This past weekend as I write this in late September we just spent the day volunteering, supporting, and running at a charity run. In this case it was the Terry Fox Run and we ran to raise money for cancer research.
This morning I signed up for another charity run in October… also, to raise money for cancer research.
It’s a weird concept, the charity race, if you think about it too much.
We don’t just say “hey, this cancer thing is a sonofabitch so let’s give some money to try to fix it” but rather we decide to put on a logo’d t-shirt proclaiming how much we despise the disease and then go run five klicks in some kind of solidarity while giving about the same amount of money as we would have anyways.
The Kid was trying to wrap her mind around how donating money “to cancer” helped cure cancer… as if we just needed more money for medicine or something.
It’s about research, isn’t it? I explained. Labs, equipment, people with years of expertise—and I’m sure a long list of other more specific things—aren’t free. Most researchers, people with PhDs and their grad students, spend the bulk of their time writing extended applications with novella-sized explanations to try and extract a tiny bit of that money for their work. They get it and it gets spent on all the costs of doing complex science and hopefully nudging our knowledge of new treatments and better therapies and more promising outcomes a few baby steps forward.
And so maybe that’s why we run: because research is slow, and incremental and (to a lot of people embedded in the work) probably feels like wading through an endless field of deep, sticky mud. We all lace up and go as fast as we can to pay for it all.
Definitions
- klick
- As a Canadian I run in metric. As a writer, I find the word kilometre clunky and clinical. I'll usually use the colloquial "klick" or "klicks" to substitute in for this.
- october
- Fully into autumn, October is a month of shifting seasons, short days, long shadows, and gorgeous sunsets. The cobwebs are hung on the eaves in preparation for halloween, and here in Canada we're running off Thanksgiving dinner for a couple weeks after a proper good meal mid-month.
- race
- You train and train and train some more, and then for no clear reason you pay a bunch of money to run as fast as you possibly can at a very specific time with a bunch of strangers along a course lined with more strangers (or along paths lined with trees if you are an ultra runner) at the end of which you are handed a medal and a banana and a sense of achievement unlike anything you will feel again (until you sign up for your next one.)
- september
- The days are noticeably shorter when we realize that September is upon us. The post-summer routine kicks in and people are back to regular work schedules and kids are back in school. It can still be warm, but the hottest days are behind us and most of the biggest races of the year are in the rear view. We savour September knowing winter is too soon to come.
- the kid
- I'm father to a daughter who has often been mentioned in my writing. She's an adult now, but I'm still not going to dox her on this or any site. She'll remain as anonymous as I can make her and you shall only know her as "The Kid"
