Operation Jack

Fighting autism, one mile at a time.

Guest Blog: Tiff Speaks Out About Jack

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Tiff told me last week she wanted to write a guest blog for today, so I said no problem. These blogs take time to write, so I’ll gladly take a break! Plus, I missed my flight home yesterday and got stuck in Spokane, Wash., so I guess that as of posting this, my weekend isn’t over so I can’t really post a weekend recap, right?

First real quick, just in case this is your first time here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner and my middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. This year, I’m trying to run 60 marathons to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train for Autism. So far, I’m through 33 of the 60. I ran yesterday in Missoula, Montana. You can read my recap here.

And real quick, most of you are very aware of the Chase Community Giving contest we’re in the middle of. If you weren’t, the banner that loaded when you hit the site probably made it pretty clear. Well, today is the last day of voting. And we have a fighting good chance at winning $20,000 if we stay in the top 200. But by no means do we have this in the bag. Lots of groups are making last-minute pushes and I’m worried about what’s going to happen today.

So please, one last time, if you haven’t voted, PLEASE VOTE TODAY! And please share this on your Facebook wall or share it on Twitter. If you want bonus points, copy and paste this into your Facebook status for today:

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Today is the last day to vote for Operation Jack in the Chase Community Giving contest. Help this great cause secure the $20,000 it stands to win by voting once at http://operationjack.org/chase if you haven’t already. Every vote is CRITICAL and yours is needed! Please copy this and use it as your status, just for today!
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We’re all done with this after today. This is like mile 26 of a marathon, and I always turn it on and power through the finish. Join me and help us make it happen today!

Oh, one last thing — Tiff took this video of Jack. When she says, “say ‘for’,” he heard “four” and said “three” instead. Cute little guy!

OK, on with what Tiff wrote.
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What does your child call you? Well, most times I’m called “Daddy”, “Miss Ann”, “Miss Doreen” (Miss Ann and Miss Doreen are two of his teachers), or nothing at all. If I prompt him with the “m” sound, then I will hear the music to my ears, “Mommy.”

Nearly seven years ago, Sam and I thought I gave birth to a healthy baby boy and a brother for Ben to play with. And for 18 months we continued to think that. After we were told to seek help for Jack at his 18-month well check up, our lives changed forever and everything has seemed to go by like a flash of light since a fall day back in November of 2006, when we heard the words “moderate to severe autism.” The neurologist told us that if we were to leave the room for two days, Jack wouldn’t even notice. I couldn’t fight back my tears.

Flash forward to 2010 now. I’m changing my 6 1/2-year-old’s diapers, buying him toys in the 18-24 month old toy aisle of Target and most of the time, putting him in a stroller every time we go out. I also wake up for him in the middle of the night a couple times a week to calm him down and to keep him from punching himself in the head from what I think is frequently stomach pain. Other times, I don’t know why he screams and cries. Imagine your child going through some type of pain, and then putting a big piece of duct tape over their mouth. That’s how I feel because he can’t tell me what’s causing him to cry. I’ll lay there next to him wondering, is he crying because he feels like he doesn’t have a voice? Does he feel like he’s trapped inside of his body and no one under stands him?


Tiff wanted me to embed this video for you to play while you read what she wrote. She’s the boss!

At night when I tuck him in, I lay there next to him and look into his eyes. I’ll talk to him and tell him that I love him and am proud of him and sometimes I’ll even say, ”Jack, I know you hear me right now, I know you know I love you and I’m so proud of you.” He’ll just lay there with an empty glare on his face and I get no response. But you never know, maybe he does understand me. And if he does, maybe in the future, he’ll be able to tell me how he remembered me always saying those things to him when I tucked him into bed at night.

I know or at least I think he understands I’m his mother. But what he doesn’t know is that I just took on the new role of becoming his “at-home doctor”. The “doctor” who’s going to fight through any fire, who’s willing to take on the new responsibility of this new DAN protocol. A protocol that involves giving him around 15 different supplements on a weekly basis, from creams, to drink mixes, to B-12 injections. I want to know at the end of all of this, at the end of my life, that I did everything that was realistically possible to save my son from this sad, sick and mysterious disorder.

With autism you don’t know for sure what the cause of it is. There are a lot of theories out there, some even backed by science, but it’s still a mystery. With other genetic disorders such as Downs Syndrome, you know what happened in the body. With autism, you don’t know for sure. Because of that, I feel like pulling Jack out of this is all on my shoulders. The thought that I have a chance to help him “recover” from this is, to say the least, very stressful and very pressuring. It’s all worth it to me though.

I have a magnet on my fridge that reads,”You can’t scare me, I have children.” And that’s exactly how I feel about fighting Jack’s autism. When you’re a mother willing to do anything for your child, NOTHING scares you.

Everyday brings a new challenge for you when you are a mother. My challenges with Jack at times seem to never go away. It would make my day if he would let me read him a book for longer than one minute. Pointing to pictures and getting him to label is how we read books together. Most of the time, all Jack wants to do is look at baby numbers books, often times carrying it around for days at a time.

Another challenge is getting him to eat more food. Jack has yet to eat a PB&J sandwich, or any sandwich at all for that matter. He won’t eat anything he hasn’t eaten before. Well, maybe once or twice a year he’ll try something new. I see kids enjoying watermelons in the summer time or enjoying a piece of their birthday cake and I want so badly for my Jack to be able to enjoy the same thing. Right now, I’m rotating about 10-12 different types of foods.

Just last month I was sound asleep at seven in the morning and was woken up by the sound of my door bell ringing. Jack had figured out how to get out the front door by opening up the top latch with a kitchen chair and a book. I quickly had a dead bolt requiring a key installed on the inside of the door. Now, whenever I need to do something as small as getting the mail, I unlock myself out of the house, making sure I bring the house key with me on the way out. If Jack ever were to get out, he would walk to the next city if he could and he wouldn’t respond to his name nor know how to look both ways when crossing the streets. Letting him out is a risk I can’t take.

I can go on and on about the challenges I face with Jack on a day to day basis. But my biggest challenge I have is getting through the pain everyday. If I really wanted to, if I let myself, I could stay in my house all day and cry my eyes out until I couldn’t cry anymore. In fact, when I do allow myself to let it all out, to let out everything I bottle up inside of me day after day, I lay on my bed usually when the kids are in bed for the night, and I cry. I cry really hard into my pillow and I ask God, “Why? Why my baby boy? Please, please God, wake him up.” I ask God to wake him up because I’ve always looked at him as being partially in a coma. I lay there thinking, is this really happening? It seems like one big nightmare. I know that God blessed us with Jack for a reason and that he’s a blessing. But I HATE the autism. I look at it as an evil monster that I need to fight away.

Looking at baby pictures and watching old videos of your child would make any mom happy, but not for me. When I look at his pictures from birth up to two years old, I think to myself that those pictures were taken before the accident. But there wasn’t even an accident.

Before Jack came into my life, I never had a problem seeing “special needs” adults walking together in their groups with each other. Now, seeing a person sitting at a bus stop talking to himself is almost like looking through a crystal ball at a 50-year-old Jack. On the verge of tears when I see that, most of the time, I quickly snap myself out of it. I get this feeling that comes over me. Some would say it’s denial, but the feeling I get is a feeling of “fight.” And I think to myself, no, that’s not going to be my Jack. To me, one of the worst feelings is the feeling of regret. I don’t want to be a 70-year-old woman one day, looking at my 42-year-old son, thinking, “what if?” What if I’d done everything I was capable of doing to help him recover from his autism?

I realize that opening myself up this way, is also setting myself up for criticism. There will always be people out there who think I’m not doing everything I could be doing for Jack. Or maybe, I’m not doing something the right way. I’m not sure if there is one particular right way to “fix”, “cure”, or “take away” your child’s autism. But I know that I’m doing everything I can for Jack and that my will to try and pull him out of this will never die.

I wanted to write this for one reason — I want everyone to understand WHY they cast their vote for Operation Jack. I wanted it to be more than a popularity contest with the charities getting the most votes winning. All people hear when they support others’ charities is, “It’s for a great cause!” Well, this is for a great cause. I always dream of the day I wake up, and hear on the news that doctors finally found what really is causing autism and that finally, a cure has been found.

Jack has had behavorial services six nights a week, two hours each session since he was 2 years old. We’ve seen amazing progress from it but I’m starting a new journey with Jack now — the biomedical journey. I pray to God that we will see a different, less severely autistic person in the future. I know that constant prayer can be powerful. And I know that the day I’ve been waiting for will come. The day when he comes up to me and says, ”Hi, Mommy. I love you.”

Race Report: Missoula Marathon

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I was nervous heading into Sunday’s Missoula Marathon with my assignment of pacing the first half of the 3:10 group. I don’t doubt my ability to hit 13.1 in 1:35, but it’s not easy work and I put a lot of pressure on myself when it comes to pacing for other runners. I found out a little more than seven hours before the start of the race that my assignment was switched to pacing the 3:50 group for the entire race. Believe it or not, that made me even more nervous!

A 3:50 marathon is an 8:46 pace, definitely not too fast for me to do. However, I was concerned that it was actually too slow. I run my recovery runs quicker than that, so when I’m fresh, which I was, it would be very easy for me to accidentally bump the pace 30 seconds faster and not even realize it. I was concerned that I would wear out my group if I didn’t pay very close attention to my pace.

When I pace, which I had done three times prior to Missoula, I keep an eye on the tangents I’m running an try to keep my pace locked on to what I’ll need based on what how far I think my Garmin will end up reading. I can tell how I’m doing as I go along. If I though I was going to run 26.3 with the tangents, I needed to run 8:44s. For 26.4, 8:42s. 26.5, 8:40s.

I wanted to start off taking it slightly easy early and run the first half about a minute fast, because there was a decent hill early in the second half that would take back time. Negative splits are one thing, but you also need to run the course correctly.

I started off well, running a pair of 8:48s to open, but right away, I could tell the mile markers were off and I was concerned that I was running bad tangents. There was a lot more traffic than I’m normally used to. I stepped it up a tiny bit, because one thing I definitely didn’t want to do was get my group there late. I took several miles to drop the average pace from 8:46 to 8:39, which is where I thought I needed to be.

Then, all of a sudden, the mile markers were right on track and I realized I was a bit fast. I hit the half in 1:53:57 on my Garmin when 1:55:00 is exactly half of 3:50, so that actually worked out perfectly. I gave some time back up the hill and locked into a groove the rest of the way.

I thought I was maybe 30 seconds fast for the race with about 9 to go, so I tried to slow down about 3 seconds a mile to let people reel me in. I tried my best to motivate those who needed motivating and I kept on moving to the finish.

At mile marker 24, I was only four seconds fast for the race, which I was happy about. I came up on a woman who had a friend pacing her. She really wanted that sub-3:50, but she was falling apart. They kept looking back at me as I approached and I felt bad, because I was the bad guy and I couldn’t slow down. But I tried to motivate her. She said she’d been training for six months for the race, and I told her to give me just one mile and she’d have it made. I didn’t tell her what I was going to tell her at 25, but I wanted to keep her moving.

I pushed a tiny bit that mile and she stayed with me and we were seven seconds fast for the race at 25. At that point, I told her that all she had was one lousy mile to go, and that she couldn’t let 25 awesome miles go down the drain with one mile. She was really pushing herself and didn’t have a lot left. I pushed a little bit that mile, dropping the pace to about 8:30 to build her a cushion as we chipped away at that final 1.2.

She fell about a half-step behind me, but I told her to just stay on my shoulder and run me down with .3 to go — she had the luxury of kicking. I can’t do that as a pacer. And that’s exactly what she did. She pulled ahead and got it done, finishing about 20 seconds ahead of me. She was exhausted and needed assistance, but she was fine and she got her time. It was a pretty cool experience.

There was another woman who ran the race on a whim and I kept her going with the “don’t let 24 good miles go to waste” line, and she took off at 24 and finished in 3:48, a 10-minute PR.

I got a lot of thank yous from my group afterwards. That’s probably the most rewarding part. It’s fun to really push in a race, but it’s fun to help others, too. So the run was a lot of fun.

Oh, and the course … the course is absolutely beautiful. You run a point-to-point course from Frenchtown, Montana to Missoula, Montana. There’s a lot of farms, trees, a river and eventually you end up right in the heart of town. It ranks way up there for scenic courses I’ve run this year. I really liked Catalina, Charlottesville (Va.) and Portland/Suavie Island (Oreg.), and I think this one is right up there with those.

Aside from the fact that I went to the wrong airport in Spokane and missed my flight, getting me stuck away from home an extra night, it was a great day.

33 down, 27 to go!


I gave those balloons to a little kid who asked me for them. But I made his dad take a picture of me first.

Weekend Preview: Missoula Marathon

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I normally post my weekend previews on Thursday, but I didn’t get done with everything I was doing until close to midnight on Wednesday, so there was no time to write anything. Better late than never, right? I’ve got my weekend preview, contest information plus my take on LeBron James (as if my opinion on this matters).

Just in case this your first time here, I’m a father of there and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. I’m trying to make a difference, to make a purpose out of what he goes through and have him make an impact on the world. So, I’m running 60 marathons to try to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train 4 Autism.

So far, I’m through 32 of the marathons. It’s a little tough physically, but very tough mentally. There’s a lot of work and a lot of struggling. Sometimes, I’m high as a kite and totally encouraged. Sometimes, I feel like I’m banging my head into a wall for no good reason.

But there’s no quit in me with this. I’ll keep on keeping on, following the path I’ve been led down, keeping my faith that everything will be okay.

Chase Contest: Down To The Wire!
We’re in the middle of this Chase Community Giving contest. Voting has been going on for close to a month and it ends on MONDAY! We’re in the top 200 right now, but voting is tight and we’ve been bouncing between the 150s and 200 all week.

I know you’re probably tired of me plugging it, but if we stay in the top 200, we’ll win $20,000, which would be HUGE! So, you’re here, and I’m begging. Three quick things that will take zero dollars and about one minute from you.

1. Think of three friends you can tell about this and CLICK HERE to enter their first name and e-mail address to send them an automated email. Easy stuff and we’re NOT storing any data.

2. Vote in the contest! If you’ve already voted, you can’t vote again. If you haven’t, this is critical and it’s a simple, one-time thing!

3. Share this through your social media outlets with these simple links: Facebook | Twitter

That’s it! Easy, right? That will make a difference. I know how many visitors we get here — if you each do step #1 once, we’re probably going to win this. If y’all do it twice and submit send to six people, I’d be pretty shocked if we don’t.

T-Shirts And Stuff
We just got a new shipment in, so we’re going to get stuff in the mail for a bunch of you that we owe. I’m so sorry that we’ve been slow on this.

Weekend Preview
I normally have a contest every week where you guys guess my time in the form of a small donation essentially equal to my time. This weekend, though, I want the focus to be on the Chase Contest.

That being said, I’m running the Missoula Marathon on Sunday. I’m going to be pacing the 3:10 group for the first half, then running my own race the rest of the way. The goal is going to be to hit 13.1 at about 1:34:30 and then run my own race from there. There’s a hill in the second half and my legs have been fairly sore this week. So, I’m guessing I’ll go 3:14 or so. I really want to get a BQ. I’ve only gotten one since Fargo on May 22, and that annoys me.

I don’t know what else to say about the race, other than I’m looking forward to seeing Montana. I just need to book a motel room, get a rental car and check my flight schedule. Details …

My Expert Insight Into The LeBron James Saga
I don’t know the first thing about basketball, and I’m really not a big fan of the NBA, but I really wanted to see him stay in Cleveland. Like just about everybody else in this country, I think the whole “The Decision” show was such a ridiculous ego thing. I don’t know who outside of Miami can possibly cheer for the guy after he went on TV and stabbed Cleveland in the back like that. Just my opinion.

Last night, I went to cleveland.com, the online home of Cleveland’s newspaper, to see the local take on everything. The lead story was an article about bedbugs. I have no idea why it was listed as the top story, but if they made an editorial decision to place bedbugs above James out of spite … well, that’s just awesome in my book.

And That’s It For Today
Tiff was going to write some things about what Jack likes to do, but she’s going to be a guest blogger on Monday so we’ll save it for then. Plus, as I write this, she’s relaxing and laughing at a TV show and I’d rather let her stay relaxed. Poor thing needs a break!

Please, please help us out in this Chase contest. It WILL make a difference. You’ll see when the votes are final that whether or not week make it, we’re only going to be a few votes away from spot #200! I’ll be back with a race report on Sunday. Have a great weekend!

Quick Announcement For Thursday

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OK, so I don’t really have the most exciting blog I’ve ever written for today, but I do have something quick I need to get across to y’all.

I know, it’s the Chase Community Giving contest I’ve been talking about a lot in the past week or so. It’s coming down to the wire (it ends Monday night), and the top 200 vote-getting charities in this contest will receive $20,000. We’ve bounced around between #155 and #200 this week, so voting is tight and the standings are volatile. We’re not the only group trying to get out the vote — that’s for sure! It’s an easy contest — you can only vote once, so it’s not one of those things where you have to vote every day from every browser on every one of your computers.

Anyways, I created something that I think is a pretty easy tool for you to use. It’s going to take you maybe a minute and it’s really going to help. Here’s what you do:

1. Think of three friends who would vote for us and GO TO THIS PAGE and enter their e-mail address in the form and they’ll receive an automated email asking them to vote.

2. If you haven’t voted, VOTE!. If you’ve already voted, skip this step. You can’t vote twice!

3. Share on Facebook and Twitter.

And that’s it. Those three steps will make a huge difference. For bonus points, do step #1 twice and that should take care of really igniting a fire that will keep us in the top 200!

Sorry to keep bugging about this, but it’s such a big opportunity and we’re so close … I really can’t let this slip away!

I’ll be back here tomorrow with my standard weekend preview blog. Have a great rest of your Thursday!

10 Random Things For Wednesday

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I love holidays. I’ve only put in eight hours at the office so far this week and it’s already Wednesday! Wait … I’ve only put in eight hours at the office so far this week and I have to start carb loading again tomorrow. Hmmm, that’s no bargain. Oh well, my weekend recap was yesterday, which means today is time for 10 random things.

Just in case this is your first time here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic and I’m trying to make a difference in the autism world. I’m trying to run 60 marathons this year to raise money for a charity I’m a part of called Train 4 Autism. So far, I’m through 32 of the 60 and I’m pushing every day to raise money and bring people into the organization.

1. OK, there’s a recurring theme between now and next Monday. I NEED you to help me with this Chase Community Giving contest. 200 small charities will each win $20,000, and for Operation Jack/Train 4 Autism, that would be HUGE.

We’re so close to winning, but we’re also pretty close to not winning. This contest runs through next Monday and it seems like every charity out there is ratcheting their efforts. For $20,000, I have to do the same. So please vote (if you haven’t already), share it on Facebook and share it on Twitter!

If you have any creative ideas, please let me know! By no means do I have a monopoly on creative ways to market things through social media. Heck, I barely have a clue! Please, give me some ideas if you can! I’m begging!

2. Last weekend, I received a check for $20 as an age group award from the Fargo Marathon. Does this make me a professional athlete?


If this makes me a professional athlete, I’m probably the first pro athlete in history to donate 100% of my lifetime earnings to charity.

3. I spent four weeks on a civil jury trial in 2001. It was a boring trial. Very boring. How boring? One of my fellow jurors had diabetes and intentionally overloaded on sugar at lunch one day so that she’d have to go to the hospital and get dismissed from the jury. Her strategy worked.

4. Tomorrow I’m going to post about things Jack likes to do. I promised a follower I’d do that, so I will. Plus, I might be able to talk Tiff into helping me out with it a little bit, which will save me some time tonight. Speaking of Tiff, she’s going to guest blog here next Monday. She asked me about that last night and that’s totally fine with me — saves me from cranking something out on Sunday night!

5. I wasn’t a very good student in high school (lazy!) and almost failed accounting, which would have kept me from graduating. My dad, a CPA, wasn’t very impressed. I also almost failed art my last semester due to not turning in enough projects, but after arguing about a D vs. an F, my teacher decided to pass me because she realized an F would have landed me in her summer school class. She hated me.

6. About five or six years ago, I went to a Dave Matthews concert with a good friend of mine and we had tickets in the eighth row. While we were walking in, I told him those were the best concert tickets I’d had since I was four seats from the front at a Lionel Richie concert in 1997. He told me to not say that out loud again while we were at the show that night.

7. Only 27 more days until my grandparents move into an assisted living facility that’s less than 10 minutes from my work and less than 20 minutes from my house. I can’t wait to be able to go visit them more, although I’m going to cry like a baby when they move out of their house. They’ve been in it for more than 42 years.

8. On Saturday when I travel to Montana, I’m flying into Spokane. So, I want to run a mile in California before I leave, then a mile in Washington when I get there, then a mile in Idaho and eventually a mile in Montana. That would give me at least a mile in four different states on the same day. I’m an idiot like that.

9. The ice cream steak is up to 157 if you’re keeping track. If you are keeping track, I have one word … why?

10. Just a reminder about the Chase contest. Sorry — I can’t help it!

Have a great Wednesday everybody! I’ll see you back here tomorrow. Did I remind you to vote?