Team Endure to Cure member, Courtney Waid shares a story about why she is a member of our team.

My dad called me the other day to catch up on what’s been happening. I told him I’ve been busy with the kids and working out a lot.  Jokingly, he asked, “Why have you been working out so much? Trying to win the Olympics?” I laughed and replied, “Well, I have a lot of challenging races coming up that I have not done before, and I want to do well.”

But that isn’t really the reason why. Of course I want to do well in the events I have planned, but the truth is that I’ve been training with a new vigor because I have two wonderful healthy kids. In fact, I think they are too healthy. They have too much energy – so much that I can’t keep up with them during the day!  They are constantly moving, running around, getting into things, messing with my bike, putting on my running shoes, chasing each other around the house tormenting anything in the way. Some days I get so frustrated with them in ways that only a mother can understand, but at the same time I love them with a fervor that, again, only a mother can understand.

The other night one of my friends and I were driving somewhere, and she told me a story about a man her husband works with whose two year old died of leukemia nearly four years ago.  Every year on the anniversary of his death, the father is so distraught he cannot come to work.  He medicates himself and stays home and sobs. She told me this story, and we both cried.  Why? Because I get that; because I am pretty sure if something happened to my children that I would not know how to go on living…or want to go on living.

It breaks my heart, makes me feel physically ill, to think that there are children out there right now suffering and fighting and struggling for their very lives.  And I imagine their mothers sitting there next to their beds trying to hold it together, trying not to break down or completely lose it, and hoping for miracles.  It troubles me just the same to know that over 60% of kids who survive will suffer long-term side effects, often times physically and/or mentally quite severe.

So maybe that’s why I’ve been working out so much.  I’m not a doctor or a scientist; blood and needles and that sort of thing actually make me pretty squeamish. Medically, I don’t know how to cure cancer and likely never will.  But I do know how to swim, bike, and run, and maybe if I just keep on swimming, biking, and running and raising funds for a wonderful two-year survivorship study at University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital as a part of Team Endure to Cure, then perhaps I will be a reason why doctors found a cure for these children.  And maybe if I keep on swimming, biking, and running then my own children will stay healthy, also inspire others to do so, and we’ll all get through this and this horrible thing called cancer will go away.

So dad, that’s why I’ve been working out so much–because no kid should ever get cancer and no parent should have to lose their child to it.  And maybe if I just keep redefining what I am capable of doing and inspiring others to join my Team and I in this amazing effort, then one day soon they won’t.

If you would like more information about joining Team Endure to Cure, click here and learn how you can become somebody’s hero today! Anybody, any event, anywhere in the world.