By Anna Skinner
When her friend urged her to sign up for the 2010 Miami Beach half marathon in the fall of 2009, Chrissy Vasquez thought she would just watch from the sidelines. She began training, unable to walk a half mile without feeling pain, and thought about quitting.
She decided to stick with it and completed the 13.1 miles in March of 2010.
“The whole time during the race I hated it and thought it was awful,” the Fishers resident said. “I thought, ‘I am never doing this again,’ but I got to the finish line and thought, ‘I had to do another one.’”
Vasquez went on to do four more half marathons that year. The next year she moved on to complete four sprint triathlons, which includes a .25-mile swim, a 10-mile bike ride and a 5k run. She ended that season with an Olympic triathlon, a .93-mile swim, 25 mile-bike ride and 10k run. She also got involved in Back on My Feet – Indianapolis, a national nonprofit that combats homelessness through running, community support, and employment and housing resources.
“The organization resonated with me because my best friend was going through recovery for his addiction, and I had grown up my whole life doing service in soup kitchens and working with the homeless,” she said. “This newfound power of running really spoke to me about transforming your life.”
In 2012, she got involved with a triathlon club in town which prompted her to start running with the BOMF crew three mornings a week beginning at 5:45 a.m. She was asked to be a team leader.
“In Back on My Feet, we are all going through something. Some problems are more intense than others, but we all have something we are working through. I could use my experiences to help relate to what (the members) were going through,” she said.
In 2013, Vasquez decided to fund-race – fundraising for a race she would compete in – for an Ironman, a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run for a total of 140.6 miles. She raised $17,500 for BoMF for that race.
Around mile 19 of the run, Vasquez was dehydrated and didn’t make it to the marker before the cut-off time, causing staff to take her time chip and encouraged her to drop out of the race, as aid stations would be shutting down.
But she continued, and 30 of her family and friends walked the last two miles with her to the finish line. Ironman staff and other finishers heard she was still running and re-rolled out the red carpet for her finish. Approximately 100 strangers cheered for Vasquez as she finished the race.
Since then, she has become the executive director of the Indianapolis chapter for BoMF. Homeless individuals from the Hoosier Veteran Assistance Foundation and the Men’s Program at Wheeler Mission involved in BoMF are required to keep 90 percent attendance at the runs to receive encouragement and a hand-up from the organization.
“A lot of times our members have never known that kind of support. We work with them on basic life skills,” Vasquez said.
Basic life skills include mock interviews, financial literacy classes and other job-search skills. Sometimes BoMF-Indianapolis assists members with apartment deposits or other start-up costs.
On Sept. 16 and 17, Vasquez will join a team of 11 volunteers for BoMF-Indianapolis to run a 200-mile relay race from Cumberland, Md. to Washington, D.C. Overnight, the team members will switch off and run through woods and Civil War-era towns to fundraise for BoMF. The team’s goal is to raise $14,400, and Vasquez’s personal goal is to raise $3,000.
To donate, visit give.backonmyfeet.org/BoMFIndyRAGNAR.
For more, visit indianapolis.backonmyfeet.org/.
Relay team members
- Angie Smitherman
- Jim Patton
- Angela Dixon
- Bill Dyson
- Susannah Dyson
- Jim Rowe
- Maigen Rowe
- Ron Poe
- Alli Mohler
- Steve Kerr
- Kate Lifferth
- Chrissy Vasquez
Back on My Feet-Indianapolis By the Numbers
- Members served to date since 2011 – 556
- Employed – 183
- Housed – 178
- Enrolled in training or education – 121
- Ran their first race – 332
- Ran a half marathon – 65
- Ran a full marathon – 10
- Nationally since 2007 – 6,000 served, 4,000 employed
