Cherub Tate Napers featured in the above Save The Cherubs Facebook Timeline Cover
My wife (Karol Napers), kids (Lexie, Jake and Tate) and I will all be attending this year's conference in San Francisco. When we heard about the conference being in San Francisco, I jokingly said to Karol 'wouldn't it be great if there was a marathon close to San Francisco around then?' So we searched, and this one is right there in the city on the last day of the conference! That was about as perfect timing as anything, a little miracle indeed.
Just some history on my running, a couple of years ago I began running and quickly became addicted. I ran my first marathon in Indianapolis in the fall of 2009. Since then, I have made it a goal to be part of the '50-State Marathon Club' by running a marathon in each of the 50 states. I have now completed a marathon in six states (Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and New York). Later this month, I'll be running the Louisville Marathon in Kentucky and then the San Francisco Marathon will be my eighth.
We were introduced to CDH just a few months ago, when our son, Tate, was born. We found out the day before he was born that he had a left side diaphragmatic hernia. He was immediately placed on a ventilator after birth, and had a surgical repair when he was 6 days old. A patch had been placed on his diaphragm. He has done ver well (he's our little miracle baby!), and was able to come home just shy of a month after birth.
When Tate was born with CDH, I always wanted to find a way to weave my running into helping raise awareness for CDH somehow. We talked about starting our own race or fundraising in someway. When I signed up for the San Francisco Marathon, the organizers where partnering with Crowdrise - a volunteer organization that helps with online fundraisers for charity. I signed up to create a "Run For CHERUBS" fundraiser and tied it to the San Francisco Marathon Charities. Below is a direct link to the Run For CHERUBS website, where you can find all the info. This is also where you can go to donate by clicking on the orange "Donate" button. My goal is to raise $2,500.00 for CHERUBS, and we're nearly a quarter of the way there already!
Also, I have included a link below to the overall San Francisco Marathon Crowdrise page. You can see from there that the Run For CHERUBS fundraiser is among the top so far, in fourth place out of about 40 charity fundraisers. It's pretty exciting stuff!
Thank you very much for helping to get the word out about this effort! It's very appreciated!
Thanks!
Dan
