Team Tommy

On April 5, 2008, I participated in my fourth straight Ukrops Monument Avenue 10K (6.2 miles) race. I did this for a lot of reasons. It's fun! It's a Richmond happening! 22,000 of my closest friends are there! The beautiful spring Virginia weather on beautiful Monument Avenue is a perfect time to do a race! I needed to stay in shape for the Susan G. Komen Race the next month. How many more reasons would I need?

View of some of the 2008 Monument Avenue 10K field:

Well one more reason I had to do this race was to honor Tommy West. He was a local man who developed liver cancer in 2007. In fact, his cancer was discovered a couple of days before I learned about my sister’s breast cancer. Tommy died just before the race in 2008, leaving behind a wife and two little children. A bunch of his friends formed “Team Tommy” two years in a row to honor this fine man at the Monument Avenue 10K, and I signed up to be on his team. We wore bright orange shirts – hard to miss us – with “Team Tommy” on the front and “Boom, Boom, Boom” on the back. Apparently when Tommy was in a meeting at work and he needed to get things done, he would say “… and then we will just Boom, Boom, Boom”. I met him and his family the prior year at a team cookout, including his sister and mother. They all seemed like very fine people, and I can only imagine how hard a loss this was for them.

The race was a lot of fun, despite cool weather and rain that was fairly drenching at times. The weather reminded me of my first marathon, in Anchorage, Alaska in 2005. Despite not having trained a whole lot for this race, and only having done a very small amount of running, I ran about 4 miles of the 10K, and had my best ever time in a 10K of about one hour, nine minutes.

I hope that the sight of all of the orange shirts was of some comfort to Tommy’s family and good friends, of which he had many.

Here I am, coming down the stretch about a mile from the end, showing off my orange Team Tommy shirt and my white Team in Training hat, with my 3 highly coveted 26.2 pins in it:



If by some chance friends of Tommy West happen to view this post, I hope you will comment and add some things about Tommy.

My Sister’s Battle

When I had lymphoma in 2002, one of the things I felt was that at least I was taking care of my four siblings chances of getting cancer for the next 20 years or so. Sadly, I was very wrong about that. In February, 2007, I got a message from my sister Ann that she almost certainly had breast cancer. I had gone through my own cancer very stoically, but my sister’s news had me fighting back tears, even at work, for several weeks.

Ann has had a very rough go of it. Her treatments have made my six months of chemotherapy look like a walk in the park. She had HER-2 positive breast cancer, which was very hard to treat until recently, when a new drug, Herceptin, was developed. Unfortunately, we would learn that her cancer was resistant to this treatment. She has now gone through 17 straight months of treatment, including 4 totally different chemotherapy regimens, a mastectomy, and a couple of months of radiation. She had a whole new cancer form while on her third chemotherapy, which was designed to prevent new cancers from metastasizing. She has been a real trooper throughout it all.

Ann’s name was the first name that I wrote on my Arizona Marathon shirt, and any time the training or the race got tough, all I had to do was think of what she had been enduring. She is still far from out of the woods, although the combination of radiation, mastectomy, and the fourth chemotherapy has us hopeful that she is done with all this very soon.

Having my sister go through cancer so soon after mine just affirmed the importance of raising money to fight cancer. I knew that I couldn’t go into full bore fund raising mode for breast cancer so soon after raising over $11,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, but I wanted to do something for this cause.


Here we are in April, 2007, a couple of months after her diagnosis.

Reflections on my Third TNT Event

On the occasion of my 57th birthday, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on and summarize my third TNT event, now six months in the past.

If you’d asked me, in mid-April of 2002, to tell you a little about myself, I guarantee that three things would not have been mentioned as part of my life experience: cancer, marathons (or races of any kind), and fund raising. They were not even blips on the radar screen of my consciousness, yet six very fast years later, I have:

Survived lymphoma (with the help of many others)

Done three marathons for Team in Training (with the help of many others)

Raised nearly $32,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and about $1,200 for Susan G. Komen for the Cure (with the help of many others)

I started training for the Arizona Marathon about this time last year. It was a dominant event in my life for the second half of 2007, and was very special to me because I really wanted to do something to celebrate five years in remission at the end of 2007, and to give back once again for my great fortune to survive cancer. Five years is a HUGE milestone for cancer survivors! I set my fund-raising goal really high at $15,555.55 and my marathon time goal was 5:55:55. That time would make a good runner laugh hysterically but for me as a walker it is a very tough goal to reach, especially knowing that one will waste at least 5-10 minutes just waiting in porta-potty lines.

Looking back on my third TNT experience, there are three major areas to reflect on: the physical part, the fund-raising part, and the team part.

The Physical Part: There is no denying it – training for and doing a marathon is tough physically and mentally. It is not by any means the toughest thing in the world but it is difficult and demanding. I trained for over 5 months, and I would estimate that I put in probably 500 miles during that time, going through two pairs of shoes. If I hadn’t missed 8 weeks of training because of injuries and illnesses, it would have been even more miles. I lost dozens of hours of sleep each month, and was often up by 4:15 or 4:30 (and never getting to sleep past 5) on the workdays and getting up by 5:30 or earlier on Saturdays. When I started it was summer with the heat and humidity, and when I finished it was winter and cold. I trained in heat, pouring rain, cold, and even a little snow in Michigan - and in some really beautiful weather as well. After long (15+ miles) training walks, I would soak in a tub of ice water for 15 minutes. Even though I missed my marathon goal by a little less than a minute, I was thrilled because it was still a personal best by about 17 minutes and I broke 6 hours for the first time, despite missing so much time during training – mostly from injuries.

The Fund-Raising Part: Let’s face it, doing a marathon is a great feeling of accomplishment, but without the fund-raising component, it is just a marathon. LLS is trying to help cure blood cancers – leukemia, Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and myeloma – and that takes money, lots of money. The fund-raising is our main focus. The marathon is a way to hopefully inspire people to donate to a good cause. I didn’t reach my goal of $15,555.55, and for a while when it became clear that wouldn’t happen, I did feel a little bad about it. Because of the generosity of 119 people and couples, I did raise $11,550. This was my second best TNT fund-raising total, and was also seventh best for all TNT participants in the Arizona P.F. Chang’s Marathon. So it was pretty good, despite it all. By comparison, the top fundraiser for the marathon brought in something like $54,000! Wow! Any success and credit I had raising money has to go to my generous donors, 11 of whom made more than one donation. By the time I left for Arizona, about $4,000 short of my goal, I still felt pretty good about it and knew that I had done about the best I could. See my post on “Bide Your Time, for Success is Near”.

The Team Part: Several other posts talk about my fabulous teammates, but I can’t do a summary of my third event without mentioning them once more. It is the people that make TNT such a great experience. When I look back on the season, I will always remember the good times with my teammates more than I will the tough times training and trying to raise money. In particular, a number of individuals made the season great: our LLS staff persons Amber and Danielle, my coaches Sarah and Michal, my mentor Theresa, our mentor captain Heather, my walking teammates Robbi, Suzanne, and Jen, and several running teammates that I interacted with: Chuck, Rachel, Paul, JoanE, Alan, Matt, and Joel. I will always remember the great purple and green balloons that Michal got me for a little post-training celebration on my five year remission weekend in December. Also, I will always remember Chuck and Suzanne waiting to greet me when I came in from doing the marathon. They could have been back at the hotel relaxing, showering, having a cold beer, but they waited for every VA teammate to come in. That was, and always will be, appreciated. The bottom line is that you go through something like TNT, you make great additional friends in your life.

I find myself missing Team in Training, and looking forward with eager anticipation to the next time. I’ve gotten a little lazy – no 4:15AM alarms, no 8 -10 milers before work, no 15 – 20 milers on Saturdays. The fundraising is too difficult, unless you are a famous person with rich friends or you are a well-connected politician, for me to do this more than every year or so. That self-imposed one year limit is fast approaching, and so I will again plan to be out there starting maybe in October for my fourth event, changing lives one mile at a time.

My next few posts will talk about the Komen Race for the Cure this past May.

Tumacacori

On Tuesday, January 15, after spending much of the day at the Sonora Desert Museum, I had only a few hours to see a little more of southern Arizona. So many of the places of interest were several hours away, and there just wasn’t time, so I settled on Tumacacori National Historic Site:

http://www.nps.gov/tuma/

This turned out to be very interesting. It is the ruins of a Spanish colonial Franciscan mission, built between 1800 and 1822 and never finished. The official web page gives more information than I could relate here, so I will just display a few photos that I took. This was the official end to my 2007-2008 Team in Training efforts, as I drove back to Phoenix the next day and caught a flight back to Richmond.

Here is a view of the front of the church. 90,000 adobe blocks were needed to build the church, and stone had to be quarried and timber felled in the mountains, many miles away through dry and dangerous Apache territory:

Interior of the remains of the church:

View of the church's dome on the right and bell tower on the left:

This is an adobe hut that some of the Indian converts and laborers would have lived in:

A good view of the bell tower:

Sonora Desert Museum

When I got up on Tuesday, January 15, my main goal was to visit the Sonora Desert Museum, which I had heard a lot about. I highly recommend it. It is unique compared to anything else I have seen, essentially a zoo, museum, botanical garden, and nature preserve rolled into one:

http://www.desertmuseum.org/

I drove back through Saguaro National Park, taking another short hike in the very chilly early morning air. I snapped one final photo of some “forested” hills in the park as I drove out of it:


The museum is everything I had heard about it. Even though I wanted to save some time to do other things, there was just too much to see and explore there. I spent 4 hours touring the various exhibits, and could have spent an entire day there. There were animal exhibits, like these javelina roaming in a half acre, very natural looking habitat:


and this cougar, kept in a separate pen, fortunately for the javelinas:

and this rare Mexican wolf, also kept separately for the benefit of any potential prey:

There were many cactus displays such as these organ pipe cacti:

these prickly pear:

and this barrel cactus:


There were wide open desert spaces and vistas:


There were also many exhibits of desert habitats, educational displays, a simulated cave to explore, American Indian exhibits, and a very interesting exhibit on agave – tequila, anyone? If you are ever near Tucson, definitely pay this great facility a visit. It is well worth it.

Saguaro National Park

I wanted to talk a little about a few things I got to see while in Arizona, other than the marathon. I had Monday and Tuesday (January 14 and 15) to myself, and took advantage of this short time to see a few new sights.

The first of these was Saguaro National Park:

http://www.nps.gov/sagu/

While I’d been in Arizona before, it was in Northern Arizona at the Grand Canyon. Seeing the saguaros was amazing and so different. After a late breakfast Monday, January 14 with some of my teammates, I went out to the Phoenix airport and picked up a rental car. I got on the road, heading for Tucson, which was a couple of hours south. My goal was to see some desert landscapes and saguaro cacti before the end of the day.

Saguaros are just incredible. If you were told to think of a cactus, this is the one that would come to mind. From an almost unimaginably small seed grows a huge cactus. After five years, the cactus is only about the size of a thimble. It takes up to 75 years to grow a single arm, and they can live up to 200 years or more. They were and still are very important in the culture of the Tohono O’odham Indian tribe. Because of poaching for suburban developments, this giant symbol of the Sonora Desert is at some risk for reduced numbers.

Once I got to the park, I went to the visitor center and quickly learned that I should have spent at least a couple of more days in southern Arizona – there was so much to see and the place is huge. But I only had a few hours left on Monday, and all of Tuesday, so I got busy. Saguaro National Park has two separate units, each many miles apart. I got to see the western unit. My legs were too sore for a lot of hiking, even though I was tempted. 26.2 miles takes a lot out of you, I’ll say that. So I did a lot of driving through various parts of the park, and a few short hikes. None of these was longer than about ¾ mile. The rest of the post will be some selected photos from my afternoon at the park, as well as an hour or so on Tuesday on the way to my destination that day, the Sonora Desert Museum.

I used the arm of this huge saguro on a nature trail to frame the distant mountains:

Many of the saguaros had incredible shapes, with many arms:

Large saguaros actually have a woody skeleton, as you can see in this photo. Note too that there is a variety of other plants besides saguaros here. The western unit of the park has, believe it or not, 1,162 species of plants. Who says that deserts are barren?


This big guy either is descended from Gumby or is some kind of a traffic cop:

One area of the park, with only a short hike, had these incredible petroglyphs carved in rocks by ancient Indian tribes. Here are representations of various desert animals.

Here are some more animals, a sun, and some other depictions. It was amazing to see this, and to think of people so long ago doing these drawings in the rocks.

Although quite different from Eastern forests, there are indeed forests in the park. Note this cacti forest that I found quite striking:

As the sun went down, and the air cooled, I knew that it was time to head into civilization and find a room for the night. My afternoon in Saguaro National Park had passed all too quickly.

Mission Moment - Fall 08 Team

I wrote this mission moment on June 4 for our Summer and Fall Teams.

Hi Summer and Fall Teams,

First, to those of you who just finished the Rock N Roll Marathon / Half Marathon in San Diego and the Breezy Point Triathlon in Norfolk, a huge congratulations. I hope each of you had a great time and a great event, whether it was your first time or your 20th. I also hope that each of you is proud of your accomplishments, both athletically and fund-raising wise, to support the mission of LLS: to cure blood cancers.

And to the fall team, it was great to meet you all a couple of weeks ago at training. What a great group!

Yesterday marked my 6th anniversary of starting chemo. That long ago now, all the time that has passed, it is a bit blurry. But even so, I can still remember waking up that morning with a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. I had no idea what to expect, other than that chemotherapy would likely not be very pleasant – which did turn out to be true. I know I worried that I would throw up right there in the chemo room, maybe on a nurse or – God forbid – another patient. Fortunately none of that happened, but I sure worried about it, and definitely felt some fear going in there the first few times. The first week, I went five straight days, and by around Thursday of that week I was feeling ill enough that I had to force myself to go back in there. But I never did throw up on a nurse or another patient, which is a good thing for all involved.

Besides that very real sense of dread, and some fear, I also had a little bit of excitement. My potential killer finally had a name, Hodgkin Lymphoma, and going into the oncology room and having 4 poisons injected into my brand new portocath would be the very first step in kicking “Hodgy’s” butt. Because of all the research, clinical trials, and patients who came before me, they knew exactly what drugs would be effective and how much without killing me. (Although it turned out there was this one drug that any amount would likely prove to be lethal if I stayed on it, but that is another story). So despite the dread, I felt really lucky to have something that could be defeated. I still feel very lucky, and I never look back on this time as a misfortune, because I was fortunate enough to live.

I know that there are so many others not as fortunate, which is why I got involved in TNT and am staying involved. It is a way to make a difference. It is a way that maybe in five years – less time than I have been off chemotherapy now – there will be even more cures. And more patients will hear: “This won’t be a lot of fun but you are going to beat this. A few years ago this would kill you, but now you will survive.” For every future patient who hears that, who is at first scared that they will die but learn that their disease is treatable or even curable, you will have a part in that, because you chose to get involved and make a positive difference. So here is a big THANK YOU and congratulations for doing so.

I hope to see you all out at training again and/or at future events.
Best wishes,
Art

This was me, June 2, 2002, the day before starting ABVD chemotherapy. I'd gotten a buzz cut a couple of days before, knowing my hair would be falling out anyway over the next month or so. I had gone for one last hike, realizing it would be a while before another one. It was a gorgeous day, and the mountain laurel was in bloom in the Shenandoah Mountains. Many times during chemo, I would look at this picture and eagerly anticipate being healthy and strong enough again to go for a hike.

To My Teammates

Every time I've done TNT, I have just tremendous teammates. I guess in part it is the nature of the cause. As Chuck says "Mean people don't tend to do Team in Training."

I've mentioned some of my mates in prior posts: Chuck, Suzanne, Theresa, and Robbi for example. So I won't go into a lot of detail now about any one individual. Here are Theresa, Robbi, and Suzanne once again - what great teammates they are:



While I was doing the Arizona marathon, three teammates were doing the full Disney marathon in Orlando. For each of them, it was their first full marathon. I had called Robbi and Theresa the morning of my race, and they were out on their race course, and doing fine. Not only did their race start very early, but the time difference meant that they were finished well before me. I was thrilled to learn from Michal that they both finished and became marathoners, as did Paul. I was so proud of them! A fouth teammate, whose name unfortunately escapes me, not only did the full marathon in Disney but the half the day before, earning for him the coveted "Goofy Medal".

In Arizona, other than Chuck and Theresa, Rachel and JoanE from Richmond were doing their first marathon. Alan and Joel were repeaters, and Jeanine ran a half marathon while in the middle of cancer treatments - which is just incredible, believe me. When I was on chemo I don't think I could have even crawled a half marathon, in fact I know I couldn't have.

I know I am overlooking a few people, not to mention the many people from Hampton Roads and Charlottesville. A couple of the latter were also first time half marathoners: Larken was there with her dad - how proud he must have been of her - and Briana, a lymphoma survivor, who seemed like a very impressive young lady. Then there was Mike and Sandy from Hampton Roads, who are doing all of the Elite Racing Events together. Mike also had a "Goofy Award" under his belt. And Kristi was one of the mentors from that same part of the state.

So whether I mentioned them or not, they were all a big part of a great team experience all season and in Arizona. The Purple People are an amazing bunch. To all of them, I say Thanks, and GO TEAM!!!

Here are some team pictures from the Team Pasta Party:

Amber

I can't end my discussion about my 2007-08 Surviving Five Years Marathon Campaign without mentioning Amber. She is an employee of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in Virginia, and does an incredible job. It is true, this is her job to recruit us as volunteers for TNT and then make sure we get what we need to succeed. But she truly does a tremendous job with incredible dedication and passion. She makes every individual on the team feel special. She puts in hours that many people would never even consider - nights, weekends, meetings. If I email her with a question at night, I usually get an answer within minutes.

Amber is so dedicated that in 2007, she did the Disney marathon with Team in Training. Yes, she fund-raised $4,000+ and trained for her first marathon, all while working for LLS. It gives her tremendous credibility with every team, because she can say to the recruits "I've done this, and you can, too." Right now, she is training for her first triathlon for Team in Training. If you want to help a special person with a special cause, check her out web page:

http://pages.teamintraining.org/va/nattri08/awilliams

Amber is such a huge part of every TNT Richmond's success. I am privileged to know her.

Coach Michal

Michal was our walk coach for TNT's winter Richmond team. I mentioned her in another post, but because she was so important to us on the walk team in particular, I wanted to give her additional credit. She is a great coach and a great teammate.

We first met in 2005 when we each signed up for Team in Training for the first time. We hit it off and became friends and training partners. We each walked at about the same brisk clip, so we usually trained together as our own little group. So we had a lot of conversations out on the race course. When the time came, Michal did her marathon in San Diego and I did mine in Anchorage, but I would have loved to have been in California to cheer her over the finish line.

Just like Coach Sarah, Michal gave up countless Saturdays, and spent a lot of her own time planning training routes, making sure we had what we needed, and gave us coaching advice. There is no way our walk team could have succeeded without Michal's dedicated coaching. She couldn't train with us much late in the season because of her pregnancy, but she was always out there with us, week after week. She and Tim had a beautiful baby boy, Alec, in late March. He couldn't ask for better parents.

After talking with Mary, the first thing I did was use Suzanne's phone to call Michal and let her know that I had finished the marathon and set a PR, and to thank her for her part in making it happen.

Here is a photo of Michal and I last year in the 2007 Ukrops Monument Avenue 10K, which we walked together, and ran a little of: