in the pink

Fall colors are here, and once again, we're surrounded by pink.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and Leslie Martinez stood up and pledged to do something pretty amazing to recognize the event. She considered it, tossed it around in her head, asked her friends and family what they thought, and then signed her name on the dotted line.

Next June, Leslie will walk the distance of two half-marathons, back to back. Over the course of a weekend, she’ll cover 26.2 miles on foot. She’s doing the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

Everyone knows the commitment this kind of event requires. For months, Leslie will train by walking her neighborhood or on a treadmill, following a training plan designed to get her to just the right fitness level. And she’ll be reducing her own risk of breast cancer just by doing the training.

What many of us don’t know is that each person who walks in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer must raise a minimum of $1,800 just to participate. “I’m a non-athletic person, so to be willing to walk for that long and that far AND raise that kind of money – well, I’m either insane or highly dedicated,” says Leslie.

I vote for the latter.

Dedication means Leslie will be donating $400 of her own money. Then she’ll ask her friends to dig deep. The rest she will make up through pot luck dinners, garage sales, and countless pink-iced cupcakes adorned with pink ribbons, which she’ll sell one by one.

Leslie says she will walk for everyone who has been touched by breast cancer. It’s a big group: over two million women living in America right now have been treated for breast cancer. And the group swells to include those 175,000 who are yet to be diagnosed each year.

But she’ll also walk for the children, husbands, mothers, fathers and siblings who have loved and supported a woman through breast cancer. Leslie’s grandmother died of breast cancer, and her own mother is a survivor who braved surgery and radiation not five years ago. Breast cancer is one of those diseases – if you can’t say you have felt its effects personally or within your own family, undoubtedly you know someone who can.

So why doesn’t Leslie just donate the money and politely bow out of the marathon distance?

“I’ll walk because I CAN,” says Leslie. “Twenty-six point two miles is nothing compared to 26.2 hours of chemo, 26.2 hours of doctor’s visits or 26.2 hours of radiation.” Leslie hopes her $1,800 will help uninsured women get quality health care – and if she gets one underserved woman the mammogram she needs, she may just save one life.

Leslie says raising a bunch of money and walking more than 25 miles is the hardest thing she’ll ever do. I think she’s wrong. Turning her back on the event because she doesn’t want to ask people for money, or because she loathes the idea of training for months to walk such a distance … that would be the hardest thing she’d ever do.

How do I know so much about Leslie? She’s my sister. And I’m proud of her commitment.

If you’d like to support Leslie, please visit her website by clicking here.