Run For A Cause: Join Guitarist Thad Beaty in Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathons in Denver, Vegas

Unfortunately, cancer touches us all in some way or another. It’s impacted Thad Beaty’s life enough to compel him to do something about it.

The guitarist for the Grammy-winning country band Sugarland has been on a personal crusade of sorts to raise money and awareness for breast cancer research while celebrating his own return to fitness. Motivated by the successful battles with cancer his mother and mother-and-law have waged and the anguish over the death of a former colleague, Beaty is running the Denver Rock ’n’ Roll 1/2 Marathon on Oct. 18 to raise money for the Edith Sanford Breast Cancer Foundation. He’s going to do it by hopping on stage and playing a song with each of the dozen or so bands along the route.

Beaty will be joined by more than 40 runners running in support of TeamEdith—including me. Although I admit I can’t play a lick of guitar, cancer has impact my life, too—cancer took my mom’s life all too soon in 1997—which is why I’ll also be raising money for TeamEdith. You can join us too, but you have to sign up by Oct. 11 at 11:59 p.m. to enter the race. (Sign up to run with TeamEdith at this link and get $15 off your registration fee.) The fundraising minimum is only $50 and the money goes directly to breast cancer research.

Beaty can’t guarantee you a new PR, but he will make sure you’ll have a rockin’ good time.

“We’ll run the race. I’ll hop on stage with each of the bands, play a song, and keep running again,” Beaty said. “We won’t run very fast, but it will be a lot of fun and it will be for a good cause.”

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Although he played baseball and ran cross country in high school and college, Beaty admits the challenges and fatigue of being a touring musician took his toll on him. By the time he was in his early 30s, he wasn’t exercising much at all, his eating habits were atrocious and he was carrying 230 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame. Despite achieving a lot of success and touring the world with a wide range of artists such as Beyonce, Rihanna and Lady Gaga, he found himself in a vicious unhealthy cycle.

What ultimately served as his wake-up call and shook up his life, was a phone call from his mother in 2009 telling him she had colon cancer. “That blew me away,” he says. “And immediately I wanted to help and do something to make a change.”

He knew he had to start by taking control of his own health. He and his wife, Annie Clements, Sugarland’s bass player, started running and working out on a regular basis. That not only immediately made him healthier and happier, it also led to half marathons, marathons and triathlons.

In the interim, Beaty was faced with more challenges. In August of 2011, Beaty and his Sugarland band mates were under the stage at the Indiana State Fair, about to go onstage, when a giant storm swept through and caused the stage to collapse, killing seven people and injuring dozens more. Then Sugarland’s guitar technician, Kevin Quigley, was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma and passed away in early 2012.

All the while, Beaty was trying to find resolve in his own health and fitness and he and his wife were raising awareness and money for cancer research. He has two sub-12-hour Ironman finishes to his credit and ran the 2013 New York City Marathon in 4:33 (two weeks after one of his Ironman races.)

Now a svelte 170 pounds, Beaty follows a plant-based diet and hasn’t had any meat or dairy in about six years.

“I came to the realization that the way that I ate and my approach to food might has well have been meth for me. It was that powerful over me,” Beaty says. “It had to understand it was an addiction and have to still treat it that way. Now I’m super careful about sugar, but I have to treat it like I’m an alcoholic who can’t have alcohol. Some people have ‘cheat day’ on Sunday, but I can’t do that. A meth addict doesn’t get to have a day off.”

Beaty is quick to point out that he’s not trying to make a name for himself as an athlete, but instead trying to inspire others to live a healthy and active lifestyle. He knows that endurance sports have a way of transcending the mere act of exercising or competing and can make huge impacts in other aspects of one’s life.

“Accomplishing things like this, endurance events, running marathons, can change the trajectory of your life,” Beaty says.”This is a celebration, and that’s what I want people to know. You can achieve your PR, you can have your journey and change the trajectory of your life and somebody else’s too. It’s such an awesome thing to affect change. It’s super cool. Once you go through it, and you feel someone else’s struggle. It’s stirring.”

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What Beaty likes best about Team Edith is that 100 percent of the money raised goes straight to affected patients and research. The Edith Sanford Breast Foundation studies breast cancer on a genetic level, developing specialized treatments for each patient with a goal of putting an end to breast cancer altogether.

“I don’t know anything else like it that is that powerful and that direct,” Beaty says. “We have more control over something we assume we were powerless over. So the message of the team is two-fold: let’s be proactive and not reactive. Let’s take care of our health and do the things that we can do, and by doing that you can have positive effects on your mind, body and spirit. You’re able to take care of your health, you’re able to be a positive influence and see the transformation that you’re making and simultaneously you’re able to help raise funds that go directly to affecting someone who is struggling with this.

“It was a tool for me, a vehicle for me to understand how important being present in the moment is,” he adds. “The reward that I learned after that was that it’s not just about being in that moment or crossing the finish line. The finish line is just kind of a pass-through to what now is the next phase of your life, which is one where you accomplished something that you didn’t think you could accomplish. For me, I learned how to have an awareness of the moment, but simultaneously you have this fate of what you’re able to accomplish.”

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