Shawna Long of Conway eats, sleeps and breathes the Komen Arkansas Race for the Cure.
Case in point: She doesn’t hesitate when she orders breakfast early one morning last week — “two pink-ribbon bagels, one to eat and one to go, please.” Then she takes a cellphone photo of the sign advertising the bagels so she can put it on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram — wherever she can spread awareness of the upcoming race and breast cancer.
Long, 42, is chairwoman of this year’s Komen Arkansas Race for the Cure, scheduled for Saturday in downtown Little Rock. Long said she’s the first Faulkner County chairwoman in the race’s 23-year-history.
She got involved with the race in 2007 as a team captain through her job at Molex in Maumelle, where she’s worked for 20-plus years.
As team captain, she organized company events to get the employees pumped up for Team Molex, and she walked in the race that year. She was hooked immediately.
“It was just amazing; I was just in love with it,” she said. “As soon as you get downtown, the feeling of it all just engulfs you; it really does.”
The answer to the obvious first question is “no”; Long is not a breast-cancer survivor.
“Pretty much my cancer experience was I had an aunt who had cancer — not breast cancer — and she ended up passing away,” Long said. Since then, another aunt of Long’s died from cancer.
Long grew up in Jacksonville and moved to Conway for her eighth- and ninth-grade years after her mother remarried. Long’s stepfather got a job in Sherman, Texas, so the family moved again, and she graduated from high school there.
“My heart was back here in Arkansas,” she said. “But to be clear, moving to Texas was the absolute best thing that could have happened, although I went kicking and screaming,” she said. “When I moved there, my grades improved. I needed a change.”
She was 17 when she graduated from high school in 1992, and Long moved back to Arkansas in September that year with a plan to join the Air Force.
On her second day back in the state, she went with a friend to the Faulkner County Fair in Conway, and the young woman introduced her to Chris Long of Mayflower, and they started dating. They married in April 1994.
Her plan to join the Air Force flew out the window. Chris worked at Molex, which makes connectors for technology, and she was hired, advancing to her current position in quality-control assurance. He now owns Custom Network Solutions.
She took a few classes at Pulaski County Technical College when she started at Molex and planned to get a degree in business, but life got even busier. Although they don’t have children of their own, the couple helped raise Chris’ niece and nephew.
She started a sideline business, Shawna Long Photography, because of her volunteer work at Race for the Cure. Every year during the race, she took photos of the Molex team and put together a video of special moments.
She was the Molex team captain until 2011, when the race chairwoman at the time, Jill Winholt of Jacksonville, asked Long to be on the teams committee for the statewide race.
Long and another Conway woman, Lori Robinson, joined the teams committee, which oversees all the teams that make the race run “like a well-oiled machine,” Long said.
When Long, Robinson and Winholt met for the first time, “we just had an absolute instant connection; we became instant friends,” Long said.
In 2015, she was the co-chairwoman. “That’s awesome; you get to kind of watch,” she said. “I was the best co-chair I could be.”
To prepare for being the race chairwoman this year, she met with an agency to come up with a theme and advertising campaign. Long already knew what she wanted.
“I wanted it to be about photography, the feeling that photographs bring,” she said. The theme is “Picture the Finish Line,” she said, “tying in the race,” as well as referring to imagining the end of breast cancer.
She also got to name an honorary survivor and an honorary 3 Miles of Men chairman, Amadou Diop of Conway, her friend and co-worker at Molex. Long said she invited him to Race for the Cure several years ago, and he was so impressed that he attends every year.
Diop said he was “blown away” when Long asked him to be the honorary 3 Miles of Men chairman.
“I was very touched and honored; I was nervous, too. I’m working with someone who is great at what she does, so it makes me have to go beyond as well,” he said.
“She got me involved [with the race]; she was excited and just dedicated. I’m going to feel sorry for the next chair because she gives 100 percent. We work together, and we are good friends, and that’s all she talks about. She’s positive, and that helps a lot.”
As the honorary survivor, Long picked Gwen Haniff, whom she crossed paths with thousands of feet in the air and realized later she had seen before through the lens of her camera.
It’s a little bit convoluted, but Long tells the story because she said it’s just another of the meant-to-be experiences she’s had since getting involved with the race.
Long and her husband foster rescue dogs. A family in Connecticut adopted Oliver, a black Lab, and Long communicated often with that family.
She and a friend went to visit the family and the dog, and they were flying on Southwest Airlines.
A flight attendant asked if a Shawna Long was on-board, and she slowly raised her hand, having no idea what was going on. She was called to the front of the plane. “There’s this absolutely gorgeous woman — she’s holding something,” Long said. The woman, Gwen Haniff, is Little Rock station manager for Southwest Airlines.
The airline was notified that Long was involved in animal rescue and was flying to see the adoptive family of one of her foster dogs. Haniff had a pet carrier with Southwest Airlines printed on it.
Haniff thanked Long for her work with rescues. “I just melt down; I’m crying the whole time she’s talking to me,” Long said, adding that she’s still not sure she heard most of it.
When Long came back from her trip to Connecticut, she decided to reconnect with Haniff because of what she had done for Long that day on the plane. About a month after the trip to Connecticut, they got together, and Long found out Haniff was a breast-cancer survivor and realized she’d taken photos of Haniff at previous Race for the Cure events.
“We became really close,” Long said.
When it was time to choose an honorary survivor, Long knew immediately she would pick Haniff. However, instead of just asking, she invited Haniff to dinner at a restaurant and surprised her by bringing with her other representatives of the
Arkansas affiliate of the Komen Foundation.
“I got her back for calling me up to the front of the plane,” Long said, laughing.
In addition to the honorary positions, the Race for the Cure committee has 120 volunteers, Long said.
“I’m very hands-on; I’m very involved with my committee members. I wanted it to be a very special year,” she said. “I’m not going to ask anyone to do something I won’t do myself.”
Long won’t be taking as many pictures as usual because she will be busy with the race, which will kick off at 6 a.m. with registration for those who still need to register.
The Little Rock race has been No. 2 in the nation in the number of registrants the past two years at about 24,000, women, children and men, she said. “I want to be No. 1,” Long said.
Long said the day of the race is unforgettable, adding that the Survivor Parade is awe-inspiring — about 700 women march and hold signs showing the number of years they’ve been survivors.
“It’s stress, but it’s kind of a one-day-at-a-time thing,” she said. Long has taken off work until after the race.
She said she thinks about the event “every waking moment,” although she sleeps like a baby at night. OK, but she definitely eats and breathes it.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.