We’d just finished the run of our lives and weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves...we’d had a goal for the last eight months, and now that we’d achieved it, it was a little surreal. But whatever deep thoughts we had, we put them aside and put our focus towards the fundraiser dinner we were to have that night, in order to celebrate, raise some more cash and talk anything but business.
We arrived at Gymea Tradies before the guests did, but soon enough there were just shy of 400 people in the room-we’d packed it out! We originally thought we might get some interest in a fundraiser dinner, but certainly not this much. In fact, we’d sold out the event within a few days of promoting it and had to turn people away which was a little unfortunate...but it was a nicer problem to have than having a function dinner with just the three of us attending (although that would have boosted our chances of winning in the raffles I suppose).
After the band played some awesome acoustic stuff early on, Ron-our MC for the night-welcomed everyone and told us the game plan.
Before long we were having entree and our first guest speaker stepped up to the microphone. Glenn Gorick had helped us out in countless ways after he contacted us around day 4 of our run. He and his mate Mal were not only physical support (running along with us one day, helping drive Ruby, harassing people in public for donations, etc), but they gave us advice and guidance when we needed it most. We were stoked when he said he’d love to speak at the dinner and he did a great job. One thing he mentioned in his speech was that after looking into the countless past Melbourne to Sydney runs (in all sorts of variations), he was fairly sure that Benny boy was actually the youngest person to do it EVER. Although I jokingly suggested he didn’t tell Ben that (because we’d never hear the end of it), it was the icing on the cake for Ben, and well deserved.
The second guest speaker to share a story was Sandra Kay, one of Mark’s good friends and a breast cancer survivor herself. During the week she had admitted she was nervous about the speech but I have no idea why-she was magnificent. Listening to her own personal story of ups and downs and how she treated Jane McGrath’s book as “her bible” was amazing and very moving, and brought out the emotion (and tears) to a lot of those listening
Ron kept pumping the crowd up and rallying donations for us...he’d give an update every hour or so with an accumulative total and after starting at just under $30,000 in original donations, by halfway through the night we knew we had smashed our $35,000 target.
After main course was served up jumped our final speaker for the night-Tracey Bevan, the driving force behind the McGrath Foundation and Jane McGrath’s best friend. From start to finish she had the crowd listening intently on her every word, she definitely had the knack for it! You could deadest hear a pin drop when she paused, all eyes were on her, and rightly so. She went on to tell everyone the background story of Jane’s battle with breast cancer, and just how much Jane was amazed with the work that breast care nurses could do for one in her position. To paraphrase, she said it was “like she’d met an angel when she first had a breast care nurse”. It was because of this, that Jane wanted to direct her newly created foundation’s focus on providing more breast care nurses to women around Australia, especially in rural areas.
Tracey’s moving speech was followed by a bit of a change of pace, as we went into “prize mode” and held our raffle, where people won some amazing prizes. We then auctioned off the various goodies that we had acquired for the night. Some of the auction items included a signed Rabbitohs jersey, Dragons jersey, signed Australian cricket bat, artwork, photography among others. We were amazed at the amount that some of these items raked in, and was even better considering most of them had been donated to us.
The one item on the auction list that was quite special to the boys and I (and our support team) was a jar. But not any old jar-inside was all the coins we’d found between Melbourne and Sydney on our three week journey. It was memories. These coins had lifted us in our low times, and provided entertainment when we needed it most. No one knew what the total was, but after counting it earlier in the day I knew it was just above the $60 mark. I can’t tell you exactly how much it was, firstly because I don’t want to ruin the magic, and secondly, because it included a 1961 penny, which I have no idea what it’s value is anyway! Realistically we were thought we’d be lucky to get $100 from it. When Ron started the bidding at $500 we thought he’d lost his marbles, but straight away a hand went up. Then it went to $600, then seven. The crowd was in just as much awe as I was-how could this be happening? When the coins eventually sold for a whopping $900, Joel, Benny and I just looked at each other and laughed...we really wanted to keep the coins as a special keepsake, but selling about $60 worth of dirty old scratched up coins for $900 to add to our total was a bloody good deal I thought!
As the night wound down, Ron told the crowd we’d surpassed our target and it was time for the boys to hit the stage. We all did our best to thank the crowd and give them an insight to how the three weeks had gone, but words can’t really describe it. Tracey also got up once more to address the crowd a final time. It was well past our bedtime (which was pretty easy considering we’d go to bed at around 8pm each night), and we were all feeling pretty worn out. We headed home and wondered what tomorrow would hold, considering we didn’t have to get up at any particular time, didn’t have to run any particular distance, or have to do anything in particular! It was a strange feeling, but we were all certainly proud of ourselves considering we’d achieved both our goals-to run the distance and to hit the $35,000 mark. A good day all around. A very special thank you to Tracey Bevan and John Steel for their time on the night.
As I write this on Monday night, it looks like we will have raised approximately $50,000! We haven’t counted every single cent yet, and there are a few costs that need to be accounted for, but we can say with absolute certainty that we’ve well surpassed out original target . We’d really love to be over $50,000 rather than under it, so if anyone can help us out and make doubly sure that we’ll make this monumental total, please do so at www.gofundraise.com.au/page/runforareason. We are still accepting donations, but will tally it all up properly during the week. If all goes to plan we will hand over a cheque (a novelty over-sized cheque that is) to McGrath Foundation next week.
Once again, we will certainly keep everyone in blog world posted about the fundraising total as soon as we know, so check back here by the end of the week and we’ll give you a nice little wrap up of this adventure we’ve called Run for a Reason.
Cheers
Nick
Table of champions (l-r) Ben, Renee, Nick, Tracey Bevan, John Steel (Jane's brother), Glenn Gorick, James, Carlee, Jacki, Sam, Joel
The barrel girls Nick and Ben doing their thing
Joel strategically placing two raffle tickets over the crap parts of his beard to make it look better than it actually is. And controversy after two people have the winning raffle ticket!
The Edge doing what he does best...talking
The boys with Glenn, John and Tracey
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