By Kim J. Harmon

 

Bev Maley of Newtown was worried she wouldn’t be able to come up with the $1,750 needed to participate in the Avon Walk For Breast Cancer and was on the verge of giving up and moving on to something else.

“I panicked,” admitted Bev, 45, who saw an ad for the walk in a magazine and decided it would be a worthwhile thing to do. “I called them and said I don’t think I can raise this much money, but they told me not to panic and to hold on for a week.”

Within that week a friend of hers was diagnosed with breast cancer while another friend had suffered a recurrence of breast cancer that had reached the point where treatment was no longer an option. And so Bev Maley was no longer panicked.

She was driven.

“These are real wake up calls for me,” she said. “Now it’s not about getting the money to walk, but that so many people don’t realize how big (an issue) this is for women. Over 40,000 women are going to die of breast cancer this year. People are so afraid to talk about it.”

Bev hopes to be in Boston, Massachusetts, on Saturday and Sunday, May 3 and 4, to participate in the Walk. Avon requires each participant to come up with $1,750 in donations prior to registration and Bev is bound and determined to reach that level in the next five weeks.

“This has turned into a crusade of letting women know what’s going on,” said Bev, a ‘starving artist’ by her own admission, who had two sons (Stephen and Dan) and a daughter (Rachel) with her husband, John. “I just think it’s really, really important. You have to listen to your body and slow down and think about what you are doing.”

Donations from her children have helped build the coffers, but Bev has also been pounding the pavement and has been gladdened by the response she has gotten from her neighbors, other individuals and the many businesses she has visited.

“All my kids pledged money,” said Bev. “My daughter was the first one – she gave me $3. My son, Dan, told me ‘I’m so proud of you’ and coughed up $20.”

But there is still more money to raise.

“I’m a little nervous,” admitted Bev, who plans, for instance, on holding a neighborhood wine tasting event (with the wine being donated) to help raise funds, “but I feel my faith will take me there. I feel God has guided me here.”

Anyone wishing to donate some money for the Walk can, of course, talk to Bev Maley personally, but they can also log on to avonwalk.org and click on the link that would enable them to sponsor a specific walker.

Now, raising the money to participate in the Walk is part of the deal here. The other part is training for the Walk – which can be either a marathon (26.2 miles) or a marathon-and-a-half (39.3 miles). Some walkers will space the marathon over the course of the two-day event, while others – like Bev – hope to do the marathon the first day and the half-marathon on the second day.

Bev was a fitness instructor for 10 years, but the pounding her knees suffered during years of step aerobics has taken its toll. Still, she managed to put in two to five miles a way and about 20 miles a week before the Walk became her mission. Now she has upped her mileage (with an eye on keeping a 15-minute per mile pace) and is looking to put in a 20- to 22-mile day prior to the Walk.

It is a lot of work, a lot of effort, but with her husband, her three children, four siblings, three siblings-in-law, her walking partner from Danbury, and all those friends in her close-knit neighborhood, Bev Maley feels she has a wonderful support group.

“I don’t feel like I’m in this alone.”

And that will help her reach her goal – to complete this very important mission in her life.

For all those making donations online, the Avon Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity. In the past 10 years, the Foundation has raised more than $250,000 worldwide and much of the money raised goes back to the communities where it was raised.