First annual fun run a success: “She inspired so many”

By Brandi Makuski

More than 100 people turned out for the 2019 Wild Wing Fun Run on Saturday.

An impressive turnout for the first-time event, organizers said, which raised about $4,000 for the National Brain Tumor Society.

“I was very surprised to see this many people because this is the first one,” said Sue Thompson-McFarland, who helped organize the event. “Judy would be blown away.”

The 5K fun run/walk was held in honor of Stevens Point resident Judith A. Nantell, who died from brain cancer in 2018. The fun run started and ended at Partner’s Pub, 2600 Stanley St., which offered the space for free and drink specials inside to help support the cause.

Thompson-McFarland, along with Sue Crawford, another volunteer at the June 22 event, helped organize donations of food, and gift baskets to raffle off to the highest bidder.

Both women were close friends with Nantell, traveling with her to many of the races Nantell ran in the last years of her life.

“She wanted to do 50 states,” Thompson-McFarland said. “She made it to somewhere between 32 and 34 states.”

In early June, Thompson-McFarland, Crawford, and others celebrated a memorial bench, located on the northwest side of Lake Joanis in Schmeeckle Reserve, paid for through donations and installed in Nantell’s honor.

“It’s about a tenth of a mile in from Michigan [Avenue],” Crawford said. “It overlooks the water, it’s just beautiful.”

Thompson-McFarland and Crawford were just two of many people who made the run possible, according to event founder Ben Nantell, Judy’s son.

Ben Nantell, 29, said he was “blown away” with the outpouring of support from the community, and said he attributed the high turnout to “the kind of person my mom was. She inspired so many.”

One of the most inspiring things he’d ever seen, Ben Nantell said, was his mother running the New York Marathon just a few months after having brain surgery.

“It was her first-ever marathon, something she said she would never do,” Ben Nantell said. “But she finished, and she continued to run races for the two years she battled, up until the last few months. And that was inspiration enough, everyone started to catch on—if this lady’s fighting a brain tumor and she can run, I think that’s enough motivation for anybody.”

Ben Nantell has spent the past four months traveling in South America, exploring the world, soul-searching, and healing—something he said his mom wished for him before she died.

“This is the first event of any kind I’ve ever planned, and there’s a lot of anxiety involved but a lot of people were like, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ I’m just sincerely grateful for all the support,” he said.

Ben Nantell plans to hold the event every year on the approximate anniversary of his mother’s passing, the third weekend of June. Next year, he hopes for at least 200 participants.

Most of all, he hopes his mother’s legacy of inspiration lives on.

“She raised three boys; she didn’t have much of a life until I got older,” he said. “She was very active in the community, she liked to golf, bike, run, she always tried to push her friends to try new things.”