LYNN — Despina Alves, Lynn native and owner of Boston Microneedling, has spent the past few months training for the Boston Marathon. But in addition to running miles and miles every week, she also raised more than $16,000 for IMPACT Melanoma, one of the charities through the Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.) Official Charity Program.
The B.A.A. Official Charity Program gives invitational entries to nonprofits for the marathon. The nonprofits then recruit runners to raise a certain amount of funds.
Alves said she applied to run with IMPACT Melanoma, an organization for the early detection and prevention of melanoma, because she works daily with people affected by the disease.
“I wanted to run for a charity that I connected to, and I went on the Boston Marathon website and I saw that IMPACT Melanoma was an official charity for the Boston Marathon,” Alves said.
When she applied she was unsure if she would actually be accepted.
“Then somebody got back to me and I did an interview, and I believe I was number 12 out of like 15 spots that they let in, and I had a fundraising goal of $15,000,” Alves said. “I was pretty nervous, like how was I going to raise that money?”
On top of training, being a mom, and working as a full-time business owner, she had to fit in a fundraiser to meet that $15,000 goal.
“Honestly, I’ve never been more touched and humbled by my client base. Everybody donated to the cause and I exceeded my goal,” Alves said. “The whole experience so far has been so humbling, to have so many people support this one goal that I’ve had, and it’s been really great.”
Running the Boston Marathon is always something that she aspired to do. It was “put on the backburner” when she had kids and started her business, she said. Then last year, she got back into running.
“It just felt right, I was like ‘Oh my god, my groove is back, I can run again,’” Alves said. “Then I was like, ‘I really want to run the Boston Marathon.’”
She did most of the training solo, which she said was really difficult. She googled how to train for a marathon and got started in the fall.
“The training in the beginning was easy because you just had to do 25 miles a week no matter how you divvied it up, you just kind of had to do it. And then leading into the end of January and into February and March was when I had to do the long runs,” Alves said.
Running by herself for hours at a time was hard, especially because she was alone.
“But I always throughout my runs would say to myself ‘People are believing in you, people donated to you, you’ve seen what melanoma has done to your clients,’ so that sort of was like my motivation to stay focused,” Alves said.
She would also try to picture herself going through the finish line, which made her “super emotional” and gave her the motivation to keep running.
For those thinking of running a marathon, she recommends joining a running team. She also said that those running for a charity should find one that has a cause they truly believe in.
“When you truly believe in the cause, and you’re able to sort of talk about it with conviction and you have this dedication to it, I think it gets your people who are donating just as excited,” Alves said. “I think that’s where my support came from, was just how excited I was to do this, that my clients got excited for me, and everyone just rallied and donated.”
As of the day of the marathon, she had raised $16,056.
