MBTS residents Toby Daley and Hilary Hall will join the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team this year. Here are members of the 2019 Marathon charity team. (Courtesy Photo)
April 18 is, as any New Englander knows, both Patriot’s Day and it’s also the day that thousands of runners will wake up and head to Hopkinton, Massachusetts to run in the 126th Boston Marathon. Those who complete the race can count it as a major life achievement, one that is often completed for a cause.
This year, three Manchester residents can say they have risen to the challenge of the Boston Marathon.
Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk will be running and raising money for the charity team at Trinity Boston Connect (TBC) charity team, an organization with a mission to challenges systemic racism. The educational and mentoring programs and vehicles for change at TBC are grounded in the values of whole personhood and racial justice, so running for the nonprofit organization for her means standing in solidarity to uphold those values.
Running for TBC has also been Joly-Lowdermilk’s way of building a relationship with a local community organization serving and supporting local people. As a director of strategic initiatives at the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, Joly-Lowdermilk said cultivating meaningful relationships and collaborations with other organizations is central to their work.
“The more we understand others' work, the better we can elevate and celebrate it and build meaningful and sustainable collaborations around it,” she said.
Joly-Lowdermilk has set up a donation page on GivenGain donation page where all the funds go to fuel Sole Train.
Manchester residents Toby Daley and Hilary Hall are also running the Boston Marathon this year. They will be running to support cancer research as members of the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge. Hall and Daley are running “IRL” (as in the actual 26.2-mile race from Hopkinton to the Back Bay in Boston, “in real life”). That is notable because Dana-Farber’s Marathon Challenge team, due to COVID-19, has also offered runners the option of running virtually.
Along with more than 500 Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge teammates from across the United States and around the world, Daley and Hall will run Massachusetts’ historic marathon route from Hopkinton to Boston to collectively raise $5.5 million for cancer research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. It’s the 33rd annual running of the challenge, where one hundred percent of the money raised by the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team benefits Dana-Farber’s Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research, which supports promising science research.
