Make It Amazing: Marathon 20

On December 5, 2026, I'll toe the line at the Rehoboth Seashore Marathon for the 20th time in my life — and for the first time, I'm asking for help to make it count twice.

My daughter Mia was six years old when she passed away in March 2017, after a 364-day fight with childhood cancer. The three words she lived by — Make It Amazing — became our motto.

I've run a marathon almost every year since 2008 — through starting as a husband, then a new father, then my mother's cancer diagnosis, through losing Mia, and through my own lung cancer diagnosis in December 2021. Marathon #20 isn't a new chapter. It's the next one.

This time, I'm running for something bigger than a finish line: $20,000 for LivFree, so more families get what Mia gave ours — joy, in the middle of the hardest thing imaginable.

Every mile between now and race day gets tracked here. Every dollar goes directly to LivFree. Follow the training and the story at @CarryTheRock on TikTok.

Make It Amazing.

"We all carry something — burdens, struggles, the weight of what's happened to us, every day, like a rock. Running gives us a chance to put that rock down for a while — and through active meditation run lighter. The rub is we know we have to pick it back up when we're done. The hope is we come back to it a little wiser, a little calmer, a little more grounded."

- Jim McCaffrey