The Energizer Bunny

On Saturday May 10, 2008, I did the Susan G. Komen for the Cure 5K in Richmond. It was a lot of fun. Dig my pink bunny ears, a reminder to keep going and going and going, just like cancer patients must do every single day.




I wore the ears for the whole race. Now you have to be pretty sure about your masculinity to wear pink bunny ears in public for 3.1 miles! Where I grew up near Philadelphia, I guarantee that this would not have been a great thing to try.

I raised $625 for Komen, trying not to bug the same people who I pester each year for Team in Training. That was really great, but the biggest thing was to do this race to show support for my sister Ann and my step-mother Rhoda – both currently undergoing breast cancer treatments – and my sister-in-law Christine, a 19 year breast cancer survivor (and 16 year ovarian cancer survivor). And at the same time, show some support for the other dozen or so women I know who have dealt with breast cancer. I printed up pictures of Ann, Rhoda, and Christine and pinned them to my race jersey:



On my purple TNT race shirt were dozens of names I had written on it for the Arizona marathon. Each name represented a person who battled cancer. As always, it was my honor to wear these names.

I was going to be a 6 year lymphoma survivor in a couple of weeks from the race, so doing a race in May – my diagnosis month – to support those with cancer also felt very appropriate.

It was a festive event, lots of teams (my favorite team name was “Save the Ta-Ta’s”) and plenty of breast cancer survivors in pink shirts – very inspirational to see them out there.

I’ll be doing Team in Training again, and preparing for another marathon soon enough, so it felt good to just to run/walk a little 5K with no fund-raising pressure!