenomenon in recent years. Individuals and organizations all around the world are choosing to raise money for and awareness of causes and to honor and commemorate people and events by running. Of all the ways to raise money, build awareness, honor deserving people, and commemorate important events, why running? I can’t explain it. All I know is that it has power, and it works for both the recipient and the giver.
You could say that the tradition of running for others goes all the way back to Phidippides, the messenger of ancient Greece who, according to legend, ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Sparta in an effort to recruit the Spartans to help his badly outnumbered countrymen and then, from the battlefield to Athens to bring word of the victory. If anything qualifies as running for others, that did.
The modern tradition of running for others may not be as dramatic, though it is every bit as noble. More than a billion dollars has been raised by runners for causes ranging from diabetes to childhood organ donation to improving the world’s clean water supply. The recipients are grateful for this show of support and funding, and the runners benefit from knowing they are helping others through their efforts. It is a model in which truly everybody wins.
My personal history of running for others dates back to 1994, not long after I met David Ames, when my friend Heather Shannon asked me to join a new organization called Team In Training.
“What’s it all about?” I asked her.
“It’s a program of the Leukemia Society,” she said. “We provide free coaching and, group workouts, and handle the travel and logistics to run a marathon for anyone who’s willing to help us raise money. People who sign up collect donations from family, friends, co-workers, and businesses.”
I signed up, raised a few thousand dollars, and ran the Honolulu Marathon with some other first-generation members of what has become one of the most innovative, successful, and celebrated fund-raising programs ever created. Team In Training has raised more than seven hundred million dollars for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, as it’s now called. More than three hundred thousand walkers, runners, cyclists, and triathletes have participated in the program. In fact, Team In Training has become so huge that it has helped fuel the tremendous growth in marathon and triathlon participation over the past decade.
Team In Training succeeded for a reason. Its early participants became involved because they wanted to run a marathon for those who couldn’t. Committing to months of dedicated training in the hope of completing a grueling physical endeavor was their way of showing support and compassion for those in need. From the outside, it might not seem entirely logical, but it’s the way the human heart functions. I think that’s why Team In Training took off.
A few years after I completed the Honolulu Marathon as a member of Team In Training, I met Jeff Shapiro, a medical doctor who, in his spare time, directed an annual 199-mile relay running race that started in Calistoga and ended in Santa Cruz. When I told Jeff I wanted to run the entire distance not as part of a twelve-person relay team but alone, his first thought was that I was crazy. I even joked with him that I didn’t have eleven friends left at this point. Still, I could tell he thought I was nuts. But then he saw an opportunity.
Jeff told me he was deeply involved in efforts to raise public awareness of the desperate need for organ donors for critically ill children. He suggested that I dedicate the colossal challenge I was planning to a little girl he knew of who had liver disease and would soon die without a donor. Recalling my satisfying Team In Training experience, I embraced the idea immediately and asked everyone I knew to donate a dollar per mile—or whatever they could afford—to help save this child’s life.
How to Raise Money for Your Cause
We all have different causes that are important to us. To raise money outside an existing program (like Team In Training) requires a slightly different approach. Here is a suggested format to follow:
• Register with one of the online donation sites. Active.com is one of my favorites. It’s free for the fund-raiser and allows potential contributors to make secure online donations.
• You can customize this site to explain your cause and the event you’re planning to participate in. Some people build elaborate sites—including pictures, graphs, charts, and maps—while others take a very simple approach.
• Once you’ve developed the site to your liking, send a message to all your contacts explaining what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Be sure to always include a link to your fund-raising page.
• Active.com has a variety of online tools that allow you to measure the activity of your fund-raising campaign, including the amount of traffic to your site and the amount of money raised.
• At the end of each month, Active.com will send your charity a check. They take one dollar out of each donation as a processing fee.
• Be sure to always thank your donors. You are a hero, and so are they!
That 199-mile run (which ended up being 200 miles, because I made a wrong turn and added a mile) was the hardest challenge I had yet faced. In fact, I might not have completed it if not for the commitment I had made to save a life. Quitting on my own behalf would have been one thing, but quitting on little Elizabeth Woods and her family was unthinkable. The fact that I was running for “Libby” made this one-man relay far more meaningful than it would have been had I run it only for myself, and as a result I dug deeper than I had ever done before.
The payoff made all of the suffering worthwhile. Not only did I get a big show of gratitude from Libby’s family at the finish line, but a week later she received a new organ. The whole experience was so rewarding that I repeated it several times, with variations, to help save other children.
After finishing the San Francisco Marathon on Day 17 of the Endurance 50, I was approached by a representative of the Fleet Feet running store in Stockton, California, who handed me a check for $2,620—$100 for each mile our group had just run—made out to Karno’s Kids, the foundation I created to support getting kids outside and active.
As I accepted the check, I felt the strength of my enthusiasm for the next thirty-three days, states, and marathons suddenly double. There’s just something about running for others that makes running by yourself all the more worthwhile.