Nearly a decade old, the Hour of Power is getting better with age.
A local occurrence of the annual swimming fundraiser that generates money for cancer research at the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital will take place at New Trier’s pool on Saturday. It started Nov. 7, 2006, at Carleton College (Minnesota) as a way to honor Ted Mullin, a New Trier graduate who was 22 years old when he died a month earlier from sarcoma, a rare form of cancer.
“It’s one of my favorite parts of the year,” said Mac Guy, the New Trier girls swimming coach and a former high school teammate of Mullin’s. “It’s a silver lining to something that was so tragic.”
Each team does it differently, but at its core, the Hour of Power is an hour-long swimming workout. Mullin was a distance swimmer and team captain at both New Trier and Carleton. Long, strenuous swims were one of Mullin’s specialties, according to former teammates.
The New Trier Swim Club, which sponsors the local event, will have two sessions Saturday, the first from 8-10 a.m. and the second from 9:15-11:15 a.m. Each Hour of Power is preceded by a warm-up period. The event is open to swimmers of all ages and participants are not required to raise money. Donations are accepted at the event, but it is not a pledge-style fundraiser.
A 2002 graduate of New Trier, Mullin swam varsity for three seasons for the Trevians and was an academic All-American and Illinois State Scholar.
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“He might not have been blessed with a great amount of talent, but he worked and worked and worked,” said Guy, a 2000 graduate. “He was a fantastic teammate and always eager to lift everybody else up. I know he was appreciated by his peers.”
Karin Brown was a swimmer and friend of Mullin’s at Carleton. She was there at the Hour of Power’s beginning.
“You always look for something positive to do any time something horrible happens,” said Brown, now associate head coach of the men’s and women’s swimming teams at M.I.T. “You want to do something productive. That was our way to unite people in Ted’s memory. There are so many great causes out there, but this one is special to us. It’s awesome to see how it’s blown up.”
Following his death, Carleton created the Hour of Power and the Mullin family started the Ted Mullin Fund. In 2006, 15 teams participated and raised $11,000. According to figures compiled by Carleton 167 teams — college, high school and club — and more than 8,100 athletes participated in the Hour of Power in 2013-14. The Hour of Power has raised more than $500,000 in support of sarcoma research at the University of Chicago.
“Before Ted, there was no pediatric research program there,” said Rick Mullin, Ted Mullin’s father. “They created one.”
In a recent report published by the university, money from the Ted Mullin Fund is aiding in a clinical treatment called Genomics of Risk Evaluation and Treatment in Children with Cancer. Simply put, the program is about designing personalized treatments for each patient.
“There has been a shift in the focus of the research from trying to find new drug therapies to tailor-making drug therapies for individual patients,” Rick Mullin said. “The Ted Mullin Fund is being used as seed money to do genetic testing and creating genetic profiles. They are putting together a library of all of this.
“I can’t say that one kid has been cured from our money. But what I am seeing is real specific work going on at University of Chicago. We are adding to the pot of knowledge.”
Like Guy, Brown recalled Ted Mullin as a model teammate and someone she admired in and out of the pool. She remembered the time when the Carleton team took a training trip to California and the weather was less than ideal for being outside.
“Even though it was cold and rainy, Ted is out there in the ocean,” she said. “He was so positive about everything, and he wanted everyone to have a great time.”
Ted Mullin first was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2004 during his sophomore year at Carleton. He was treated at the University of Chicago for the soft-tissue disease. The cancer went into remission until the end of junior year before it returned and spread to his lungs.
Brown, who graduated from Carleton in 2008, became an assistant coach at Amherst (Massachusetts) College, one of the original Hour of Power colleges, for five years. She recently completed her second season at M.I.T., which also participates in the program.
“I’ve been able to explain to the swimmers at M.I.T the spirit of it, to let them know who Ted was and how he impacted the people around him,” Brown said. “We talk about how it can bring us closer. There are times when life is hard, but it always can be worse. This is a way to gain perspective. It’s something everybody can connect with on some level. Everybody has battles.”
While the Mullins weren’t involved in the creation of the Hour of Power, Rick Mullin said the family is intimately involved these days. In the middle of the first and second sessions on Saturday at New Trier, Rick Mullin and his wife, Mary Henry, are scheduled to speak to the crowd.
Rick Mullin said he’s humbled by growth of the event.
“It’s been very inspiring and thrilling at the same time,” Rick Mullin said. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”
Twitter: @harnesspreps