Last month, John Verdon completed the grueling Marathon des Sables to raise funds for his nephew Buddy, who is battling osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer.
The Marathon des Sables, often regarded as the toughest footrace on Earth, is a 160-mile ultramarathon spread across six days in the Sahara Desert.
“You have varying stage lengths and varying difficulties, so the intensity of the heat, for example, is gonna be different on days,” Verdon said. “And then you're carrying your own pack, you're carrying your food for the week, you're sleeping in a tent with seven other people you have perhaps never met at all.”
Verdon teamed up with MIB Agents, a pediatric osteosarcoma nonprofit that helps patients, families, and medical professionals raise research money through the marathon.
“4% of federal funding goes to children's cancers and an even smaller percentage of that to osteosarcoma,” Verdon said.
There have been no new treatments for the cancer in the past 50 years.
Buddy, who has shown remarkable resilience throughout his medical journey, became a source of inspiration for Verdon during his toughest moments in the marathon.
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"Having somebody that I can draw on like that in difficult moments during some of these longer races is incredibly important," Verdon said.
The third day of the marathon, with its scorching heat and a daunting distance of nearly 54 miles, tested Verdon’s mental strength.
“There were a couple of moments there where I was like, ‘Wow, this was, maybe, I've overstepped the mark on this one,’" Verdon said. “And so in those moments, again, that was the time to tap into some of the mental resilience and think through like what are all the important pieces?”
Those pieces were support from his family, little notes they had written to keep him going and motivation drawn from Buddy’s strength.
"There are things that you can control and there are things that you can't control," Verdon said.
At the end of the marathon, Verdon and his tentmates waited at the finish line for their entire tent group to complete the race.
“What that meant was we saw everybody else come through as well and it was one of the highlights of the trip for me, not necessarily just because it was done and the emotion having completed it was over, but there was this notion of everybody had a reason for doing this," Verdon said.
Verdon hoped to not only raise funds for research but also hope in his family.
“I think I will come into my own as an uncle when I can be supporting on stuff like this and I think one of the things I'm impressing upon Buddy and certainly on my kids as well,” Verdon said.
