GMRI Fundraiser Speech at the Wellington City Gallery
On Wednesday at the Wellington City Gallery, we held a very successful charity event for the Gillies McIndoe Research Institute, to raise funds and awareness for the institute’s world class work in cancer research.
I billed the event as “From Hospital to the Summit: An Escaped Patient’s Race to the Summit of Mt Fuji”.
It was a lot of fun, and we were all in a celebratory mood, with the strong turnout meaning we achieved more than double our fundraising goal of $3,776 ($1 for every metre of altitude) – thanks to a great deal of generous support from many people over the past few months!
Simon Harrison, a friend and past president of Mt Victoria Toastmasters, welcomed us all to the Gallery and expertly MC’d proceedings through the evening.
It was an honour to begin with a presentation from the founder of the GMRI, and the person who first laid out my head & neck treatment plan, Dr Swee Tan.
Swee has always seemed to me to be a Jedi master of medicine. He amazed us all with a presentation describing his surgical and scientific work over the his career, from radical surgeries to cures for birth defects and tumours in children, to world-leading stem cell research and the recent achievement of his 15-year vision for a world-leading research institute in Wellington.
I followed with a slideshow presentation of the story of my treatment and adventures over the past 5 years, to the story of my run in the Mt Fuji Summit Race in Japan this year. I spoke about some of my influences and lessons along the way, from Outward Bound values (responsibility, compassion, greatness) through to learning to focus not on how long I wanted to live, but how I wanted to live.
I spruced up the presentation with some multimedia, showing some video from my training run up Mt Difficulty, as well as video of my “eating training” at the radiation department at hospital too. The centrepiece was a short video designed to give people a sense of the dramatic spirit of the Mt Fuji Summit race.
Side note: My presentation format for the night was inspired by the work of and guidance from my friend Garr Reynolds, who I had met with in Japan following the race. Garr is a design professor at Kansai University and author of the excellent book Presentation Zen. His teachings weave Japanese and Zen principles into lessons on presentation design. After a walking tour of his home town Nara, (a small city with protected deer roaming the streets!) we talked about my aims for the fundraiser show. Garr stressed the importance of keeping the story simple, yet engaging for people – and presented me with a special gift workbook set to help prepare this presentation. I am very grateful for that!
After my presentation, it was a special privilege to hear a short address from Jason Cameron, the event director of The Goat mountain race. Jason supported me from the moment I contacted him in 2009, the day before my major surgery at Hutt Hospital, asking for an early entry into his race. We became good friends and he continued to kindly support me in the next 5 years as my mountain running exploits developed, right up to his company Victory events being my official sponsor for my Mt Fuji race application.
Jason sponsored a raffle on the night for a ‘Goat goodies pack’ including sponsored race entry and merchandise. He dipped into the hat to pull the winning ticket. A wave of quite some trepidation rippled amongst the ticket-holders in the auditorium. Strangely, the winning number had no owner. Redraw. Then another redraw. Finally, perhaps with a collective reluctant gulp, the audience found its winner of the Goat race entry. We were all impressed by her determined, immediate statement that despite being 57 years old, she’d run the adventure race, to raise funds for GMRI. She’s clearly goat what it takes!