Marathon Monday is one of my favorite days in Boston! I love getting out on Comm Ave to cheer for the runners. In particular, I love cheering for good friend Greg Gonzales, who runs for the children his mother, Mary Jo, cares for as a pediatric oncology nurse practitioner at Mass General. Because childhood cancer has touched the edges of my life at various moments, I've always wished I could join the Mass General Marathon Team. Unfortunately, a knee injury ended running for me several years back. But, when the young nephew of some good friends sadly died of neuroblastoma, an aggressive and hard-to-treat cancer, in December, I started thinking about swimming a marathon to raise money for pediatric cancer research. Swimming a marathon will take a lot longer than running one - I estimate that it will take me a little over 26 hours - and will involve my swimming 45,500 lengths of a 25 yd pool, so my goal is to start now and finish on Marathon Monday. I'd like to raise $2000 , as this amount will fund one week of research. I've chosen to raise money with Alex's Lemonade Stand because the organization has a rigorous vetting process for grant applications, and because it recently awarded grants for neuroblastoma research.