Bison runner goes long distance for little girl
By: avi.saper@canstarnews.com
When Adam Penner needed a summer job after his first year of university, he found himself working at a daycare down the street from his home.
There he met Erica, a girl who had been living with Type 1 diabetes since she was 11 months old.
“I watched her test herself every day to see if she could eat dessert or not,” Penner said.
About a year ago, after more than three years working at the day care, Penner decided he wanted to do something for Erica, who is now nine years old, and other people living with diabetes. The 24-year-old Fort Richmond resident decided to join Team Diabetes, a fundraising program run by the Canadian Diabetes Association. Penner made a commitment to raise at least $6,100 in order to run a half marathon in Rio de Janeiro in July as part of the team.
Preparing for the run was no problem for Penner, a fifth-year member of the University of Manitoba’s track and cross-country teams who has run in several half-marathons in the past. Raising that much money, however, was a little tricky. “I kind of went in and signed up one day not really thinking about how much money that is,” said Penner, who covered all of his own travel costs even though he wasn’t required to do so. “I didn’t want people covering a free trip for me, so I put in the money for the trip and the rest of the money I collected went to the diabetes research side of it.”
Penner said he was fortunate to receive some significant donations along the way, but also had to scrape together a dollar at a time. He asked people at the university to give up a coffee or a chocolate bar and donate the loonie or toonie to him instead. “I prayed for miracles a few times, and it all worked out,” he said.
Some of the fundraising even served an educational purpose for many of the people Penner met. While putting on a bake sale at the university, he was often asked if it was appropriate to be selling sweets as a fundraiser for diabetes.
“I realized that everyone who saw the diabetes signs I set up assumed I was talking about Type 2 diabetes because it’s more common,” he said. “I explained that I was doing it for Erica, who is a girl with Type 1 diabetes, and that there are days when a cookie will save her life because her blood sugar is so low.”
Although he’s a competitive runner — racing in the longer distances for the Bisons on the trails and on the indoor and outdoor tracks — Penner took on the 13.1-mile distance in Rio for a different reason.
“I purposely left my watch in Canada because I knew that otherwise it would turn into a race,” Penner said. “This was something I did for Erica. It wasn’t about me or what time I did it in.” For the record, Penner finished in one hour, 24 minutes and 41 seconds, good for fifth place in his age category.
As for the person who inspired him to run in Rio, Penner said Erica may not have understood just how much money he raised, but “she understood I was doing something special and she was the reason for it, so that was exciting to her.”