The start.

By Founder/President Liz Dooley

At our 20 week ultrasound appointment Wednesday March 31st 2010 (ironically CDH Awareness Day), my husband and I were thrilled to get the news we were having our second girl. That news was quickly overshadowed by the fact that our baby had a serious complication. We were told that our baby had a left-sided congenital diaphragmatic hernia (this happens in one in about every 2,500 births) which means the diaphragm didn't close entirely when it was supposed to and some of the lower organs (in our case; stomach, intestines, and spleen) are up where they shouldn't be. As a result, the lungs wouldn't grow to normal size and our baby was at risk for a laundry list of complications that ended with the statement that she had about a 40-50% chance of survival.

Finley was in the fortunate 50% that survive. It took 19 days to stabilize her for repair surgery and after another 30 days more in the NICU, she was finally able to come home. Her full story can be found here: www.finleyanabelle.wordpress.com.

Because this birth defect is rare and not commonly known, it does not have the funding that other more widely known birth defects attract. This all began because we just wanted to hold a race to raise money to donate. It quickly became clear that to organize a race the way we wanted to do it, we needed to start a non-profit. We were fortunate to obtain our 501 (c) (3) status via a group exemption through the Road Runners Club of America and held our first race on August 12th (Finley's second birthday) 2012.