A group of local friends will be running to raise funds for child cancer research under the team name ‘Hannah’s Heroes’ in Sunday’s Intertrust Cayman Islands Marathon.
The friends are doing a ‘tortoise and hare’ challenge, with the team’s ‘tortoise’ being Eugene Nolan, who is running the full marathon distance and who will attempt to beat the ‘Hares’, Nikki Callender, Sam Dawson, Kim Short and Nicola Gillespie Smith, who are running the marathon as a relay team.
The group said that while life has changed for everyone this year, what hasn’t changed is that kids still need cures for cancer, and every two minutes a family receives the devastating news that their child has cancer.
The team is raising funds for local charity Hannah’s Heroes, a fund of the St Baldrick’s Foundation, the largest private funder of childhood cancer research in the world. They said that, this year, contributions to St Baldrick’s are down $12 million and the foundation anticipates a $10 million decline in grant funding due to COVID-19.
By this week, the team members, each of whom has lost a loved one to cancer, had already raised $20,000.
This will be Nolan’s second marathon raising funds for St Baldrick’s. He took part in the Dublin marathon in October 2019 and since 2013 has raised more than $80,000 for childhood cancer research.
“It has been an honour to be a small part of the Hannah’s Heroes efforts to raise awareness of and funds for childhood cancer research because kids like Hannah are worth fighting for,” Nolan said in a press release.
He said he hopes to get around the course in under four and a half hours, beating the ‘Hares’ comfortably, although the ‘Hares’ say they have other ideas.
Hannah’s Heroes usually hosts an annual head shave event which typically raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for St Baldrick’s, but due to COVID-19 restrictions, this year’s fundraiser could not go ahead.
Since 2013, Hannah’s Heroes, named after young cancer survivor Hannah Meeson, has raised more than US$2.4 million for St Baldrick’s, which has led to 11 research grants being awarded at several research institutes across the US, including John Hopkins in Baltimore, the Dana Farber Institute in Boston and Duke University in North Carolina, where researchers are working on treatments and cures for childhood cancers.
To support the Hannah’s Heroes marathon team, visit www.stbaldricks.org/teams/hannahshares.
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