UPDATE on the 24 Hour Relay

If you didn't read Monday's post about the 24 Hour Relay I'm setting up for my friend who just passed away, please click that link.

A "college buddies" table at our wedding 11.5 years ago, with Aaron being a goofball, per usual.
(The reception hall told us it was the fastest they'd gone through 2 kegs. Thanks, jerks.)

Thank you to everyone who's signed up to fill an hour-long block of time during the relay! And to those who donated money! By yesterday morning (1 day into the donation drive), we'd raised around $700 for Aaron's family, and currently we're up to $1,090! Thanks everyone!

Some donors on our YouCaring page are leaving comments, and the best
so far is "My money is on Ralph achieving revenge." Nice.

Right now, there are only 3 open hours left in the 24 hour period, but check back in about a week if you're interested in possible open slots on late Saturday morning - I reserved 4 hours for Nora's friends, but I don't know if they'll all be filled. I might be opening some of those up last-minute.

Please give here if you can, and check out our Facebook event page if you'd like to sign up for an open hour. (Feel free to join the group if you want updates on the event.)

5 RANDOM THINGS:

• It's been awesome (and not unexpected) to see the support that Aaron has been receiving online and in the media. His obituary (seen in my last post) has REALLY been making the rounds. It trumped Black Friday news on the front page of some of our local Twin Cities papers. From what I've heard, it's been on CBS This Morning, the front page of Yahoo!, The Chive, The Huffington Post, SomeEcards/HappyPlace, US Magazine, countless other random websites, and it's received mentions online from Zooey Deschanel and Elijah Wood. Awesome.

• If you want to come run with us, but can't make a team or can't find an open time slot that works, just show up to run a few laps to show support at any time during the event. We'll be tracking how far the "official" runners get during their team's hour of running, but I also think it'd be nice to track how many other people do laps in Aaron's memory. I think we can hit 2,000 laps in the relay, so can we hit 2,500 or 3,000 with other people's help? Come run with us! (Don't come during the overnight hours because access will be tricker, but come during "normal" hours.) Again, find more info on the Facebook event page - I'll be adding more details next week.

• Nobody's brought this up, but I meant to address it in my last post: I chose to raise money directly for Aaron's family and not for cancer research. Aaron has already raised a lot of money for cancer research, and I figured anything we could add to that - although very important - is just a drop in the bucket. However, raising some money directly for Aaron's family will have a bigger impact on their lives. Everyone seems to be OK with that. Thanks again for your donations.

• FrontRunner and the YWCA of Minneapolis are helping out the event. We hope to be borrowing a big "finish line clock" from FrontRunner to make it easier to track our mile splits, and the YWCA is lending us a bunch of orange cones to direct runners on the track. Thanks FrontRunner and YWCA of Minneapolis!

• I feel like everyone's seen this, but if you haven't, here's a "teaser trailer" from about 2 months ago for a documentary about Aaron's cancer battle. It only had about 300 views last week, and now it has almost 140,000:


Direct link


Finally, I think there's a lot of "coincidence" in this world, and I don't look too deeply into things. Not everything has a deeper meaning or purpose. But I have to share this tweet from a week ago:

Last Tuesday, I tweeted this at 3:18 p.m. as class had just wrapped up. Aaron had passed away 35 minutes earlier (but I didn't learn that until the next morning), and he had an unnatural obsession with Taylor Swift. Coincidence? Maybe.

But if not, thanks for the earworm, buddy.

Give to Aaron's family here, join our Facebook event page here, and read more about how the 24 Hour Relay will go down in my last post.