Courageous Christopher 5K

Today I participated in another walk for charity and just wanted to share some of my photos from the event with my readers. Besides, it’s Saturday and I’m (mostly) not in a political mood.

The line on the registration tent started pretty early. They had about 100 register today, bringing the total number of participants to over 400.

We began the race under the American flag thanks to our local firefighters. Yes, it was a little breezy.

I took both of the above photos prior to the race getting started. It’s worthy of note that they ran low on runner numbers so as a walker I didn’t take one. I’ll tell you how I did after the next group of pictures.

As if the kids didn't burn up enough energy walking or running, they had these inflatable attractions too.

If nothing else, the amount of food we could get was more than enough to satisfy even the hungriest runner - especially having the pig roast.

A number of folks stuck around to eat and enjoy the band in the background. You'll see who that was shortly.

I actually knew my time when I finished, I walked the 5K in 40:58. It was a bit disappointing because I thought I could put up a sub-40 time but when I needed that extra gear in the last half-mile it wasn’t there. I thought I was doing a pretty good pace because I was 26:13 at two miles. Oh well, maybe next time.

And while I have the 5K race winners in the second photo down from here, the real winner is in the next photo.

The purpose of this fundraiser was to help the young man in his mom's arms playing with the hat - Christopher Mull.

Here the Mull family is posed with the two overall winners - Nick Loffer for the men and Josie Brown for the women.

Both winners are interesting in their own right – Nick Loffer is a contributor to the Salisbury News blog and a member of the Lower Shore YR’s, while Josie Brown was seriously injured in a pedestrian accident a couple years back and told she’d never run again. I guess that doctor was proven wrong.

The next picture is called foreshadowing an upcoming post:

Red No Blue was the band who played for the postrace picnic. They'll be part of the upcoming Weekend of local rock volume 15 post. You've been warned.

To close, I want to make a few observations.

Through no fault of their own, the Mull family faced a serious dilemma because their son Christopher was diagnosed with a condition called Dravet Syndrome – actually to them it was a relief to finally have a name for what was wrong with their son. While I don’t know the Mulls personally I would wager that the stress level in their home between having two older boys who weren’t even in school yet and another child born during the long quest for a diagnosis for Christopher was nearly unbearable. And then to find out that securing an assistance animal to help Christopher would run about $11,000? Most families would have given up or looked to public avenues for assistance.

Instead, the Mulls rolled up their sleeves, enlisted an army of volunteers and sponsors to help with the effort, and with all their help put together an event that not only raised the $11,000…oh no, prior to today’s 100 or so race entries (at $30 apiece) they were at $26,000. Because of the generosity of one small city – Salisbury, Maryland, my adopted hometown – this troubled child who’s had some of the innocent joy of being a toddler robbed by a disease few have heard of, much less understood, not only will courageous Christopher be able to get his assistance dog later this fall but another deserving family or two can be helped as well.

To me, this proves that misfortune doesn’t necessarily need to be addressed by a government program. For all I know the Mulls may be on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum as I, but hopefully this effort can be a lesson to everyone who reads this post. Remember, there’s an entrepreneur who saw a need for assistance dogs for those who suffer from epilepsy-related conditions and went into the business to help. It’s not a government program, providing and training these dogs is someone’s livelihood.

And is this not what America is truly about?