Former city man lacing up his shoes to help the Lung Association

By Dale Woodard on April 21, 2021.

Chris Sadleir continues to breathe life into a special initiative.
And the former Lethbridge resident who now calls Edmonton home is ready to literally walk the walk once again for a purpose that hits close to home for him.
For the second straight year, Sadleir is lacing up his shoes for the long haul in his Walk To Breathe campaign from Lethbridge to Edmonton in support of the Lung Association of AB & NWT.
The trek will start July 7 and finish in Edmonton July 23.
“It basically stemmed from a personal ordeal within my family,” said Sadleir. 
“My dad, seven years ago, was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, which is essentially a scarring of the lungs. There is no known cause for it and certainly no known cure, which led to the need for a life-saving double lung transplant. I didn’t even know a double lung transplant was a thing, but he needed that. So in July of 2016 he received that. The entire journey through that, just getting the diagnosis, was just mentally, physically and emotionally draining for him, but it was so much further reaching for the families and friends and everyone trying to be supportive and living through this and watching a human being struggle to breathe on a daily basis gets to you.”
In August of last year, Sadleir embarked on an 11- day, 330-kilometre trek from Calgary to Edmonton, in a bid to raise $22,000 to support people dealing with lung disease and increase awareness of its far-reaching effects.
That inaugural Walk to Breathe brought in more than $33,000 for the cause.
“Calgary to Edmonton last year was the main corridor I thought to do, but I didn’t want to concentrate on just those two cities,” said Sadleir. 
“We tried to reach out to as many people as possible. We had original plans to launch it bigger and better, but we had to scale it back when we decided to re-launch it last year. We were just trying to be compassionate for people who might be struggling financially and might not be able to donate. We went in there with cautious optimism on our goal.”
The original goal of $22,000 represented the average breaths a human takes per day, said Sadleir.
“Right around the halfway point last year when we were rolling into, I believe, the Innisfail and Bowden area, we were notified we had met our $22,000 goal,” he said.
So the decision was then made to increase the goal by $11,000 – symbolic of the 11-day walk – to $33,000.
With his parents driving an RV and providing support, Sadleir surpassed that goal as well.
“The funds are great and so very much appreciated,” he said. “But more so than just the funds is the heightened awareness that needs to be done and taken to a different level to let people know. My job that I’ve taken on is to really let people know that lung disease is about as far-reaching as you can get and people don’t realize it. So it’s the awareness as well as the funds that really need to be driven home.”
One in five Albertans will experience some sort of lung ailment or lung disease throughout their life, said Sadleir.
“Those are the people who are directly afflicted with it. Unfortunately, I’m highly confident everyone in Alberta will be affected in some way, directly or indirectly, with lung disease in their lifetime. The mortality and the morbidity rate of lung is among the highest from all diseases, yet it receives about a third of the government funding in Alberta that it needs.”
Sadleir said people are “just stunned” when they realize what all falls under the Lung Association umbrella. 
“People think it affects older smokers and that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said. “We’ve got babies, toddlers and youth, healthy athletes suffering from asthma or babies dying from asthma because they just can’t catch a breath. So many people suffer from sleep apnea, that’s a huge respiratory ailment and a potentially deadly one. Not to mention the flu and COVID-19 is a respiratory ailment (as well as) Cystic Fibrosis. So many things fall under the Lung Association umbrella that people don’t realize it’s that far reaching.”
The original trek was from Calgary to Edmonton, but Sadleir wanted his walk to reach further than that.
“I was born and raised in Calgary and spent many years down in Lethbridge and now I’m in Edmonton. My family lived up in the Northwest Territories for a few years,” he said, adding The Lung Association covers Alberta and the Northwest Territories. “So it made sense for me to reach into every pocket of the province that I can. I’m a proud Albertan and have lived in the three largest cities throughout my life, so why wouldn’t I touch base? This is province-wide and it means a lot to me, for sure.”
Now, Sadleir makes Alberta’s deep south the start of his next trek in Lethbridge in early July with the goal of raising $50,000 on the 500km trek.
The finish date in Edmonton July 23rd will mark the five-year anniversary that Sadleir’s father received his life-saving lung transplant. This year’s walk is in celebration of that milestone, and in commemoration of a family member who lost his life to respiratory complications earlier this year.
“I just felt this year if we were entering into it, I felt remiss that if I didn’t put a bigger push on the immense support that we’re missing out on in southern Alberta,” said Sadleir. “There are two people as part of my father’s group, lung transplant recipients, who all became friends in the whole process when they were going through their boot camp at the University of Alberta Hospital. They all ended up getting their transplants within a couple months of each other and three of them were from the southern Alberta area. So I really wanted to include that.”
Sadleir was happy to start this year’s walk in his old Lethbridge stomping grounds and while he’d been able to hit Calgary and Red Deer on his way through to Edmonton during his first walk, he intends to maximize his exposure on this trek.
“I want to stop in Claresholm, Vulcan, Okotoks, High River, Carstairs, Crossfield, Bowden, Wetaskiwin, Lacombe, I want to hit everywhere along the way and be in touch with people who are, unfortunately, out of my proximity of being able to visit,” he said.
Though House of Cars has gotten on board with the The Walk To Breathe campaign as a sponsor to make sure the funds go to the proper outlets, Sadleir said his walk is a grass roots approach.
“That’s certainly what made it a success last year, it was just appealing to the every man and the regular Albertans,” he said. “There weren’t a whole lot of corporate dollars. We had some sponsors, but it was all donations, footwear and things like that. It’s not a big corporate event.”
As for the actual journey, Sadleir said he likes to cap his walks at about 30 km per day. “Which is a lot, I know that from experience,” he said. “I burned through three pairs of running shoes last year. So I’ll need more this year and a lot of wrap and gauze and things like that.”
The goal is $50,000 for the Lethbridge-to-Edmonton walk, but Sadleir said he’d love to exceed it. “My personal experience, being a born-and-raised and proud Albertan, I know when Albertans rally behind something, there’s nothing we can’t do and that’s what I’m holding out for.”
The Walk To Breathe donation page launched last week.
Those wanting to make a donation or read the history of the walk can visit http://www.ab.lung.ca/walktobreathe.
“We know it will pick up more steam as it gets closer, but we’ve already got donations coming in,” said Sadleir. “We’re not just asking for donations, we’re really asking for support. We want people to share our posts, talk with their family and friends and encourage maybe their employers and their businesses to do fund raising if it’s a cause they can really get behind, maybe raise some funds in the office. Those kinds of things were a huge success last year.”
Sadleir can also be reached on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ck.sadleir, on Instagram at @sads216 or on Twitter at @sadleirchris.

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