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Kracht organizes virtual cancer race in honor of Luverne aunt

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By
Mavis Fodness

For the past decade, Luverne’s Kim Vander Poel found strength among the runners and other cancer survivors participating in the Avera Race Against Cancer in Sioux Falls each May. 
Since her successful fight against cancer in 2009, family members would form a team around Vander Poel and complete the 5K race.
This year, however, due to the COVID-19 restrictions and to curb the spread of the virus, Avera canceled the in-person race, which traditionally drew as many as 6,000 participants, and encouraged everyone to run the race at home.
In honor of Vander Poel and to bring attention to breast cancer, her niece Kacie Kracht, a Luverne High School senior, enlisted a small group of organizers to conduct a virtual 5K and 10K event for the Vander Poel team to run Saturday in Luverne.
Eighteen runners and walkers joined Kracht’s eight-member family team to complete the virtual challenge.
“Kim is such a good inspiration,” Kracht said.
“During the race the thing that helped me keep going was knowing I was supporting my aunt and bringing awareness to breast cancer. It was cool seeing all the supporters we met while running.”
Kracht completed the 10K, a distance that honored Vander Poel’s decade of being cancer free. Her team, some dressed in pink tutus, wore this year’s team T-shirt designed by Kracht and friend Kynzie Hamann. 
As a fan of the Disney movie “Lion King,” Kracht played off the movie’s Swahili phase, “Hakuna matata,” by naming the team “Hakuna Ma TaTas” for this year’s cancer run.
Saturday’s event contained experiences like the real race in Sioux Falls, but in a smaller, social-distancing manner.
Hamann started the event with warm-up exercises to music followed by the running of the course, mapped out by Kracht’s and Hamann’s high school band instructor, James Jarvie, himself a marathon runner. Both the 5K and 10K courses included several water stations.
“I planned a nice, easy 5K and 10K on kind of my usual running routes because they are solid distances that I know well,” Jarvie said.
“I stayed away from going up hills and tried to get a gradual uphill if there was one.”
Dave Duffy, who’s organized community running events in the past, supplied signage for the running route while Lisa Hamann, Jenae Hamann, Marsha Fick and Erin Schneekloth gave planning tips, took pictures and manned the water stations. 
The virtual event replicated the same hopeful atmosphere as experienced yearly at the actual Sioux Falls event.
Vander Poel, who had a 30-percent chance of surviving breast cancer, reflected on the “moving forward” attitude Kracht and others brought to the virtual event in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Embrace the fight, because life will be different,” Vander Poel said.
“Cancer has prepared me for COVID-19 because all of us have a choice whether or not we are winners in this race or not … choose to be a winner. We have the finish line to look forward to because like fighting cancer, COVID-19 is also a marathon. It’s not a sprint.”

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