We Run to Beat Cancer — For Good

Today we learned what Team in Training is all about. 
In the blink of an eye, you can be perfectly healthy one day and sick the next.
You can be a 5-year-old who can never get warm. 
You can be a high school athlete, involved in every sport possible and then one day notice a bump on the side of your neck that turns out to be lymphoma. 
You can be a woman diagnosed with breast cancer who beat it and then years later finds out her friends and father will have to battle cancers of their own. 

Today we listened to survivors and discovered that what we are doing with Team in Training is far bigger than ourselves. 
It's far bigger than a personal goal to run a marathon or half marathon.
It's far bigger than a fundraising goal.
It's far bigger than a good deed.
It's saving lives and prolonging others. It's improving the quality of life for patients and their families. It's giving people a fighting chance.

For many of us, we are running this race in honor or in memory of friends and family affected by leukemia, lymphoma and other blood cancers. 
I'm running this race for my cousin - Julia Dilworth - a leukemia survivor and an amazingly strong woman. 

But today I also realized that I'm running for so many people I don't even know. In the U.S. alone, there's 1 million people currently battling blood cancer or in remission from it. 
Since 2000, 50 new cancer drugs have been created and 41 percent of those have been for blood cancers. That's because the money raised by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society goes to advance treatments and further research to cure leukemia and other blood cancers. We are at $1.4 billion and counting since 1988.

After our DC and Greater Washington teams met today to run 8 or 14 miles, depending on your race, we all shared a waffle breakfast together as we listened to our honored teammates and survivors. One survivor put it best, "What happens for blood cancers, happens for all cancers."

Together we are making a difference, and I couldn't be more honored to be part of something far bigger than myself. 

Please consider joining the cause by donating here.