Relay for Life

Friday, April 16th

I enter to a deafening roar – support for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life at JHU. Unfortunately I missed the opening ceremony, but as one Hope Lodge resident who marched in the Survivor Lap put it, the overwhelming compassion and encouragement brought her to tears.

As I walked into the gymnasium and looked down upon the proceedings, one event immediately caught my eye: the Miss Relay Pageant. But don’t let the name fool you. This was a contest where men dressed as drag queens paraded themselves in front of an audience in order to elicit donations from the crowd. Of course, I couldn’t pass up the chance to stuff a few singles down my friend’s bra (acknowledgements to Larkin Luo).

After the commotion died down and I met up with my fellow 4Kers I noticed that our very own Craig Sadler had been cycling on the trainer since I had arrived. In fact, Craig ended up cycling for seven hours straight, during which, at one point he had someone bring him a bag of ice to sit on. Kudos to you Craig for showing us one of the reasons we take water breaks during our trip across the country.

This was simply the start of a very long night, however. As I waited for my chance to jump on a bike, Abhishek Gupta suggested we try out the American Gladiator style fighting arena. After only three rounds (I won two of them) of bashing each other’s heads in with foam pads, we were exhausted. Thank God cycling isn’t as hard as that, or else it would take us half a year to get to San Francisco.

The night wore on as fellow 4Kers had to go home and sleep, and soon only Jose Medina, Kristine Casey, Erica Lai and I were left. With most of the crowd dispersed the gymnasium soon took a turn towards arctic. Jose was keeping warm on the bike, I stole Casey’s blanket and Casey and Erica kicked Craig out of his sleeping bag. As the cold and sleep deprivation sunk in the conversations took a turn for the weird. Erica and Casey spent half an hour wondering if a white canister on a table was a salt shaker or not until I garnered enough energy to get up and check (it was a donation jar). There were talks of Erica’s disgust of men’s unkempt, hairy feet, and tales of Casey’s adventures with her Gluten allergy.

But we persisted. Soon it was 7am and the Relay for Life was, sadly, over. The 4K For Cancer team had had at least one person biking at all times from 7pm, April 16 to 7am, April 17. We were able to show our support for cancer victims and raise money for cancer research as well. And for those of us who stayed the entire night, it was definitely worth it: tons of free bagels!

Adam Ammar