By Jen Slayden

Last spring, I sat outside Bernice’s Bakery drinking coffee and chatting with my good friend Angie. Angie was on the planning committee for Relay for Life and although very enthusiastic about the mission of Relay, she wished she was raising money specifically for the cancer that she had been living with since 2006.

Angie has a Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor, or GIST for short. As we sat there talking an idea hatched. Oregon Health Sciences University, a facility directly involved in GIST research, is in Portland where I had run my second marathon in 2008. Somewhere along the line of conversation, we agreed I could run again and raise a little money. She could walk and hope to portray a healthy mom to her three beautiful daughters who had seen mom sick for too long. It would also give her a break from dealing with cancer and let her rejoin the “world of the healthy people”.
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