“So if you’re 38 and a police officer and have young children, they tell you that there really is no hope and your treatment is buying weeks and months of time.”

Enter a post I saw on the Facebook page of my running friend, Debbie, who had supported me through my mom’s cancer. On 30 November 2021, Debbie shared about her son-in-law, Evan, who was having surgery for a brain tumour they found a few weeks earlier.

Since those early messages with Rebekah, I’ve been truly inspired by her family’s willingness to share their story with me – so I in turn can share that story in my advocacy efforts with the National Brain Tumour Society during annual Head to the Hill events, to raise awareness about brain tumours and brain cancer each May for Brain Tumour/Cancer Awareness Month, and to encourage people to donate to my fundraisers in support of organisations that advance research into better treatments and hopefully a cure for this type of cancer. They’ve been frustrated by the lack of treatment options for glioblastoma and worked hard to find options for Evan – who is now considered a long term survivor – through his experience brain cancer. They hope their story will help move the needle and force legislators to take action.

So now, I’m running the 2025 Bermuda Marathon Triangle Challenge to honour the O’Dell Family and their travel down this path with GBM. This will be my 42nd marathon (plus a 1-mile run and a 10K), and at a time when their plans due to Evan’s brain cancer are shifting in a new direction, I want to show my love and support in one of the ways I can from afar.

If you would like to show love to the brain tumour/brain cancer community, please donate to my London Marathon fundraiser. Thank you for helping support people like Evan and Rebekah, Georgia and Will, my mom and my brother and me, giving all of us HOPE at a time when they could use it the most.

In May 2022, when I participated in Head to the Hill events, I shared this as part of my plea to US legislators as a very important reason for them to fund NIH and NCI to the level we requested that year:

“Evan is a 38 year old police officer. He has a loving wife, Rebekah, and two fabulous kids, Georgia and Will. And last November (November 2021), Evan’s life changed when he was diagnosed with the same terrible cancer my mom had – glioblastoma.

Evan graciously allowed me to share his story with the legislators over the last couple weeks, a story of his own unique journey in living with brain cancer and how it has changed his life.

As he and his family are finding, like my family also learned through experience, there are so few options for treatment for this. “Here we are in March two days after he ended radiation (image left). And these are the people — Georgia and Will — for whom he needs a better treatment and, ultimately, a cure.”

In May 2023, Evan was in the care of expert doctors at Duke, and after a long almost 18 months of treatments, he finished the standard of care in March 2023. However he’s was not completely in the clear as doctors saw two new strange spots on his MRI, necessitating a return visit to Duke for another procedure (this time just a needle biopsy) to find out what it is. It is primarily scar tissue, but doctors could still see residual, non-dividing glioma cells every so often.

And that’s just how this disease is. You’re never really clear; those cells will always be there threatening to begin dividing and growing again.

At that time, Evan was doing quite well, even running a 10k in April 2023! As the O’Dell family looked ahead to November 2023, they knew if Evan could make it to that point without recurrence, he will be considered a “long term survivor”.

Between May 2023 -24, Evan unfortunately had a recurrence and a new tumor at the location of his original tumour. Since the standard of care didn’t work, they moved on to other chemotherapies, which also stopped working, then tried some non-chemo options to keep the tumor stable.

While Evan felt pretty good most days at this point, treatments have ravaged his body and other organs. Evan and his family knew they were slowly exhausting the list of possible treatment options because they are so limited for GBM. The family is at a new point in this experience, and I send them all my love and strength as they make difficult decisions and lean on each other for the next unknowns with this cancer.

I may be far away, but I send so much love and support their way, and I hope that my silly little Triangle Challenge shows them they are part of a larger community of people who care. So Bermuda 2025 – 3 races in 3 days for a total of 33.4 mi – is for you, O’Dell family!