Komen Race for the Cure in Wichita has new venue, declining numbers

The Komen Race for the Cure marked its 25th anniversary Saturday with a new venue that drew rave reviews but also with declining numbers.

The annual benefit for the Kansas Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure for breast cancer offered a new 10K race this year along with its main-event 5K, both taking off from the WaterWalk area of downtown.

Unlike last year’s wet and raw race day at the end of September, this year’s event took place on a beautiful morning under mostly sunny skies, temperatures in the 60s. Just more than 5,000 people took part — half the number that participated at the race’s height in 2011.

About 10,000 people took part that year, said Lindsay Smith, director of the Kansas affiliate of Komen. In 2012, 9,500 people registered, and the race brought in around $500,000. Last year, about 6,700 people people took part, and just more than $400,000 was raised, Smith said. This year she expects more than $300,000 to come in.

Smith said she didn’t know why the numbers of participants had been falling.

“When the race started it was kind of us and the River Run, and now there’s really a lot of races every weekend,” she said. In addition, there are many other activities going on at the end of September, she said. The Kansas affiliate started a race in Hays last year, and about 1,000 people take part in that, perhaps some of them former participants in Wichita, Smith said.

“I think people support our cause, and we’ve not found a cure yet, so the need is still there.”

There was a controversy with Komen in 2012 when the national foundation decided not to give grants to Planned Parenthood for breast-cancer screenings, then apologized and reinstated the grants. The Kansas affiliate does not give money to Planned Parenthood, Smith said, and she doubts that that controversy has had any effect on the local race.

Of the money raised at the affiliate’s biggest fundraiser, Smith said, 75 percent goes to the 95 counties in Kansas that it serves, in the form of community grants for mammograms, education, community outreach and help for breast-cancer patients. The rest of the net revenue goes to Komen on the national level for research.

The Kansas affiliate decided to have the 10K this year to try to raise more money, as there aren’t as many of the longer races, and marathon runners often need to do them, Smith said. More than 250 people took part in the 10K, she said, the WaterWalk fountain shooting up as the first runners crossed the finish line. Thomas O’Connell was the winner, with a time of 32:34. The first breast-cancer survivor to finish the 10K was Sheryl Drevo, with a time of 56:22 — at age 70.

Andrew Topham came in first in the 5K with a time of 16:29.

“It went really well,” Smith said of this year’s event. “People seemed to love the new race course. I heard great comments about where it was and what the feeling was.”

For 17 or 18 years, the event had been staged at Towne East, with runners and walkers heading out from there through Eastborough. But the little city decided the crowds had become too much, especially at the point in the event when combined walkers and runners had to funnel into Eastborough’s narrow streets from the four lanes of Douglas, assistant city clerk Barbara Kratzer said.

In addition to the usual sea of pink T-shirts, head scarves, tutus, baby slings and bandanas, the new pink downtown atmosphere included pink bulbs in WaterWalk Place’s landscape lighting, women in pink skirts looking down from the balcony of one of the condos, and pink rose bushes (except those were just a happy coincidence).

Dick Warren of Wichita sported a pink beard — unlike the guy wearing a cardboard pink mustache, Warren’s hair was real — and said at age 79 that he’d registered for Sleep in for the Cure. Except he woke up at 4 a.m. and was soaking up the event in his Komen sweatshirt before the start of the 5K at 8:15.

The main event at the Race for the Cure is the 5K, which some people run and some people walk. Other activities include the survivor breakfast, a kids walk and a kids dash, a family fun walk, and a survivor celebration.

People on Saturday were praising the new location.

“I like it lots better here,” Linda Vierthaler of Wichita said, perched on a rock between the Boathouse and Gander Mountain. “There’s more scenery — there’s the skyline.”

Vierthaler was volunteering at the event for the first time; in the past she’s joined her three sisters-in-law and a friend in the 5K — all survivors of breast cancer. “You never say you’re over it,” Vierthaler said.

She also praised the boathouse as the new location for the survivor breakfast — much better than a tent in the Towne East parking lot, as nice as the sponsors made it. Tables with big bouquets of fresh flowers were set up on the second floor of the boathouse and on the balcony; Cherri Murray was among the survivors and their guests sitting outside eating hot oatmeal and watching the race from above.

“What a beautiful place to have it,” said Murray, who has helped plan the event in the past. She said there wouldn’t have been enough room in the old location to have the 10K.

Eleven-year-old Claire Dingler was among the early finishers of the 5K — arriving ahead of her two older sisters running the same race, and also apparently before her parents, who were running the 10K. The family runs many races together, Claire said — and she always beats her sisters.

Also new this year was a “promise garden” — cardboard flowers bearing personal messages, planted in the gazebo in front of the WaterWalk Place condos. Candy Robbin took a pink phone out of her pink bag to take a picture of one of the flowers in “loving memory of Mom and Nana” — Robbin’s mother, Fern Maloney, who had breast cancer and died five years ago. Robbin herself is a survivor.

“One day we will have a cure,” Murray said. “And then we’ll move on to other causes.”

This story was originally published September 27, 2014 at 11:21 AM with the headline "Komen Race for the Cure in Wichita has new venue, declining numbers."