Myrtle Beach group runs marathon for friend who can’t because of cancer treatments
Myrtle Beach resident Karen Grischuk couldn’t run the in her hometown marathon on Saturday as planned.
But she had four friends running the race for her.
Grischuk, a member of the Grand Strand Running Club, was registered to run the Myrtle Beach Marathon with fellow club members.
But she went to a doctor after she started having pain in her hip, and it was discovered that she had lung cancer that has metastasized to other parts of her body including her hip. She has been traveling back and forth to a cancer center in Atlanta for treatment.
In her absence Saturday, James McIlrath, Mindy Smith, Guinivere Fouts and Nan Hasting ran the full marathon in her honor with shirts deeming them “Karen’s Cancer Kickers.”
Hasting is a two-time breast cancer survivor who ran her first marathon. “I told her I was still going to run it for her,” Hasting said. “She was completely taken aback and she never knew we had the shirts. When she saw them she thought they were wonderful.”
Hasting beat cancer early in the 2000s and again in 2012 and ran her first organized race, the Myrtle Beach 5-kilometer, just a couple days after her chemotherapy treatments in 2012. She found running gave her a purpose and feeling of control over her situation.
“I thought, ‘I am not going to let cancer control my life.’ I felt like I had a little control of what was going on. It kind of saved me more or less,” said Hasting, who went through eight surgeries during treatment as well. “I thought the training was really good mentally for me. It kept me grounded and it kept me focused on something other than my illness. Once I started doing 5K I thought, ‘I want to do this if I get through cancer,’ . . . and I’ve been running ever since.”
A benefit 5K called the Karen Strong 5K Fun Run is planned for Grischuk, who is a volunteer race trainer for Fleet Feet, at 1 p.m. next Sunday beginning at the Grumpy Monk in Broadway at the Beach. There is a Facebook events page set up for the run and more than 50 people have signed up thus far.
“We ran in her honor because she is so big into the running community and has a lot of friends in the running community,” Hasting said. “We just wanted to stick together.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2020 at 3:46 PM.
