She hopes to outrun cancer
A Laguna Beach resident is looking to run from Huntington Beach to Arizona to raise awareness of pediatric cancer.
Becky Mudd, 57, plans to start near the Santa Ana River bike trail in Huntington Beach on Saturday morning and make the 265-mile trip to Parker, Ariz., over eight days.
“I do a lot of running events, and when I do, I always dedicate my runs to the children, but there’s a lot of great people running for other great causes,” she said. “I feel like the kids get lost in all the other causes.”
According to the American Cancer Society, about 10,450 children were diagnosed with some form of cancer in 2014.
Mudd, community outreach and education coordinator for the Orange County Water District, is collecting donations to benefit the Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation. She is aiming to raise $5,000 and as of Tuesday had collected $2,430.
She is all too familiar with losing a loved one to cancer. Three years ago, her sister Robin Ross died of glioblastoma, a brain cancer. In October, she lost another sister, Rhonda Ross, to lung cancer. Both sisters were 54 years old.
The loss of her sisters was the catalyst to make her want to raise cancer awareness, Mudd said.
“When you lose your siblings, it makes you start realizing that our time here is very short, and it makes you look at your own mortality,” she said. “So I said, ‘All right, what am I going to do with my time here? I’m healthy and I have a fire in my belly.’”
During her run, Mudd will be followed in a support RV by Sabrina Jeffers, 45, of Grover Beach, a city near San Luis Obispo. Mudd met Jeffers through a Facebook page, Run for the White House for Childhood Cancer Awareness.
Since then, the two have accompanied each other during charity events near San Luis Obispo and in Orange County. The upcoming run will be their biggest challenge yet.
“I’ve never driven an RV before,” Jeffers said with a laugh. “I’ve never done anything like this before, but we’ll be fine. It’s not like we’re going to be hiking through the boondocks. We’re going to be crossing California highways, going through cities and towns, so I’m not too worried.”
Mudd’s run is significant for Jeffers, who lost her son, Samuel, to brain cancer in 2013 when he was 8. Since then, Jeffers and her husband, John, started a nonprofit called the Samuel Jeffers Childhood Cancer Foundation.
“We were completely clueless [about cancer] before Sam was diagnosed, that there was this whole devastating world of illness and children dying,” Jeffers said. “Now that we’re aware, we can’t turn our backs. We do this for him so that other kids in the future will hopefully hear better news than he had.”
Mudd said she recognizes the challenges in front of her: elevation changes, varying weather and the blisters she anticipates to have on her feet. But she isn’t deterred.
“I’m going to celebrate by jumping into the Colorado River,” she said with a laugh.