Sarah's Miracle Mile Race

On November 4, 2006 the Miracle Mile Race for the benefit of the Spastic Paraplegia Foundation took place on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

The miracle of this race actually began more than three decades earlier when a young child was born somewhere in the vicinity of Ashville, NC. By all accounts this girl lived a very ordinary life through elementary and high school.

I've been told that she went on to study religion at Davidson College which I believe is just north of Charlotte, NC.

She didn't go into the ministry, though her words would ring out in the ears of many an Information Technology manager (as I was) like Gospel. That's right Gospel with a big G.

This young writer, many times younger than an old dinosaur like me, shot out onto the technology stage like a shooting star.

As a writer and editor for magazines like PC Magazine and Portals she got access to the brightest minds in the information technology world. Those of us who lived on the cutting edge (Some say bleeding edge) of technology were among the few who really grasped (to some degree) just what she was talking about. At least I think we did.

Her articles were short and very deep. She turned difficult concepts into meaningful business ideas. Her articles on data complexity and knowledge management can still be found on the indexes of leading colleges and universities here in the United States and in countries such as the United Kingdom and Russia. They have been translated so that they can be understood in some places that don't speak or read English.

You never expect to meet the people that shape your world. Then one day at church you see someone who is having a little difficulty walking. You do something, like holding a door, to make their day a little easier.

Never knowing this is the person who wrote that article your boss kept quoting when you said it wasn't that easy to build a data warehouse or turn a home built application into a fully functioning Knowledge Base.

You may have agreed with every word that was written. It was just you saw a timeline of years and your boss saw a timeline of yesterday. Sarah's access to key industry people made the articles all that more relevant. After all if company X had it, we needed it and we needed it now to compete.

When I first met Sarah, all I knew about her was that she had a husband Jeff and two little children. I didn't even know about her running background. That's right; she was also a very good Marathon runner; up until September of 2004 when she ran her last half-marathon.

No, she was just a mother with children who was having a bit of trouble walking. Nor did she know that I belonged to the group of people who had to figure out how to make the ideas she wrote about work in the real world.

I didn't know that her husband, Jeff, an information manager at Lenovo, had been a technology writer with her at PC Magazine in California. In fact, I didn't know exactly what he did.

I probably know more about Sarah now than she wishes.

I know she used to meet with the kinds of people in the industry that I could only dream of meeting some day. She got to search there minds with probing questions. She was very, very good at separating the important information from the chit-chat. That is probably why her articles had such a strong impact on the Information Community.

Seeing Sarah and Jeff with their children, Claire (3rd grade) and Will (toddler), is seeing a family that is very real. All those old enough to understand what life could be, feel some anger and pain about what the disease has done to them.

At the same time when I see them, I see a family that is closer than most and really working to make the best for each member of the family.

Although I have known Sarah for a bit, it has always been as one member of our church community to another. I did not know she was Sarah Roberts-Witt the Information Technology Writer. I just knew her as Sarah Witt the church member with some kind of difficulty walking.

Through the last couple of years we have seen Sarah go from having difficulty walking; to needing a wheel chair; back to walking with a cane; back to the manual wheel chair; and finally to a motorized chair. (This has given her some ability to move on her own!)

A short time back, just as I was becoming more aware of why she was having a tough time walking, Sarah lost her voice.

I was just becoming aware of SPF and HSP. I had an uncle with MS, so I had some idea how these diseases affect the person and their family. Like Sarah, my uncle used technology to allow him to be somewhat mobile for a much longer time.

As a parent I can grasp some of the import of losing your ability to swing your child high in the air as the other parent gasps and the child squeals with pleasure. I have a bit of a problem with my heart so I can't do this with my grandkids any more.

Sarah and Jeff are very strong people. She is planning on using her skills to help the SP Foundation website. Hopefully she will be able to write a little to help people going through the process get a better insight on things she has been able to do to make it through the day.

With her technology background, she is already making advances in what a person with this disease can do. She lost her voice to the disease, but she can talk by using her computer keyboard and a synthetic voice. It is a strain on her, but she has been able to present the problems disabling diseases create to school children in a way they can relate.

She has two voices on her computer. One voice sounds like a woman and one sounds like a robot. The kids love the robot voice.

Sarah is a miracle to the people around her. She hits the wall, (runner talk) from time to time, but she knows from her running experience how to go on.

This year alone she has been in two races, (one of which she organized) worked on a plethora of church committees and has taken an active part in clinical trials designed to try to find some solutions to the symptoms using existing drugs off-label.

She is, like a person who from her talks, seems to be her mentor, Christopher Reeves, bent on doing whatever she can, as long as she can to find a cure.

She gave us this quote by Christopher Reeve: "Humans are not meant to be in a wheelchair, there must be an answer".
She also shared a little about her search for faith. A quote by Christopher Reeve sounds close to the way she expresses her thoughts. It goes: "I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do".