Last night I had re-auditions for the women’s choral group, mainly so that the conductor can figure out any new placements for the coming year if necessary. So I turned my phone on vibrate during the sessions and I forgot to turn it back onto ring until much later in the evening, as I was getting ready for bed and started hearing this weird noise and finally realized that it was my phone, telling me that I had a message.

The message was from my older sister, and she started it by saying ‘Here you go, live in concert’. Then there was some garbled noise for a little bit, until eventually I finally heard what she was trying to share with me – Pat Benetar, playing “We Belong”, live in concert. And because my older sister remembered that that was one of my very favorite songs back when we were teenagers in the 80’s, she called me on her cell phone, in the middle of a huge concert, just so I could hear it.

My older sister turned 40 this year, back in February. My whole family has been fighting a (sometimes losing) battle with weight for a very long time, but she decided that she didn’t want to be overweight any longer. So she set herself a goal of losing 40 pounds by her birthday, and she made it. She also decided she wanted to do another big walk (like the Avon Breast Cancer walk she and our sister and I did two years ago) so she got together with some friends and they all signed up to do Team in Training for a marathon in San Diego this weekend. Shortly after they all signed up, unfortunately, her friends backed out, due to life getting in the way, but my sister, despite facing doing it alone, stayed in. She managed to raise more than what she needed for the Team in Training donations, and she got herself a treadmill and somehow, in between teaching and ferrying two small boys to various sports practices every single night of the week, and also even coaching some of those teams, and fighting through bout after bout of strep throat until the doctors finally decided that her tonsils should come out, so also having to go through surgery, she kept on training for this walk, all by herself. And this weekend, she got on a plane and she flew down to San Diego, all by herself, and she did the walk, as much as she could in the time alloted, on her own.

Because this was an actual race and not just a walk, there was a set amount of time to finish it, and so she didn’t get a chance to do the whole marathon, when I talked to her today she was feeling kind of down about that. But the rest of us are all pretty amazed and proud of her. Honestly, if this had been me, I would have likely pulled out when the rest of my group did – I am very bad at situations where I don’t know anyone, and the thought of participating in a big huge event all by myself is sort of horrifying to me. But she stuck to it, despite a lot of uphill battles with finding time to train, and dealing with being sick and surgery and everything else in her life.

Both my sisters are truly awesome people and I am proud of both of them for everything that they’ve done with themselves so far. But I am especially proud of my older sister for everything she has accomplished in this past year. Losing all that weight and doing all that training means that she looks seriously good for being an old lady of 40 years (I can make this sort of ‘old’ comment only because she lives too far away to smack me when she reads this, and also because I am only a year behind – heh) and what she did to raise money for this walk, and train for it, and then do it, is a huge achievement.