Climbing a mountain to save lives

DON'T MISS: Follow along with my training and fundraising on my hike blog.

As many of you may remember, in 2006 I hiked the Grand Canyon. The experience was more than a personal highlight to a year of change. It was an accomplishment for all those fighting blood cancers as I raised thousands of dollars for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). I started training for that hike in honor of a good college friend, Noah, who had successfully fought Hodgkin� disease; I ultimately hiked in honor of 10 people: friends, friends of friends and family whose lives had been touched or taken by blood cancers.

This year, I'm heading back out on the trail as a member of LLS' Team In Training with the same goal of raising funds to help stop leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin�'s lymphoma and myeloma from taking more lives. I'll be training for the next few months to do an elevation hike in the Rocky Mountains in September, while raising money in an undeniably difficult economic climate. But cancer does not slow with the economy; now, more than ever, families need the assistance of charities like LLS as they face substantial costs of hospital stays and medication.

Please make a donation to support my participation in Team In Training and help advance LLS's mission. It's 100% tax-deductible and a minimum of 75% of the money raised goes directly to research and patient services.

Need more reasons to give?

• Every ten minutes, another child or adult is expected to die of blood cancers; that's 145 people each day, or six people every hour.
• More than 894,000 Americans today are affected by blood cancers.
• Leukemia causes more deaths than any other cancer among children under the age of 20.
• The survival rate for myeloma is only 35 percent.
• An estimated 138,500 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with blood cancer this year.
• 52,000 people in the U.S. will die of blood cancers this year.

Things are getting better though.

• Overall five-year survival rate for children under five with acute lymphocytic leukemia was 3% in 1964 -- today it's 88%.
• The five-year survival rate for leukemia has more than tripled in the last 46 years.
• Hodgkin lymphoma has a five year survival rate of 86%, more than double what it was in 1960 and it's now considered one of the most curable forms of cancer.

Thanks for your support!

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