It's a grueling endurance challenge that saw participants running–or in many cases walking, lumbering, or handrail-climbing–up the steep cement stairs ten times (a 7,000-step elevation gain) at Camel’s Back Park in Boise, Idaho. Over 100 hale and hardy Idahoans attended the event, but only 60 finished it. However, the aim of the race wasn’t to crown a winner. The 5k raised over $7,500 for wishes and specifically honored wish kid Hailey’s wish to go to Disney World, the same wish Alex had over twenty years ago.

Alex Conley was diagnosed with leukemia right before his fourth birthday. The diagnosis is one of his earliest memories. He was too young to really understand what was going on, but he knew that he was very sick.

There was a running joke in his family. Alex’s sister was always smiling in family photos, but Alex was not. It wasn’t an intentional thing. He was just too sick. Alex credits his parents with doing a great job of preserving a life as “normal” as possible. They kept him enrolled in sports and helped him keep up with his schoolwork while he was in the hospital, so he didn’t have to get held back.

When Alex was five, he met a member of the Make-A-Wish® Idaho staff and his wish granters, a couple named Clint and Carolyn who kept in contact with Alex for years, –even attending his high school graduation–at an ice cream shop. They told him that he could wish for anything that he wanted, but Alex was shy and needed ideas. As soon as Disney World was mentioned, Alex knew that a Disney wish was for him.

“Disney World was awesome,” Alex said. When he’d line up for a ride at Disney, his status as a wish kid allowed him to cut to the front of it. He felt like a celebrity. He also enjoyed the hospitality at Give Kids the World. Every day when Alex and his family would return from the parks, there would be a new present for him in the room: candy, a plastic toy, or a stuffed animal. That was his favorite part.

Alex remembers his parents joking that the first time Alex ever smiled was when he was at Disney World. “It was such an impactful experience. It was a great chance for me just to have fun and be a kid again and to forget my struggles. It’s so important from a morale standpoint,” Alex said.

At the age of 12, Alex was in remission and healthy. A few years later, he went off to college at the University of Idaho with the plan to become a pediatric oncologist, but after a couple of years taking biology and chemistry classes, he decided that it wasn’t the path for him. He graduated, instead, with a degree in Health and Exercise Science.

Growing up battling a critical illness, Alex thought about health often. One of his favorite quotes is “A healthy person has 1,000 wishes but a sick person has one.” His focus on health led to the founding of KONO Nutrition a sports-performance supplement company that has a health-first, fitness-second philosophy. “There’s huge difference between fitness and health. I think a lot of people in the fitness community put their focus on the wrong things and may choose looking good over feeling good. We wanted to put the emphasis on being healthy first.”

With his company established, Alex wanted to give back to Make-A-Wish Idaho and the broader community by spreading the message of health and wellness. While competing in a half-marathon in Rome, Georgia, Alex got the idea for the Stronger Together 5K. He liked that the half-marathon was unique in that it had over 6,000 feet of elevation gain and focused on mental toughness. He wanted to recreate a similar event in Boise.  “We often forget what the body is capable of. I wanted the race to be a mental challenge, something where people had to push themselves to succeed.”

On September 25, 2022, the first annual Stronger Together 5k became reality and was held in honor of eight-year-old wish kid Hailey, also a survivor of leukemia. Hailey had recently been declared cancer-free and her wish to go to Disney World was scheduled just one month after the race. Alex said that meeting Hailey was very emotional. “I told Hailey’s family about the event we were throwing. I went to their house. Hailey was very shy at first, but after awhile she was showing me all her favorite Disney songs. It was overwhelming to be part of her journey. They are such a great family.”

Alex suggested that other wish kids going through childhood leukemia should try to maintain positive attitudes and get excited for their wishes. “A positive attitude is such an important piece of the puzzle. I think it’s just important that they find something that they want to do to just ease the stress on the body and just kind of forget about the illness for a while.”

Next year, Alex plans to host another 5k on the Camel’s Back Park stairs. He’s, of course, excited about new participants, returning finishers and raising money for wishes, but mostly he’d like to see the forty people who weren’t able to finish the race to come back to try to test themselves again and finish what they started.

Former or current wish family members are invited to join the wish community.