Three weeks until Race Day!

This week represented the peak of my training, with a total of 43.33 miles logged for the week, and just under 150 miles for the month of March so far.

Yesterday, while many of my Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge teammates were braving snowy roads to run 20-22 miles, I was blessed to be running in perfect weather here in Marin County.

I ran from my house in Larkspur over to China Camp State Park (picking up a running buddy on the way, so I had great company for miles 7-14!) and back, as you can see from the map below.

It was probably a little silly to include a giant hill on my route (in both directions!), which slowed me down considerably, but I was happy to have taken it easy enough on that 20 miler to be able to run 5 more miles today. Thumbs up because now it's taper time! "The hay is in the barn," as team coach Jack Fultz likes to say, and the next 3 weeks leading up to the race will see a decrease in the number of weekly miles I run.

Over the next two weeks I'll be making Honor Cards for display at the DFMC Pasta Party the night before the race. This is one of my favorite parts of running for DFMC - learning about the people who inspired donations. Those of you who donated in honor or in memory of a loved one should soon receive an e-mail from me, requesting a photo for the Honor Card. Here's an example for my lovely neighbor Verna, who passed away in 2010 after a nearly 5-year battle with breast cancer.

It has been a privilege hearing your stories, and I will carry these honorees in my heart as I run on April 17.

Every penny of your contribution goes directly to investigators on the leading edge of cancer research, through the Claudia Adams Barr Program for Innovative Basic Cancer Research. For example, the Kinome Project, with initial Claudia Adams Barr Program funding in 1997, discovered mutations in a family of genes called “kinases” that prevent cell growth stimulators from being turned off, resulting in cancer cells that replicate uncontrollably. These discoveries by William Sellers, MD, and his colleagues led directly to the development of targeted drugs used by patients worldwide for the treatment of multiple cancers, including lung cancer, leukemia, and melanoma. Examples include Tarceva and Vemurafenib, which improve survival in subsets of people with lung cancer and melanoma, respectively. This work has become the model for personalized medicine in cancer treatment and is widely credited for helping transform the approach that pharmaceutical companies use for drug development.

If you have not yet donated and would like to do so, please visit http://rundfmc.org/2017/milinda . Every dollar and every mile brings us one step closer to the ultimate finish line: a world without cancer.