Avera’s fitness queen, race leader leaves legacy of wellness

By Steve Young, for Pigeon605

In the afterglow of Avera’s 34th and incredibly successful Race Against Cancer on May 7, the event’s high-energy queen bee ─ Jackie Haggar-Tuschen – wished she could have done more as the buzz faded.

The tents were coming down in the parking lot of the Avera McKennan Fitness Center at 41st Street and Southeastern Avenue. Down, too, came the bras strung together and hung on a nearby fence to symbolize the ongoing battle against breast cancer. What a morning it had been ─ 5,000 participants, and $600,000 raised to stay entirely in the community to assist cancer patients and survivors.

Yet Jackie wasn’t completely satisfied.

She tells herself now that she should have mingled more and connected with more people in the parking lot before the race began. Should have spent more time at the finish line as participants came through. Should have – and her voice buckles as she voices this – engaged more inside the survivors’ tent.

As if more was even possible.

See, pulling off the logistics of an annual mega-fundraiser that brings in cancer survivors, their support teams and John Q. Public from almost three dozen states and at least three countries already asks a lot, even for the seasoned event coordinator that is Jackie Haggar-Tuschen.

The police escorts, the National Guardsmen helping keep participants safe on the streets, the 600 volunteers, the food tent and fruit that needs to be cut up, the expo tent, the survivors’ tent with its gift bags and food and services, the band playing on stage by 7 a.m., the mobile digital mammography unit on-site, the tracking of thousands of registrations, the T-shirts, the media interviews – it just goes on and on.

And then on top of that, as she does every year, Jackie finally breaks away from logistics and becomes cheerleader, exploding onto the stage before the race in her yoga pants and her “Let’s Run This Town” cancer race T-shirt, swinging her arms wildly as she marches in place and exhorts the crowd to warm up with her.

It’s not a one-person show, she insists later. Her contribution to all this, she said, simply involves putting a good team together to make it happen. And while her friends don’t disagree, “all the good that has come from this event … more than $8 million raised for projects like wigs for cancer patients, medical fitness programs, research … it’s all because of Jackie,” said her good friend, Judy Davis, herself a breast cancer survivor. “Through the years, every year, she just wasn’t going to settle for anything less than making sure this was a success.”

Who knows, maybe next year she really can do more. For in a few days, on Friday, she is retiring as the executive director of the Avera McKennan Fitness Center.

After 36 years of moving up the Avera fitness leadership ladder – first as wellness coordinator beginning in 1986, as operations manager at the fitness center in 1997 and, finally, as center director in 2005 – she’s leaving behind her desk and computer for what she suggests will be a slower-paced retirement life at her Lake Madison home with her husband, Gary, and the comings and goings of her daughters and grandchildren.

As if high energy actually can move at a slower place.

Jackie has been swinging her arms wildly and marching in place for decades now, all the way back to her years at Lincoln High School and her days as a cheerleader there.

“Back then, I liked to be active. I needed to be active,” she explains. “I needed exercise to keep my weight managed and my stress level. Exercise is how I managed it. My dad’s side of the family has heart disease, and my mom died of cancer, so I wanted to take care of myself.”

She went off to the University of South Dakota after high school, earned a degree in social work and came home to Sioux Falls afterward to help manage the lives of young quadriplegic residents in a nursing home. To help pay her rent and feed her need for exercise, Jackie took a part-time gig as an aerobic dance instructor at the YMCA as well. When the nursing home program came to an end after 17 months, she turned her social work skills full time to fitness at the Y as the women’s program director.

“I started making a difference in people’s lives using endorphins, using fitness and wellness as the platform to make people happy,” she said. “I felt like I was being a social worker in a different way … helping people to feel better about themselves.”

In the days of high-profile workout stars like Jane Fonda and Jacki Sorensen, Jackie helped to pioneer group fitness and exercise in Sioux Falls. Aerobic dance, Pilates, spin cycling – she was at the forefront of it all.

As her reputation for all things fitness began to grow, Avera McKennan Hospital enlisted her to become its wellness coordinator in 1986. She coordinated wellness and fitness programs for hospital employees and branched out into the community to do wellness screenings, group exercise classes, weight management and more.

It all proved quite successful, said Tom Bosch, vice president of hospitality for Avera and Jackie’s boss, because of her ability to connect with people.

“I always think of Jackie as someone who is relational, and that’s just who she is to the core,” Bosch said. “Building those relations and having a passion, quite honesty, for caring for people, caring for their health and well-being … is Jackie. Guiding them to be the best person they can possibly be from a health standpoint.”

Jackie’s guidance of the fitness center ─ putting a team in place that includes trainers with four-year college degrees, maneuvering it successfully through the COVID pandemic, retaining managers and staff who have stayed for years if not decades ─ has culminated with the Avera McKennan center being certified three times by the Medical Fitness Association. Less than 1 percent of the medical fitness centers across the country receive such certification, Bosch said.

“Building a team … that has experts in the health and well-being of people is where Jackie certainly, certainly shines,” he said.

Leaving that team in a good place as she retires again offers Jackie the possibility that she can spend even more time on the Race Against Cancer, an endeavor she has been part of since its beginning.

In 1988, Judy Davis was staring down breast cancer. At a time when information was scarce and the disease simply wasn’t discussed much, Davis’ sister Peggy Kirby and her friends at the Junior League decided they were going to shine a spotlight on the disease. So they all brainstormed it one day, hatched the idea of a race and enlisted Jackie to help make it happen.

“I was really sick for many years,” Davis recalls. “I think at first, they thought the race was going to be in my memory.”

Indeed, the first event in 1989, was held in the Hy-Vee parking lot out by The Empire Mall with 10- and 5-kilometer races and rollerblading, Jackie recalls. It was part of the Susan Komen Race for the Cure back then, with Sioux Valley Hospital hosting a race luncheon and Avera McKennan staging the races.

In time, with Jackie and the Avera Race leadership taking the lead, it evolved to spotlight all cancer ─ not just breast cancer ─ and grew into such a massive enterprise that the economic effects of its impact rippled throughout the community as thousands adorned in Race Against Cancer T-shirts filled up local restaurants, hotels and businesses. In recognition of that, Jackie was honored this year with the Heart of the City Award by Experience Sioux Falls.

“When you look at the name of the race and it being in Sioux Falls … this community has really gained attention regionally and even somewhat nationally because it’s such a successful, meaningful race,” said Teri Schmidt, executive director of Experience Sioux Falls. “Everybody knows somebody that has suffered from cancer, and that’s why they’re here. And they’re here because they know Jackie. They love Jackie. She’s got a heart as big as Texas.”

That heart was on full display this year on a cool, windless May morning as the sun rose over the parking lot to the east and Jackie flitted around the grounds.

One moment, she was motoring across the parking lot on a golf cart, heading for a media interview. Then, she was behind a tent, huddled with volunteers and working through last-second minutiae. And soon after that, racing through the crowd, she was encouraging survivors to move up front and help her with the pre-race warmup.

The band The6four had just started playing “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman when Jackie slid up next to Davis by the stage and put her arm around her friend’s shoulders.

“I am brave, I am bruised, I am who I’m meant to be. This is me. Look out ‘cause here I come.”

Now and then, friends came up to Jackie for long and tender embraces. A tall man stooped low and held her. A mother brought her child to get a hug. Later, her voice choking, Jackie acknowledged that for some who sought her out, there would not be another race, another next year.

And her thoughts quickly turned to her mother, Beverly, who died of cancer in 1998.

Jackie had promised her mom that she would take care of her, would always be there to push her out onto the dock at Lake Madison and experience the glory with her of another setting sun.

It was a promise, a daughter softly says, that was not in God’s plan.

Just for a moment, caught up in the memory, her high energy ebbs. Then Jackie is back, quickly contemplating the landscape of a life that she insists will include more than just lazy days at Lake Madison.

Her hope is to come back occasionally and keep her connections at the center, maybe teaching a fitness class or two, perhaps sitting around a table afterward drinking coffee with old friends. She intends as well to keep on with the Race Against Cancer, only now with a little more time for even better planning and more personal interaction.

The fact is, how could she not come back, she said, and miss out on every hug, every embrace that is one more affirmation of gratitude, of thanksgiving, of a hope that someday maybe mankind will actually finish the Race Against Cancer.

“My mom would be disappointed if I stepped away. My mom and dad would both be,” Jackie quietly said. “So this is the path that I just decided I better stay on. Keep holding hands. Keep working towards the same goal. You can’t stop. Why would I stop when all these people fill my heart every year?”