By Special to the Town Crier

Editor’s note: Three Los Altos residents, Tracey Gropper, Bobby Liao and Robert Tetzlaff, have been selected to carry the Olympic torch for the 2002 games. The following story is about Tracey Gropper.

For 65 consecutive days next year, relay runners will carry the torch of the Olympic spirit through 46 states covering 13,500 miles. In ancient Greece, runners carried the torch throughout the land to announce a truce or to call athletes to Olympia.

Today the torch remains an international symbol of peace and unity through sports.

Torchbearers for the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Winter Games were selected from among 210,000 nominees. Tracey Gropper, co-owner of FIT in Los Altos, is one of the 7,200 chosen to carry the flame.

She will run in mid-January advancing the flame in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Gropper said she was notified in August of the honor. The torch bearers were publicly announced last month.

“It’s pretty amazing,” she said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime (opportunity).”

Growing up, Gropper shared the pain and grief of her 13-year-old friend, Linda, whose mother died of leukemia.

Having faced the pain of her own mother’s successful battle with cancer, Gropper felt she was giving something back by helping her friend in need.

These ordeals left indelible imprints and instilled in her the need for consolation and a concern for suffering.

Ten years later, Gropper ran her first marathon with Team in Training, a fund-raising opportunity for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Soon after making the commitment, Gropper learned of a 29-year-old woman from Atherton, Sara Kaiser Maas, who was battling the disease. Gropper decided to run in honor of this young woman’s fight against cancer and raised nearly $25,000 for the cause.

Gropper has since become a mentor for Team in Training, inspiring others with her ambition and drive to help those in need.

She hopes to run her third marathon in New York, 2002.

Asked what makes these marathons so magnetic, she said, “The odd sensation as you pass the first mile marker knowing that it is the first of so many more, but with each one down, there’s one less ahead. It’s kind of synonymous with life, you know.”

Gropper graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in kinesiology, the study of human movement.