LA Cancer Challenge 2008

Wow. What a day. Thank you so much to everyone who came out and walked or ran and also to those who gave so generously. It was a really fun day. I am really sorry for those of you who did not get a goodie bag. There were a couple instances where the race could have prepared much better. I am not sure if they were expecting the economic downturn to effect turnout or what, but the community came out in force for Pancreatic Cancer Research. There were over 3000 runners this year. Now it is not quite the 60,000 runners that the Revlon Breast Cancer run gets, but it is a really good turn out for a pancreatic cancer run. Thank you all so much for also surviving their convoluted web donation system. Honestly, I see a lot of room for improvement. I understand that they want to make everyone a fundraiser and give everyone their own fundraising page, but really, some people just want to give and be done with it and that is perfectly all right. We did so well as a team. I am so proud of everyone’s performance. On the fundraising side, we raised an amazing $4,040.00! That was 300% over our goal. Again, incredible generosity. We had 46 people join Team Tyler. I will never be able to communicate how much your support means to me and how much it has helped me fight this disease. Now, I have no idea how they figure out the team standings, but it looks like they took into account both races, and even though we were heavily stacked in the 5K and were overly relying on my father in the 10K, we managed to win the team title by over 3 minutes. It looks like we did this for the second year without Ross’ (the second place finisher) help as some how he just can not get it together to actually join team Tyler. Next year I may have to sign him up myself. Our team did benefit incredibly from Shannon Rowbury and her friend Dan demartini (cool last name). He won the race and she was 4th place overall and the first woman and totally whooped John Burke. I guess those Olympic athletes are legit. Also, another great perk was that, even if you walked the 5K in an abysmal 1:14:20 (yes 1 hour, 14 minutes, and 20 seconds), you can say that on October 26th, I was on a team with an Olympic athlete. We may not all get to the Olympics (except maybe to watch), but at least we will have that.

I really enjoyed the walk this year as a number of people on the team all walked together and chit chatted during the race. It was really great to catch up with so many of you and it sounds like everyone is doing really well. Nate Bershtel, a former teammate from my LB Poly XC days and the current girls XC coach at LB Poly, brought out a number of runners who all walked with me. I don’t want to be a dirty old man or anything, but it is pretty nice to have a dozen or so high school girls around.

One exciting moment during the morning came when my father spotted Harrison Ford. He of course could not just leave him be, so he ran and grabbed a Team Tyler t-shirt and ran over to Harrison and gave it to him. He did not put it on but we did see it hanging out from his belt a little later that morning. About a half hour later we saw him going into a porto-potty (I know, he wipes his own a**!) and we were going to confront him after he finished and walked out to insure that the t-shirt was not soiled. Unfortunately, we got distracted and never saw him leave the porto-potty. You may have escaped this time Han Solo, but I will watch you next time. In case you were wondering, his kid did the little kid’s run. I was thinking about hopping in, but I don’t think I could handle the emotional devastation of being beaten by 100 seven-year-olds (their quick little guys and girls).

Once again, thank you all so much for your support.

Take Care and Live Strong,
Tyler