Team Continuum in the Press
In memory of her father
By Mark S. Lebetkin : The Herald-Sun
chh@heraldsun.com
Nov 2, 2008
NEW YORK -- When the second wave of runners in today's ING New York City Marathon takes off at 10 a.m., among them will be a young woman Triangle residents may recognize from the American Tobacco Trail and the paths around Jordan Lake.
Trail-going runners have heard her smiling, breathless query, "How many more miles?" as they pass.
Jane Houle, 27, has never run competitively before, but today she is wearing the jersey of cancer charity Team Continuum in memory of her father, David A. Houle of Chapel Hill, who died of colon cancer in August.
Only a few months ago, Houle had no thought of serious running or of leaving New York City, where she had been living and working as a publicist, promoting athletic-wear and outdoor sports gear, since graduating from Michigan State University in 2003.
She was a recreational jogger, and loved going out to watch the marathon on the streets of Manhattan every year. "Being a competitive person, I thought 'Oh, I need to do that,' she said. "But I didn't have that one thing that pushed me over the edge."
Her father and mother had moved to Chapel Hill in 2006 from Hawaii, where he had been the chief financial officer for a bank, in order for him to receive treatment for his cancer at Duke University Medical Center.
Houle visited her parents in Chapel Hill a number of times from New York, and when her father went into hospice care in the family's Governor's Club home in July, she quit her job, loaded up a U-Haul, and moved into her parents' home to help care for him in his last days.
Her father was her best friend, Houle said. They shared the same dry sense of humor, strong work ethic and interest in sports. "He put his entire self into the people around him," she recalled.
When her father's insurance company refused to pay for experimental drugs his doctors at Duke had prescribed, Houle felt like she needed to do something.
"I became infuriated -- I was so livid," she said. "Everything my family worked for over the last 40 years could be wiped out to -- to continue life."
A coworker suggested she run for a charity in the New York City Marathon, and that appealed to Houle, who has always been athletic. She played varsity basketball in high school and occasional pickup ball in New York. After college she had taken up running a couple nights a week.
She chose Team Continuum because, unlike charities that focus on research, it was the only one on the list that gave immediate relief to families with a member undergoing cancer treatment.
With nearly 400 runners in the marathon, the New York-based charity considers it their biggest event, says Suzan Mikiel Kennedy, Team Continuum's director of development. Fundraising projections for 2008 are $2.1 million.
For families undergoing long-term treatment, Kennedy said, "It's usually a matter of when you'll go bankrupt rather than if you'll go bankrupt. Sometimes you have to decide whether or not you'll keep your home."
Team Continuum provides such services as buying plane tickets, paying hotel bills, and sometimes even making mortgage payments.
Houle so far has raised $10,500 for Team Continuum, surpassing her goal of $8,000, which is how much 10 days of her father's drugs cost.
In terms of training, the move to Chapel Hill posed a new challenge: she had to be her own coach.
"When I was running these 18-mile, 20-mile days I would hit a 'runner's wall,'" she recalled. Other runners taught her the mantra, "This isn't going to kill you." That only made her think more about her dad.
"He fought it for six years," Houle said. "On the day he died he fought it for eight hours. This marathon is just four hours of my life."
She is amazed at how far she has come. "It's wild for me to think about how many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles I've run," she said.
Her friend Kelly O'Reilly, a writer in New York, is not surprised Houle has made it so far. "We'll all be cheering her on," O'Reilly said, "but knowing Jane, she'll be the one getting everyone else fired up when she runs by -- the girl's got more than enough chutzpah for 26.2 miles, that's for sure."
