With heavy rain pouring down during Morgan Hill’s Relay For Life event at Community Park three years ago, resident Valerie Renggli continued to slog around the wet track.
Even swirling winds at 2 a.m. were not going to stop her from continuing her team’s continuous 24-hour jaunt in the local edition of the American Cancer Society’s biggest annual fundraiser.
“It’s 24 hours because cancer never sleeps,” said Renggli, 44, who has stepped up as the Morgan Hill Relay For Life’s new organizer for 2014. “I remember thinking that I can get out of the rain and stop, but someone who has cancer can’t make that choice. They can’t stop having cancer.”
Her husband, Jeff Renggli, a cancer survivor himself and loyal Morgan Hill Relay participant, interjected: “They’d love to change places with us, but they can’t.”
The Renggli family, which includes 11-year-old Nathan, has made it their mission to grow the Morgan Hill Relay For Life and help in the fight to find a cure for a disease that, in 2013, was projected to claim the lives of 580,350 Americans, or 1,600 people per day, according to ACS research statistics.
“When you have cancer or you have a loved one who has cancer, you can feel helpless because it’s beyond your control,” said Valerie, recalling emotions of fear, anger and hopelessness. “So I felt like I needed to do something.”
Jeff, now cancer-free at 43 after being diagnosed and treated while a college student at San Jose State University, gets frustrated at the fact that a cure has yet to be discovered. But Valerie, who lost her father and stepmother to cancer, quickly reminds her husband of the progress made with treatments.
From 2002-2008, the average survival rate for a cancer patient is 68 percent, although certain cancers remain under 20 percent.
This year’s Morgan Hill Relay For Life – the 13th annual and part of the ACS’s 100th anniversary – is scheduled for May 17 at Community Park. So far, a modest 11 teams have signed up – well short of Renggli’s goal to recruit 40 participating teams. She remains tenacious in achieving that figure, proudly directing anyone interested in registering a team to www.relayforlife.org/morganhillca.
The Morgan Hill Relay participation dropped from 33 teams in 2012 to 13 teams in 2013, but participants were still able to raise $48,157.55 at last year’s event to increase its overall donations to $1.2 million.
There will be a team captain and training meeting at 7 p.m. Monday inside the Holiday Inn Express on Condit Ave. as well as a kickoff party at 10 a.m. March 1 at the Centennial Recreation Center off Edmundson Avenue.
“It’s something the whole family can participate in,” said Valerie, whose son’s travel baseball team is following up last year’s task of filling the luminaries and aligning them along the track at night with forming its own Relay team.
“They were really, really into it and it moved them,” added Valerie, whose 69-year-old father-in-law, a cancer survivor, walked 26 miles during last year’s Relay. Her mother is a two-time breast cancer survivor as well. “We do look forward to it.”
This year’s Relay event includes musical bands playing until 10 p.m., karate and dance studio performances, laser tag recon, jump houses, food, refreshments and raffles. Any individual or business interested in adding to raffle prices can contact Valerie at (831) 595-8823 or
vr******@cs***.edu
.
Each year, more than four million people in more than 20 countries raise much-needed funds and awareness to save lives from cancer through the Relay for Life movement, according to the ACS’s website.
Relay For Life is an event that takes place around the globe and claims to be “the largest movement to end the disease,” according to the organization. Teams of people camp out at a local high school, park or fairground, then take turns walking or running around a track or path. Signifying the fact “cancer never sleeps,” relays are overnight, last 24 hours and require each team to have a representative on the track at all times during the event, according to the organization.
