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THANK YOU, ALBUQUERQUE! 412 finishers • $11,400 raised That's well over a hundred free mammograms for women who don't have insurance. See the 1999 results » |
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Hi, I'm Curtis Creighton. I'm a land surveyor here in Albuquerque, I'm the dad of Felix, who's fourteen, and Robert, who's eleven,
and I was married for nineteen years to the best runner, teacher and person I have ever known. This is her race.
Last Saturday morning 412 of you ran, walked, jogged and pushed strollers along the river in Carrie's name, and together you raised $11,400 to pay for mammograms for women who can't afford them. That's $4,250 more than last year. The boys and I stood at the finish line for two hours clapping until our hands hurt, and I don't think any of us stopped smiling the whole time, except once, which I'll get to. Thank you. Every one of you.
Carrie Creighton taught second grade for seventeen years, and she was the kind of teacher kids came back to visit when they were in high school. She could get a room of twenty-six seven-year-olds to be quiet by raising one hand, and she could get them all laughing again with one face. Every year her class raised a caterpillar into a butterfly and let it go on the playground, and every year she cried, and every year the kids comforted her. She didn't run a step until she was thirty-two, after Robert was born, when she decided she wanted her energy back. She started by running to the end of our block and walking home. Two years later she ran her first marathon. By 1996 she'd run nine of them, including Boston in 1994, which she qualified for by eleven seconds and never let me forget. She ran before school, five mornings a week, at 5:30, in the dark, down along the river. Sometimes the boys and I would ride our bikes alongside her on Saturdays and she'd be talking the whole way while we were gasping. In February of 1996 she found a lump. By the time she saw a doctor and had the tests, the cancer had already spread. She was thirty-nine. She did everything they asked her to do: surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, more chemotherapy. She kept teaching as long as she possibly could, and that spring, bald under a pink bandanna, she walked her class's field day 5K with twenty-six kids holding on to her. She died at home on October 14, 1997, with the three of us there. She was forty-one.
While she was in treatment Carrie spent a lot of hours in waiting rooms, and she talked to everybody, because that was Carrie. One day she came home upset about a woman she'd met there who was about her age, who'd noticed a change months before but had put off getting a mammogram because she didn't have insurance and couldn't come up with the money. Carrie couldn't stop thinking about it. She said to me, more than once, that somebody ought to do something about that. So after she died, the boys and I decided that somebody was us. A race seemed right, because running was hers. With help from her running friends and the parents and teachers at her school, we held the first Carrie's Run on Saturday, September 19, 1998, and 268 people finished and we raised $7,150. Every dollar goes into a fund at a community health clinic here in town, which uses it to pay for screening mammograms for women who don't have insurance and can't afford one. Nobody gets paid to put on this race. Our costs (the T-shirts, the bibs, the timing) are all covered by sponsors, so your entry fee and your pledges go to the fund, all of it. Joyce Hunt, who ran with Carrie for nine years and runs the clinic side of things for us, tells me that last year's money paid for eighty-one mammograms, and that two of those women were sent on for more tests and are being treated now, early, when it counts. Two. I think about those two a lot. That's what this is for.
The course is the same stretch of trail where Carrie did her morning runs: an out-and-back on the paved path through the bosque, the cottonwood forest along the Rio Grande. We start and finish at Cottonwood Bend Park, run north under the trees for a mile and a half and change, turn around at the water table, and come home. It's flat and shady and fast, as fast as anything can be at almost five thousand feet. If you're visiting from sea level, take it easy on the first mile. You'll thank us.
These local businesses paid for everything, so your money could go to the fund. Please go see them and tell them why you came.
And thank you to the 63 volunteers in pink shirts, the parents at Carrie's school who sold pledges door to door, the second graders who made all the posters, and Carrie's mother, who drove up from Las Cruces and handed out every single finisher's ribbon herself.
I'm not a doctor and I won't pretend to be. But I'll say this as plainly as I can. Most doctors recommend that women have a mammogram every year or two starting at forty, and a breast exam by a doctor or nurse as part of a regular checkup, and some women with a family history should start earlier. Ask your own doctor what's right for you. And then do it. Don't put it off because you're busy, or you feel fine, or it's uncomfortable, or you're scared. Carrie felt fine. Breast cancer found early is a very different thing from breast cancer found late. Men, that goes for you too: make sure the women you love have an appointment on the calendar. Then drive them there. If you don't have insurance and you live in the Albuquerque area, e-mail me and I'll put you in touch with the clinic. Nobody will ask you anything you don't want to answer.
The third annual Carrie's Run will be on the third Saturday of September, same place, same time. We'd like to get to five hundred runners and fifteen thousand dollars. Felix says he's going to break twenty minutes. Robert says he's going to beat Felix. I say we'll see. Carrie would have had money on both of them. The moment I didn't smile, since I promised: a woman I'd never met came through the finish in about forty minutes, walking, and found me afterward and told me she'd had her first mammogram in August because of last year's race, paid for out of the fund, and it was clear. She just wanted me to know. I had to go sit in the truck for a minute. |
