First Call
Elizabeth Chin runs 26.2 miles in purple every November to honor her brother Connor, who spent nine years fighting osteosarcoma. But this story is really about the House that held her family during the hardest chapter of their lives—and how gratitude turns into action.
Why Elizabeth Chin runs the TCS New York City Marathon for her brother Connor, and for the House that held her family.
Recently, Elizabeth Chin wanted to play music.
The speaker was old. Older than Bluetooth. She tried one cable. Then another. Then a third. Nothing worked.
Then she remembered a drawer, and in the drawer, a small adapter her brother, Connor, had handed her years ago.
“I plugged my phone into the cable and the cable into the adapter and plugged it in the speaker,” she says. “It just magically worked.”
Connor Chin passed away in December of 2024. He was nineteen.
The adapter he gave his sister still works.
The Person You Call First
Every family has one. In most families, it’s a parent.
In the Chin family, it was the kid brother.
“Anytime I needed something, the first person that I would call, it wouldn’t be my dad or it wouldn’t be my mom. A lot of times it would be Connor, because I feel like he had all the solutions to my various problems.”
He was selfless. Kind. Funny in the specific way that siblings are funny with each other—relentlessly and at the worst possible moments. The family lived in Singapore for two years, and Connor traveled across Asia before he reached nineteen.
He was eleven when he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. What followed was nine years of surgeries, treatments, and therapies. The cancer relapsed more than once. Each time, Connor found a way to keep going.
“He was on the battlefield for nine long years, and he never gave up,” Elizabeth says. “While 26.2 miles can be painful, I look to my brother for strength with every step.”
Someone told the family, after, that Connor had lived a fuller life than some people who make it to their eighties and nineties. Elizabeth carries that around with her. It changed how she moves through her own days.
“He took advantage of every single moment, and I think that’s something that I carry with me now. I try not to push things off too far. If I can go somewhere now, I’ll do it. Because you never know what tomorrow holds.”
Where the House comes in
Connor was treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and again after his relapse. For a period, the family traveled to MD Anderson in Houston.
They stayed at Ronald McDonald House New York. They stayed at the Ronald McDonald House in Houston. Off and on. Here and there. Years measured in stays.
Like most families, they had no idea any of it existed until they needed it.
"Like before Connor got sick, I don't think any of us really fully understood how much a family needs when they're going through any kind of treatment and your whole world changes… "
Elizabeth Chin
"Like before Connor got sick, I don't think any of us really fully understood how much a family needs when they're going through any kind of treatment and your whole world changes… "
Elizabeth Chin
That quote is the whole argument for this House.
What she'd tell a family checking in tonight
Ask Elizabeth what she’d hand a family arriving at the House for their first night, and she pauses. It’s a hard question and she says so.
Then she answers it, and her answer isn’t an object.
“I would just want them to know that they don’t have to go through anything that they’re going through alone. They have the support of the people around them, but they also have the support of a lot of really amazing organizations like Ronald McDonald House New York, to lessen the burdens that they have.”
She adds something that surprised even her family at the time: they didn’t realize how much support they had until it arrived.
Knowing it’s there, she says, is “a really warm feeling.”
The First Race
Here is the part of the story that reorders everything else.
Elizabeth ran her first New York City Marathon in 2024, alongside a cousin, in support of her brother.
Connor was still alive.
He passed just six weeks later.
She has run every year since. So, what began as a race run for someone became a race run in memory of someone, without the route changing, without the reason changing at all. She just kept showing up at the starting line.
People sometimes assume she’s a serious runner. She’d like to correct the record.
“At best, I am the Okayest Runner in the World. But I run because I believe deeply in the purpose.”
Her estimated finish time this year is six hours. She is twenty-three years old. By her own cheerful admission, she’s not built for this. She does it anyway, which is arguably the entire point.
Team Connor, year by year
What started as three people has become something a family builds its calendar around. Connor’s mother, Lisa, organizes the team. Elizabeth runs it. Cousins, family, and friends fill it out, and every year a few more people hear the story and ask how to sign up.
| Year | Runners | Raised for RMH-NY |
| 2024 | 3 | $17,500 |
| 2025 | 5 | $19,500 |
| 2026 | 7 | $31,500 (goal) |
Three years. More than double the team. Nearly double the money.
They run in purple because purple was Connor’s favorite color. This year the shirts may be purple and gold, gold being the color of childhood cancer awareness. There’s a dragonfly on the front. On the back: Connor’s Wings of Courage, the 501(c)(3) foundation the family established in his name, where Elizabeth serves as Vice President.
“We’re all running the marathon for Connor, but that’s like our material way of carrying him with us.”
Where Connor shows up
Ask her where on the course she feels him, and she doesn’t hesitate.
The bridges. “I feel him the most in the bridges. I can kind of feel like he’s pushing me along.”
First Avenue at 73rd Street—her favorite stretch of the entire five-borough route, because it runs past Ronald McDonald House New York. Past the place that held her family.
After Mile 21, the long, straight, uphill return into Manhattan, where the crowd thins and the legs are gone and Central Park is close but not close enough.
“That’s when I’m like, I really wish Connor was here. I wish he could tell me a joke, take my mind off this.”
She associates him with dragonflies. One flies past her car on a hard day. When she’s uncertain about a decision, one turns up, and she takes it as her brother signing off.
Missing him turned into company.
“Connor shows up for me a lot of the times in the hard moments.”
"And I think our family knows first and foremost how incredible the support is that Ronald McDonald House gives to families, and that's why we support it."
Elizabeth Chin
"And I think our family knows first and foremost how incredible the support is that Ronald McDonald House gives to families, and that's why we support it."
Elizabeth Chin
The bigger race
Ronald McDonald House New York has been part of the TCS New York City Marathon since 2005, and the numbers add up to something remarkable:
- Raised for RMH-NY since 2005: $3,827,498.91
- Runners over that time: 819
- Runners on the 2026 team: 101
- Runners since 2024 with a personal RMH-NY connection: 46
That last figure is worth sitting with. Forty-six of the people who have laced up for this House since 2024 stayed here themselves or had a family member who did. They are alumni of the worst chapter of their lives, coming back to pay for someone else’s room.
Elizabeth’s work in the pediatric cancer world extends well beyond race day. She sits on the Executive Leadership Team of Camp Quality’s New Jersey chapter, where people still come up to her with stories about her brother. At Penn State, she spent four years inside THON, eventually serving as a Director of Development, and danced the full forty-six hours the year the students raised more than $17 million for pediatric cancer research and support.
This year the marathon falls on November 1, 2026, just weeks after the House opened its renovated second floor, the new Community Floor, and launched a new chef program. New rooms to gather in. New culinary food at the end of a terrible day.
Elizabeth was the first person ever interviewed on that new floor. It seemed fitting.
The adapter still works
There’s a temptation, writing about a family like this one, to reach for something enormous. A word like legacy.
Elizabeth doesn’t. She tells you about a drawer, and a small piece of plastic her brother gave her years ago, and an old speaker that had no business playing anything.
That’s what he was. The person who had the fix. The first call.
On November 1st, seven people will run 26.2 miles through five boroughs in purple and possibly gold shirts with a dragonfly on the front. Somewhere on First Avenue they will pass a building where a family once stayed, off and on, for years. The people inside that building on that morning will be families in the middle of their own worst chapter, most of whom had never heard of this place until they needed it.
That’s who the run is for. That’s who it’s always been for.
Connor had the solution to many of the problems his sister had. It turns out he had one more.
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