Just like the Energizer bunny, Peter Kirk keeps going and going and going—13.1 miles at a time.
Four years after recovering from chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant to treat acute myeloid leukemia, the 54-year-old New York City executive has continued on his mission to run 1,000 half marathons over a 10-year-span in an effort to raise $1 million specifically for stem cell transplant research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
As of this week, the CEO of Sermo, the world’s most trusted social platform for physicians, has completed the half marathon distance 387 Courtesy Kite Hill PR, and he’s still going strong. He typically runs 13.1 miles three nights a week after work, and has averaged about 100 per year.
“The funny thing is, I still don’t consider myself a runner,” Kirk said. “I know it seems totally misplaced to come out of a mouth for someone who's running a hundred half marathons a year. But I’m really doing it as a challenge to do some form of good. And yes, there’s absolutely some runs I do enjoy when the weather's great, but it's not like I'm loving running most days.”
So why is he running? The answer is much bigger than himself. In short, he wants to inspire individuals to achieve big things. Specifically, he’s hoping to inspire others to join his quest of running to unlock $500,000 for medical research, and he’s making it very easy for people to get involved.
Kirk’s annual “Be Your Possible Run for Research” on June 8, which will mark the four-year anniversary of his recovery, is another reason to celebrate, and yes, lace up his favorite Nike Vaporfly 3 shoes, and go for another 13.1-mile run.
But he wants others—anyone who wants to show their support for medical research—to join the thousands of physicians and other healthcare professionals who are participating in the event worldwide. (To date, 7,500 healthcare professionals from 75 countries have pledged to run more than 40,000 miles.)
Perhaps the best part is that it doesn’t cost participants a thing to sign up. Sermo is organizing everything and "footing the bill," so to speak, covering what could be a $500,000 donation to numerous organizations funding medical research. Since the inaugural event in 2022, Run for Research has donated more than $850,000 to more than 50 organizations.
Runners can sign up and pledge any distance and run anywhere around the world. The only ask is that everyone shares a selfie on social media to share the Be Your Possible message. The Run for Research event is primarily a virtual event, but there will be in-person events in New York City, London, Barcelona, and Puebla, Mexico.
Living to run
In the fall of 2020, Kirk appeared to be suffering from symptoms of either food poisoning or a bad virus. After feeling sick and throwing up for four days, he decided to contact his hematologist. When he saw Kirk’s blood work, his doctor called an ambulance to get him to the emergency room.
Blood tests revealed he had developed acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer his doctor was concerned about after earlier tests that led to a neutropenia diagnosis. Within 48 hours of being in the ER, Kirk’s condition rapidly deteriorated; he was transferred to the intensive care unit and intubated and induced into a coma. On top of the leukemia diagnosis, doctors quickly realized Kirk had double-lung pneumonia and could no longer breath on his own.
Doctors warned his wife, Torun Kirk, that he may not survive another 24 hours. A priest was sent to the room.
Once intubated, hematologists suggested that Kirk needed to start chemotherapy immediately for survival, even if it made the drugs for his lungs less effective. Torun made the decision for her husband to begin chemotherapy.
“At that point, it wasn’t really the cancer killing me, it was like the breathing; there was no oxygen coming through my lungs,” Kirk recalled. “The doctor just said, ‘nothing’s working, so we just gave him everything.’ And then 40 hours later, something started working and my oxygen number started improving.”
After 16 days in the ICU, doctors transferred Kirk to a regular room where he would stay for another two weeks. At five months of chemotherapy, Kirk found out he was in cancer remission. But he still received some bad news: Doctors told Kirk that there was a high likelihood that the leukemia would return someday because of his neutropenia, and if and when it did, the therapies that worked this time, wouldn’t necessarily work so well a second time.
Fortunately, he qualified for and eventually received an 850 million stem cell transplant from a donor that helped cure his leukemia and his neutropenia for good. But that procedure required high doses of chemotherapy and isolation prior to the operation to kill all the damaged blood cells.
“When you get a stem cell transplant, you spend a month in the hospital, and they almost kill you,” he said. “Basically, they have to give you so much chemo to kill your stem cells in your bone marrow to make room for the donor’s stem cells. Then you're getting blood transfusions every day, And when you come out there after a month, they tell you, ‘Oh, it went really well,’ but you're a shadow of yourself.”
Running for a cause
Kirk is a shining example that one of the best aspects of the modern running boom is that anyone can run for any reason or any cause they choose. It doesn’t even have to be about running at all.
He still finds it peculiar that he gets such affirmation out of running, especially because his fitness was so limited that he couldn’t run more than a city block two months after completing his treatments. He was so weak, in fact, that he couldn’t open a bottle of Gatorade on his own. But that’s about the time he decided to sign up for the 2021 New York City Marathon.
“I signed up and I told my wife that night, and she thought I was crazy,” Kirk said. “I told the doctor the next day at (Memorial Sloan Kettering), and they said, ‘Do you mean the one next year?’ And I said, ‘No, I mean, the one in 12 weeks.’”
The doctors tried to discourage him, but Kirk wasn’t having it. Even though it took weeks before he could complete a full mile and nearly two months until he could run 8 miles, he was relentless in his pursuit and persevered.
“I had this idea that if I could do a marathon, it would not just be that I beat cancer, but I would no longer be defined by cancer,” he said. “I didn’t want to be defined by a label. For some reason, I didn't even want to be defined as a cancer survivor. I want to be Peter Kirk. I want to be me. If I could do that, no one could tell me who I was.”
Kirk completed that 26.2-mile journey through New York City’s five boroughs as a member of Fred’s Team while raising money for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s charity. He said finishing the marathon was a “crazy emotional” experience for him, but he realized, in part from the responses to his LinkedIn posts about his journey, that he was also engaging others along the way.
“I sort of realized I'm actually inspiring people, which was not my intent,” he said. “That was not part of the goal. My goal was to take the shackles of being a patient off of me.”
Yet, a few days after finishing that marathon, Kirk said he felt a bit of an internal void and anxiousness, so he went out for what he thought would be a short run. He wound up patching together about 13 miles on a route that included looping around Battery Park along the southern end of Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge and back before winding his way back home. He did it again a few days later.
Not long after that, he came up with the concept to run 1,000 half marathons over 10 years to help raise money for medical research through the Be Your Possible charity organization. If he stays on pace, he’ll complete that audacious goal by June 9, 2031.
As much as he humbly still doesn’t consider himself a runner, he knows that running has given him a lot. He loves the quiet moments of clarity during his two-hour runs, what he calls “concentrated, slow thinking” where he is able to calmly think about work or family. Although he often runs alone, he also enjoys the community of running, and is appreciative of the many New York Road Runners (NYRR) who have joined him on his runs.
Kirk generously supported the “Final Finishers” short film that will debut at Tribeca Film Festival on June 12 under the umbrella of NYRR’s newly launched in-house studio, East 89th St Productions.
He is also the subject of a three-part docuseries called “A Life Worth Running” and new five-part NYRR audio documentary called “850 Million Reasons to Run,” the final part of which was released on June 6.
Health & Injuries?
“I'm actually doing it to prove my possible,” he said. “And I'm hoping to inspire people in big and small ways. I'm actually not trying to inspire them specifically towards running, just to do something more than they currently are. Make something that might seem like a big thing, a little thing, and then start by taking step one.”
