WHEN RUNNERS LINE UP on Fifth Avenue for the Seattle Marathon on Sunday, 45-year-old Randy Dahl plans to be among them -- running for the American Cancer Society.
The cause is personal.
And never mind that if he didn't cross the starting line, few would blame him for backing out.
It was July 2000. Dahl and his son, Mark, then 12, were in Utah at a family reunion when Mark suffered a seizure. Dahl rushed him to a small hospital, and after a CT scan, doctors told him Mark had a tumor and was dying. He was rushed to a Salt Lake City children's hospital.
"Five minutes after we got there, they were drilling a hole in his head to relieve the pressure," Dahl says, his voice breaking.
A 13-hour surgery followed. Partway through, a doctor came out. The tumor is on Mark's cerebellum, he told Dahl; there's a chance Mark may never talk or walk again.
"At that point everything went black," Dahl says now. "I couldn't see the next minute in time."
Fast-forward to the ICU. Mark is screaming.
"Dad, it hurts!" he says.
Call it bittersweet music to a desperate father's ears.
"You don't want to hear your kid scream," Dahl says. His voice cracks. He struggles for composure. "But if you didn't know if he was going to talk again. ..."
And some time after that would come what Dahl calls "the dance": Dahl's arms supporting Mark, Mark's feet on Dahl's as they execute a slow waltz around the room.
Mark would learn to walk again. And the tumor, considered benign, would show up again.
There would be nine surgeries.
Despite missing large amounts of school, Mark would graduate from high school just six months later than his graduating class.
Now 21, he lives in his own apartment in Fife, a small piece of the tumor still attached to his brain stem.
"His cognitive skills are fine, but he has ataxia and shakes on the right side," his father says.
Add yet another reason for Dahl's commitment to do the marathon: Shortly after Mark got sick, so did Dahl's mother, an Oregon resident. Doctors diagnosed uterine cancer. Surgery and radiation followed.
Dahl took up running to help handle stress and did three marathons -- two in Portland, one in Vancouver.
He's easy to pick out when he does a marathon. He wears a T-shirt Mark decorated for him years ago. On the shirt, two stick figures -- a man and a boy -- cross a finish line together.
Earlier this year, Dahl agreed to run the Seattle Marathon on behalf of the American Cancer Society, not knowing that in July he would be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Any thought Dahl might have entertained about hanging up his running shoes quickly was doused by Mark.
"I beat a brain tumor. You couldn't run 26 miles with MS?" Mark asked, his tone heavy with unmistakable challenge.
Consider it noted.
"I'm going to finish that marathon," Dahl says. "I may crawl across the damn line, but I'm going to finish.
"MS will slow me down a little bit. When I get hot, I lose a little balance.
"When everybody else is running 26.2 miles, I'll probably run 29," says Dahl, who became an American Cancer Society volunteer six years ago and is now the organization's vice president for the Western Washington region.
"You think of David and Goliath," he says. "David had a rock. I have a tiny pin.
"I'm going to pick at this giant as long as I can. This thing called cancer went after my family.
"Absolutely, this is personal -- and if it was your kid, it would be personal, too."
Dahl asked me to list this Web site, www.charityrunners., where readers can make donations to support runners.
"It doesn't have to be me," Dahl says. "It can be for anybody."
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