Mentoring e-Mail # 20

I realized that I never posted this note to my mentees, written a week ago....

Hello My Hard Working Mentees,

It is I, your Artful Mentor, with one more Tuesday message. I decided to leave you two Shamrockers on my list for one more week so I could tell you congratulations on completing the marathon and half-marathon. I was thrilled to see that you both completed as your events – as if there was any doubt. Well done! I hope it was a blast – not just the race but the whole weekend. I would love to hear your stories and see photos if you wish to share them.

Congratulations, Lexi and Leslie – you both rock!!!!

And to Kristi, too, I know you were there at the race helping out as a coach. I hope you had fun and didn’t overdo it, because you have a big event coming right up in another month.

I am going to keep this note very short. Mainly I wanted to congratulate you Shamrockers, and of course remind you Country Music Marathoners about keeping up with your fund-raising. I have been in contact with all but one of you. So if you are that person, please let me know how you are doing with fundraising, what you have going on, and what is working and not working for you.

I wanted to give you a brief mission moment from tonight. I will probably blog about this later this week in more detail. I was in Ukrops tonight, wearing my purple TNT windbreaker. A woman came up and asked if I had done Team in Training. I told her that I had done TNT three times and was training for # 4 right now. She said that she wanted to thank me, because she had recently received a stem cell transplant for multiple myeloma. She told me that her daughter had done TNT, and that she (the survivor) wanted to do TNT in a year or so once she got back to full health. She wants to do a triathlon, just like her daughter did. We chatted for a few minutes, she thanked me again, and we went our own ways. It just made me feel good that someone would want to thank us for what we are doing, and that medical research has helped save this lady’s life. When I had Hodgkin lymphoma just 7 years ago, multiple myeloma was considered one of the really bad and incurable diseases. Now, it still is a tough disease to fight, but in just 5 years, several new treatments have come out to help people survive something that would have previously killed them.

It occurs to me that when someone like this lady, surviving a deadly disease thanks to new discoveries, thanks any one of us, she is thanking all of us, because we are all doing the same thing – trying to help to defeat blood cancers. We are all in it together! So I wanted to pass that on.

I hope you are well. Enjoy the 10K if you are in it, and cheer for the other purple people. If I don’t see you at the race, see you on April 4 for our last long training run / walk! How cool is that?

Go Team!
Art