Steps for Noel

My feet were burning, the sweat started to drip into my eyes and my throat was as dry as a desert; but I didn’t even care. No pain or discomfort that I was in could compare with the overwhelming feeling of triumph I felt as we entered into the stadium of hundreds of cheering fans. I don’t even know how I picked up the pace after I had just ran 6 miles straight, not something I do often or well ever. I can’t even begin to explain the amount of adrenaline you get as you push your disbailed daughter in an adaptive stroller through a race. As you pass people all you hear are encouraging words-

 “You’ve got it Mama!” “Great job girls, you're both so strong!” “Keep it up!”

 It’s as though with every encouraging word my pace got faster. What began on that race is something so close to my heart, a little thing called “Steps for Noel.”

Earlier that summer my heart broke when Noel told me that her goal in life was to walk again. How do you look a determined eleven year old in the eyes and crush her goal of walking? And I mean walking? That’s something we all take for granted. But unfortunately Noel, diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy, lost her ability to walk at 4 years old. Now at eleven I knew from the degeneration of her disease walking was no longer possible. 

I promised to her in that moment we could figure out what we could do. That’s when I had the idea of running.  We started running races together as a family. We signed up for our first 5K in August 2018. We pushed Noel and our two other young kiddos in strollers as our older kiddos ran alongside us. We took turns pushing each stroller. From that first race we were hooked. 

I decided to sign our family up for a Labor Day 10K. Ready or not we were going to run our longest race yet. This is one of those awesome community races where there is something new on every corner. You can hear the saxophone, and trumpet as you run up on a perfect jazz ensemble on the corner. Or see a whole family dressed up in their family halloween costumes, having a bright yellow minion give you knuckles when you're running a race is quite the experience. There was even a group of college kids who set up a shot stand. Run-through-Jello-shots apparently is a thing! Don’t worry we didn’t drink and run! 

We were on about mile 4 when the mid morning chill started to fade into the late September heat. That's when my eleven year old son looked up and me and said, “Mom I just can’t do it any more, my feet hurt so bad.” I looked down at him and said, “Buddy,  we’re not running for ourselves, we’re running for Noel; we’re taking the steps she’s never taken.” 

With that realization vocalized tears started pouring down my face. Yes that’s what we were doing. We were taking Steps for Noel. That’s why I felt so much pride and triumph as we pushed her into the stadium, we had just taken so many Steps for Noel. 

After that race I began to wonder, just how many steps does the average eleven year old take in their life. We calculated how many steps Noel would have taken at that point in her life I came up with 43 Million Steps. Dang. All of us together who had just run that 10K only had about 40 thousand steps. This was a huge goal!  That’s when I realized we couldn’t do it alone, we needed help. So we invited family and friends to join us to take “Steps for Noel.” 

We reached out through Facebook and let everyone know what our goal was. Before long we had people from all over taking steps for Noel. Friends would send us pictures at the tops of glorious mountains peaks, sandy sun drenched beaches and even a desolate rainy bridge in Prague. It was absolutely amazing to have so many people join us and pledge to take deliberate steps for a girl who was no longer able to step on her own. 

Every week we would have a celebration as we did a video revealing the total steps accumulated for that week. Each week we got to dance and celebrate hundreds of thousands of steps from all over the world! It was all very exciting. Noel always loved the dance party reveals!

However, I was a little worried that at the rate we were going with accuamplacting steps it would take us years to achieve the goal. LIttle did I know that the story of Noel was getting around to so many. One night in the mail we received a rustic plaque made of an oak tree. Etched on the front in red letters was the word “Believe” and with over 40 signatures. On the back it read: “Noel our company took 127,105,047 steps for you!” 

One hundred twenty seven million one hundred five thousand forty seven steps…

What?

 The word of Noel and what we were doing spread to this company and they decided to do a step challenge in her honor. We surpassed our goal by 72 million steps! I cried when I told Noel and she just beamed! It’s like she knew that people would do this for her. This whole story and experience can be summed up by an unknown quote:

“I run because I can and when I get tired, I remember those who can’t run, what they would give to have this simple gift I take for granted, and I run harder for them.”