SMILES FOR EVERY STRIDE

By NEILWIN JOSEPH L. BRAVO
This year, a Dabawenyo urologist ran the Chicago Marathon and at the same time helped raise funds for charity organization Smile Train to help give children around the world not only new smiles, but a second chance at life.
Dr. Mark Anthony Benignos, 46, is an endurance athlete. He regularly joins major triathlon events in the country and last year, completed his first international triathlon race in Langkawi, Malaysia.
Travelling around the world is part of Dr. Benignos’ schedule as he is a regular participant to several international medical conferences. In those trips, he made sure he does some running on the side. When the schedule is rather cooperative, he joins minor international races like the Orange County Marathon in California in 2014
However, Dr. Mark has set his sights on the bigger ones. To name a few, there’s the Boston Marathon, the Chicago Marathon, and the New York Marathon—three of the most prominent races in the world.
This year, he earned a spot to the Smile Train’s Team Empower.
Smile Train is an international children’s charity that provides free surgery to poor children suffering from cleft lip and cleft palate. Children born with cleft cannot eat or speak properly, aren’t allowed to attend school or hold a job and face very difficult lives of shame and isolation, pain and heartache. Some children are even abandoned or killed—all because of the way they look. Their clefts usually go untreated because they are too poor to afford the simple repair surgery that takes as little as 45 minutes and costs as little as 250 dollars or maybe as any as you can give. Yet with your help, we can save these children and give them the life changing surgery they both need and deserve.
Dr. Mark was eventually picked as one of the Team Empower members and the rest, as they say, is history.
On October 11, 2015, Dr. Mark officially became one of the over 20,000 runners of the prestigious footrace at the Windy City. He did not make the podium but he did achieve more than enough. First, he reset his personal best time in Chicago. Second, he helped children with cleft palates flash their smiles again to the world.
The 2015 Chicago Marathon continued to live up to its reputation as one of the most popular races in the world along several dimensions: a flat and fast course, more than a million cheering spectators, and thousands of top-notch volunteers. The entire city seemed to embrace the event again this year.
Here are some fast facts about the 2015 Marathon:
45,000 entrants are selected to run through a lottery, which had more than 70,000 applicants.
A total of 37,182 runners finished the race (20,144 men, 17,038 women)
Dickson Chumba won a slow men’s race in 2:09:25, while Florence Kiplagat won the women’s race in 2:23:33.
Dr. Mark crossed the finish line in 4 hours and 25 minutes. His wife Dr. Marilou Quezon-Benignos waited for him at the finish and gave him a big hug—perhaps the grandest prize for his achievement.
After Chicago, Dr. Mark is thinking of bigger things ahead. There’s the Boston Marathon and NY Marathons waiting for him, and just like that, he has not leveled up to the world-conqueror that he is right now.