A race going well

Faith, hope help Newberg teacher confront leukemia

By JOHN FORTMEYER
CNNW publisher
    NEWBERG — As a teacher and former pastor, David King has long known the importance of a life full of faith and hope.
    More recently, as a cancer patient, he has been reminded how energizing faith and hope also are. Both perspectives combined weeks ago for King, 48, when he fulfilled his personal dream of running the famed Boston Marathon. He didn’t quite reach his goal of breaking the four-hour mark for the 26-plus mile race, but is nevertheless looking at the result with the most positive of attitudes.
   “I can just look at it as the training I had in April for my next marathon in June,” said King, who plans to run in Anchorage, Alaska, on the 21st of this month in a benefit for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
    King is a sixth-grade teacher at Veritas School, a Christian school in Newberg. He earlier served nine years as pastor of Christ Community Church in Newberg.
    King was diagnosed with leukemia a year ago. At about the same time, one of his students, Marshall Magill — son of Mike Magill, an engineering professor at George Fox University, and Lisa Magill, a high school teacher at Veritas — was diagnosed with lymphoma, also a blood cancer.
    Both have gone through treatment. Marshall is in remission and doing well, and King’s cancer is kept at bay with a daily dose of Gleevec, a drug developed in Oregon that specifically targets leukemia.
   “They caught it very early,” he said. “I’ve had very few side effects from the pill.”
    But the cancer was nevertheless serious news for King, and prompted him to put a renewed focus on exercise. As a high schooler growing up in the Seattle area he had run track, and in his 20s he had run marathons in Seattle and Olympia, Wash., and New York City.
    Last year, King was telling Veritas board member Jeff Jones some of the things he hoped to accomplish yet in life. One of them was to run in the Boston Marathon.
    Last fall, King ran a marathon in San Francisco, Calif., as a representative of the society and to honor Marshall, completing it in about four and a half hours. When Jones saw how well King had done, despite his illness, he contacted a friend in Texas who had run many marathons nationally. Jones asked his friend if there were any strings he could pull to get King a special pass to run in the Boston event.
    Jones’ friend contacted a running buddy, who somehow was able to make connections with the Boston police chief. When the details of King’s cancer and his desire to run for Marshall were outlined, officials of the April race sent King not one, but two, passes so he could bring a partner. King asked Todd Evans, a member of the Veritas board who had run the Portland Marathon in 2006, to be his running buddy.
    That left them only 18 weeks to train for the event. They ran through the dark, cold and wet of an Oregon winter — something King admits he had never done before and wasn’t always enjoyable. But that was good training, because the Boston race itself isn’t always enjoyable, King found. Although the weather on race day was beautiful, and the entire route was lined with what King described as “screaming, adoring strangers,” he found himself seriously spent on the infamous “Heartbreak Hill,” a stretch of the route at Mile 21 that has been known to confound even the most experienced marathoners.
    He felt like quitting, but was egged on by Evans — “so much so that I almost took a swing at him,” King recalled.
    King later credited his running partner with helping him complete the run. “If Todd wasn’t there, I might have just gotten on the subway and headed home,” he said.
    King finished in 4 hours, 38 minutes and 17 seconds, one second after Evans.

   In addition to his faith, King also finds strength in the support of his wife Beth, their children, and his students, who eagerly monitored his progress in the race.
   “Beth knew I wasn’t the kind of guy to shift down to first gear now that I have cancer,” he said.
    More than ever, he sees life as a gift from God that is to be lived fully. “I’m more convinced than ever that a disciplined life of health and exercise is better for my overall well being. There is something to a disciplined life. It just seems good and right.”