Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

The Hardest Part

posted by lizzie    « No Comments »    tied to Uncategorized   

We have known for some time now that the hardest part of running this marathon has nothing to do with the physical effort. Ten miles? No problem. Twenty-six and two-tenths? Bring it on. It’s the fundraising that is going to kill us. We have lots of great ideas that are taking a while to come into fruition. For a while we have been wondering if we were going to be able to continue, or if we should just forget about Team in Training, running the marathon, raising absurd amounts of money. But every once in a while, something happens to lift our spirits and let us know that things are going to be just fine.

Case in point: Micah has undertaken the planning of a fun run/dance called Laie’s Charity Move & Groove. It has major fundraising potential, and he has spent a lot of time trying to get contacts and support and any other help he can to get it going. But he ran into a wall in that he really needed the Laie Community Association’s (LCA) support. Many unanswered e-mails and phone calls later, he received word that he was on the agenda for the next board meeting. Hooray! The day of the meeting he spent a few hours putting together packets for the board members, complete with the lovely design you see on the right on the cover. We headed out in plenty of time to make our 7:15 appointment with the board, but when we got to Laie Elementary school–the LCA’s normal meeting place–there was no LCA board meeting to be found. We must have circled the premises three times before giving up and calling Ray, our source of all information about how to find anything in Hawaii. Ray’s best guess was HRI in the Laie shopping center, but we found it locked and deserted. We sat down in the parking lot to discuss our options. We weren’t sure we would be able to raise the funds we need without this event, and without the support of the LCA we knew it would be impossible to do. And we had until the next day to decide if we were going to re-commit to raise all this money or if we were going to forget about it. Sounds like a good time to say your prayers, rigth? So that’s what we did.

Then we got in the car and started driving, even though we didn’t really have any place to go. We found ourselves circling BYU-H campus when we decided to call the son of the LCA board president, a friend of Micah’s from work and whose number he happened to have in his phone. Pane agreed to call his dad and a few minutes later called us back with our destination: the Aloha Center at BYU-H. It was almost 8:00 and we weren’t sure the LCA would still be fit us in again, or if they were even still there. But they were there, and they still had time for us. When we got in there, we faced with a tough crowd. Do people really pay money to run races? Are you sure you can get 300 people to sign up? Will there be t-shirts? (People are willing to pay just about anything for a free t-shirt, we’ve found.)

Twenty minutes later, we walked out of the room with not only the support of the LCA, but a better deal than we ever dreamed of: the fun run is going to be part of the Laie Days celebration in July (yes, that is after we run the marathon, but not after our fund-raising deadline) and it is an event they do every year (albeit without a registration fee), so many of the hurdles we were facing just got lowered. Plus, we have new inside contacts to those who normally plan the event. Our plan for the dance was not approved, but it is a small price to pay for such a blessing. And the moral of this story is that the church is true.

Hint: people who leave the first comment are cooler.

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