photo 10 A father and son, Brian and Thayne Bolin started the Race for Tara. I was in the hospital and I think it was maybe a month or so after my crash and I got a call from Brian and Thayne wanting to know if they could start this event to help raise some money for me. I didn’t know them but they just sounded like the sweetest guys. They knew Mike Stewart who was the Giant rep up in Northern California and they also knew Renee Anderson who owned the land that we raced on for the first couple years. When the race got started I think everyone thought it would just be that one year that we’d do it and that would be it, but after that first year people were asking to have the event again so we did! After the second year Renee was having some issues with her land and if we were going to have the event again it was going to have to be somewhere else. A little while after that I got a call from Brian asking me what I would think if we had the event up at Northstar in Tahoe? I nearly fell out of my chair I was so excited!! I’d been to Northstar and it’s just gorgeous! Plus they had already done some major renovations in the village and added an ice skating rink, fire pits, cabanas, etc. and it looked amazing. So from the third year until just this last year which was our 7th year of having the event, it was up at Northstar. The event was about raising money to help me pay for all my medical bills. I had insurance but not everything was covered. For instance my insurance covered only $2,000 of medical equipment per year and that was unfortunately gone as soon as I bought my wheelchair, which cost $5,000. At the time I was also going to Project Walk for physiotherapy and since they don’t take insurance it was costing me between $3,200-$3,500 a month so without the money raised from the TLC there is no way I would have been able to go to physiotherapy for those 2 years. I am so thankful for that. The monies raised for the first couple years was donated to the Tara Llanes Road to Recovery.