Wake Up Narcolepsy's Marathon Runners

The Boston Marathon is one of the most renowned and largest marathon road races in the world, drawing over 20,000 participants and 500,000 spectators to Massachusetts each year. As a person who has never liked long distance running of any form, especially recently with cataplexy making it more difficult, marathons have never meant anything significant to me, other than being an insanely long distance to run! My friends on the other hand run varsity track and get a kick out of taking a two or three mile trot through the woods in between homework assignments. They see more into the Boston Marathon than I ever could, simply from their love of running.

But recently, six amazing selfless people have given me a reason to be interested in this year's race, through their incredible goals of running the marathon for a good cause. Tomorrow while struggling through another long and sleepy morning of high school, my thoughts will be with the six runners that make up the Wake Up Narcolepsy marathon team:

- neuroscientist/sleep-expert Nancy Chamberlin
- WUN co-Founder and mother of a narcoleptic child Monica Gow
- WUN board member and mother of narcoleptic child Tabitha Crawford
- uncle of narcoleptic child John Leahy
- narcolepsy supporters Ken and Kim MacAskill

Wake Up Narcolepsy

These six strong and inspiring people all have separate reasons for their determination, but the thing that remains the same is that not one if them suffers from narcolepsy personally but they all have been working hard to raise money to fund narcaplexy research at two leading narcolepsy labs in the United States. One hundred percent of the $60,000 raised by running the past two Boston Marathons, as well as all funds raised by this years' team will be split between Harvard and Stanford's narcolepsy labs for continued research into this very misunderstood field.

So in closing, I'd like to thank all six of these awesome runners for working so hard to help everyone living with narcolepsy today and in the future, including myself. I'm so grateful for all of the people who care about narcolepsy and the future of this sleep disorder. Every penny raised is more hope that researches will be able to someday cure every one of us living with narcaplexy and prevent anyone else from having to go through their lives perpetually sleepy.

Read the full press release here: Six Wake Up Narcolepsy Runners Go The Extra Mile in Support of Narcolepsy Research

Good luck, WUN marathon runners!

Happy Easter and Passover!

Here's wishing you and those in your life a happy, healthy, and wakeful Easter and Passover holidays! :)