The Moss Family: Move Over MSA

Almost 2 years ago my dad was diagnosed with MSA, Multiple System Atrophy. It is a neurological disorder similar to ALS. It is a very rare disease and so we as a family wanted to help raise awareness about the disease and help raise funds to support research. The diagnosis really hit our family hard, as you can imagine, and we wanted to do something, anything. Knowing that there really wasn't anything that we could do specifically for my dad, since there is no cure for the disease, we wanted to do something that could possibly help families that might have to deal with this disease in the future. My Dad has always been very active and competitive. When we were growing up he was always competing in triathlons or runs of some sort. We thought that maybe doing a fun run would be a good way to raise money and honor my dad's love for running.

We didn't start even thinking about this until the middle of the summer. In July we got a non-profit association organized, Move Over MSA. Once that was done at the beginning of August, we were finally able to start planning the race, which was held on October 17th. This was the first time for any of us to plan something like this, so we didn't have super high expectations for this first year. A lot of what we did was hit or miss and we definitely learned a lot that we will do differently next year. Luckily there a lot of people that love my Mom and Dad and so we had a lot of support. We were able to find sponsors pretty quickly and had a lot of friends a family volunteer to help.

We decided to do a 5k, kids 1 mile, and a 1 mile obstacle course. Tucker's varsity football team wanted to do some service so we had them help with the obstacle course. There was also a kid in my parents ward who helped organize the obstacle course as his Eagle Scout project. The Centennial football team invited other high school football teams from around the valley to compete against them in the obstacle course, the Patriot Challenge. There was a total of 5 football teams and they all seemed to have a great time and luckily the Patriots took home the sledge hammer. Originally we thought that we would have about 100-150 people sign up for all of the races, well to our surprise and excitement we had almost 400 people show up for the races. We ran out of bib numbers and shirts, but I guess that is a good problem to have. We held the races at Centennial High School and they all went really well. It was definitely a busy week leading up to the race, but everything really came together well. My sister Tiffany really did most of the organizing of it all and she did a really great job, that's why we named her the President of the association : ).

We just can't believe how much support our family was shown. There were people that traveled from out of state and others who couldn't run but donated to the cause. We were really just overwhelmed by all the love that we felt from everyone. It truly goes to show how amazing my parents are and how loved they are by everyone that meets them. We were able to raise enough money to donate $15,000 to the MSA Coalition, who will then use $1,000 for education and awareness and the other $14,000 will go toward research. We seriously thought that we would be sending them $3,000. We have already started working on next years run and hope that we get just as many or more people to come support the cause. It was such an amazing day and we can't wait to do it again next year.