Reflections on my Fourth TNT Event

Wow, here I am, a year older once again next week. Well, only a week older from right now, but as humans measure age, a year older. It will be my eighth birthday since contracting cancer. It is sobering to contemplate that had effective treatments for Hodgkin’s disease not existed, I would not be writing this, or doing anything else other than pushing up daisies. Nor would I have had a fourth TNT season to reflect back on. I am so grateful to still be on God’s green earth!

I have so many great memories of my participation with TNT this season. It was my first half marathon and my first time to Nashville, and my first time running more of a long distance race than walking. So those things alone made it special for me. I got to train with some old friends: Vicki, Chuck, Kristi, Theresa, Paul, Nicki, Ann, and Sarah for starters. I got to make some new friends: my amazing mentees Dave, Lexi, Leslie, and Nicole, and many other new teammates like Kate, Jen, Cathy, Chopper Guy, Tammy, Jamey, Chad, Nancy, Donna, Gina, Bethany, and Rose. Then were the wonderful teammates that I met in Nashville from other parts of Virginia, including the great time we had together cheering for everyone. Then there was the young girl with leukemia that I saw in Nashville two days before the race. I think of her often and wonder how she is.

Fund-raising was tough this year for everyone. I didn’t come close to my goal. But I gave it a good shot and had a lot of fun with it. I really enjoyed executing my fund raising campaign as if it were an election: kicking off the campaign, the press conference, the attack ad and so forth. And I really liked the campaign buttons that my friend Lissa did for me. Even though I didn’t make my goal, I still passed 40K for total fundraising since I started doing Team in Training, so that felt special.

A few other special moments was the fun of training with the Charlottesville Team, running the Monument Avenue 10K, and seeing my friend Susan go for the Triple Crown in the Fletcher Flyer Century. Then of course, the surprise of being chosen for the LLS Winged Victory award a couple of weeks ago was a tremendous honor.

And finally, it has been a lot of fun blogging about my fourth TNT campaign. I’ve really enjoyed that, and plan to keep right on writing about it right along into my fifth campaign sometime next year.