Inspiration

As many of you may or may not know the staff at CleggThis has been on quite a health kick lately. The cigarettes are gone, the weight is down and the mileage is up, running miles that is. Our staff (and you all know when I say staff, I mean me) just completed their first 10K race and has now begun training for a half-marathon on June 27.

If you have never trained for a race, let me tell you, it is hard. Although you might have already guessed that, what you think is hard usually is not the hard part. The actual running is fairly easy (I say that now.) The hard part is what you have to give up in order to reach your goal. Revamping your life schedule and telling yourself nothing is going to get in your way of your training is what is hard. Some of you may already know Tricia, who ran the Boston Marathon and cataloged her journey was one of my main inspirations to get going at this.

Each week I do a long run, which is basically 1 mile further than I ran the week before. This past week I did my first 7 mile run. In my entire life, all through my athletics in high school (yes, the ski team WAS a varsity sport) I have never run 7 miles, in a row at least. Well, I did it. And this week will be 8 miles. While doing these long runs and listening to my iPod you start to kinda drown out everything, not even thinking or listening to your music. To break these lulls I try to think of things that are harder than what I am doing, or people who have had it harder than me, or just people in general who make my life better than it would be without them.

From now until June 27th, I will give you all, my loyal readers of hard hitting, relevant insights into social commentary, the weekly "Long Run Inspirational Story."

This week, I bring you the story from a video I was lucky enough to work on back in 2006. It is the story of kids with Neurofibromatosis, or NF for short, a disease which causes tumors to grow on every part of your body. Over my tenure at Cramer, I have worked on countless videos, but I will always remember this one because it is the only time I cried in the edit suite. Yes, I have no problem admitting that because after watching this video you will too. While they were tears of sadness, they were also tears of hope for kids like Charlie, Max and especially Brittany, who for a 14 year old girl was mature way beyond her years. There are countless people out there who are fighting to help cure this condition. I saw countless NF running shirts while watching Tricia run the marathon. So the next time you think you can't get up for whatever challenge you have in front of you, remember there are kids out there like these who are finding hope and joy in their lives, and you can do whatever you put your mind to.