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And each morning the medal hanging on the wall reminds her of the best and worst days of her 17-year-old life.
The worst came in August 2006 when her mom rushed into her room at 5 a.m. and told her they needed to hurry to the hospital to say goodbye to her father, Francis Barth.
She’d known for almost a year that her father had lung cancer and his perpetual coughing was a constant reminder.
But she was 12 and it wasn’t until that morning, sitting in the front seat of the family car, that she realized the full gravity of the situation. Her father was going to die.
Barth bowed her head and, through her tears, said a prayer.
Francis Barth was 61 when he died of lung cancer. He smoked for many years and battled to stop up until his death.
It was Katie who motivated him to try to stop when she was just 2. Francis was holding his little girl while smoking when she reached up and pulled the cigarette out of his mouth.
“My mom says that he vowed right then that he would never smoke again,” Barth said.
He “pretty much stopped,” Barth said, but the family still occasionally found stashes of cigarettes in the garden and around the house.
“It’s just so hard to quit,” Barth said.
Shortly after Francis died, the family had to move out of their Puyallup home and move in with Barth’s grandmother, Addie Schmalenberg.
“It was a very hard time,” said Barth, who will attend Pierce College full time as a high school senior this fall.
Barth relied on her faith and a budding passion for running to get her through those stressful times.
It was during one of these runs as a 15-year-old when she thought about her dad and wondered if there was a running event where she could honor him. She found the National Lung Cancer Partnership’s Free to Breathe race and entered the 2009 run.
Little did she know that she would soon be counting the event as the best day of her life.
Barth wasn’t sure what to expect from the event. She’d never run a 5-kilometer race. She simply wanted to honor her father by raising some money for lung cancer research and by helping raise awareness for the disease.
When she crossed the finish line she realized she’d done all that and more. She finished 15th overall, third among the women and first in her age group.
“When they gave me the medal, I was shocked,” Barth said. “I loved it (the event) so much I’m going to continue to do it every year.”
This year’s race is Saturday and Barth will be there once again running in honor of her father.
According to the National Lung Cancer Partnership, about 219,000 Americans and 4,540 Washingtonians are diagnosed with lung cancer each year. About 50 percent of those people have stopped smoking and 15 percent never smoked. About 160,000 people die each year from the disease.
Barth knows her annual participation in the Free to Breathe run is just a small part in the fight to reduce those numbers, but she takes great pleasure in the fact that she is fighting.
“I want to do something in honor and in memory of my dad,” she said. “I think it would make him proud.”
Craig Hill’s fitness column runs Sundays. Submit questions and comments via craig.hill@thenewstribune.com, facebook.com/adventureguys or twitter.com/adventureguys.
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