In February Los Altos natives Julie Dougherty LoGrasso and her sister Sandy Dougherty Antony said they were just “very minor recreation runners.”
By June 21 they had completed their first marathon.
Through her work at Silicon Graphics, Julie, 33, heard of the Leukemia Society’s Team In Training program where the society provides coaches and mentors for those willing to raise money running in a marathon. Sandy, 40, works for Cisco Systems in San Jose.
The women signed on.
“I thought it was a neat cause,” Julie said. “If one of our loved ones was battling this disease, we’d want every able body to do whatever they could to help find a cure,” they said.
The women began their training and fund raising. Each participant agrees to contribute $2,200. “If you’re not able to raise it, you supply it yourself or you drop out,” LoGrasso said.
That was not a problem for the sisters. They set a goal of $10,000. In fact, they raised $20,000, the highest individual fund-raisers for the Northern California Chapter of the Leukemia Society.
“As we were fund raising, people came forward and told us they’d lost a loved one” and they wanted to help,” LoGrasso said.
The sisters trained and ran in honor of Taylor Calvert, an 8-year-old Saratoga boy, who was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 3, but now in remission.
The sisters learned their daily training schedule from a Web site. Typically there were five to six days each week of training. Every other day was cross training, LoGrasso said, when you did something cardiovascular that was not running, like riding a bike or swimming.
On the weekends there were organized runs.
Eventually, they built up to the longest of their training runs, a 20-mile event across the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco-Tiburon run.
In the beginning, as an entry-level runner, LoGrasso walked. “Some totally non runners were doing this,” she said. But then she moved up to running.
The organizers “were very sensitive that some people were non runners,” she said.
The marathon, held in San Diego with more than 20,000 registrants from around the country, raised $15 million, the single most successful fund-raising sports event in history, according to the Leukemia Society.
Since the race, LoGrasso is still running, “sticking with what they had been advising us,” she said. Her long runs are seven miles, not the 15 or 16 during training. But she’s still at it.
LoGrasso lives in Mountain View with her husband Rob and their two children, ages 3 1/2 and 1 1/2. Antony lives in Los Altos with her husband and 2-year-old.
For more information regarding the next Team In Training program, call the Leukemia Society at 1-800-482-team (8326). Or check the Society’s Web site at https://www.lsa-teamintraining.org/home.html.
