LIVERMORE — Renda Libby told only two people when she started training to run the Dempsey Challenge 5K. She didn’t want everyone to know if she failed.

Out of shape, she started walking on the treadmill. Then running a couple of minutes in the gym. Then minutes more outside. She lost weight and gained confidence.

Today, she’ll run the 5K as friends, family and an entire team cheer her on. She’ll do it for herself. She’ll do it to raise money for a cause she believes in. And she’ll do it for her husband, Alan Libby, who died of a heart attack last fall while training to bike in the 2010 challenge.

“This team is my family; they are our family,” Renda said. “And to be heart-healthy and to stay on track, to raise money for such a great cause, that is where Alan would have been.”

Renda began walking in March, six months after her husband collapsed and fell from his bike while riding with his team, Fitness Fanatics, on Lake Shore Drive in Auburn. He’d been training for months to participate in the Dempsey Challenge, chugging mile after mile on his old mountain bike. His doctor had told him he had to lose some weight and get healthy. Alan, 47, found he could do that while cycling with friends. 

“He was like, ‘I feel really good about it. I had to bust my butt. I was at the tail-end of the thing again and people were yelling when I went by, but it was all good,'” Renda said. “That was his favorite saying: ‘It’s all good.'”

Alan lost 53 pounds from his stocky frame. He eschewed the typical trappings of a cyclist — no helmet, bike shorts or light road bike for him — but he loved riding and he looked forward to the Dempsey Challenge 50-mile trek. 

The Sept. 11 heart attack came out of nowhere. One moment, Alan was training with his team — flying down the road at the head of the pack for once — and the next, he was on the ground.

“I’m thinking, ‘God, he caught his bike tires in the sand. That’s really weird,'” recalled teammate Sue Biliouris. “Then I realized: mountain bike. You don’t fall off of a mountain bike.”

Alan was unconscious and not breathing. Biliouris, a nurse, and her husband, Bill, started CPR while another teammate called for help. But it was too late.

Weeks later, his son, Matt White, rode in the Dempsey Challenge in Alan’s honor. Renda walked the 5K. She never thought she’d do more than that.

“If you’d asked me a year ago if I’d be doing this, I probably would have said no. I probably would have said, ‘No, you know, I just kind of filled a spot,'” she said.

But in March she started walking. She told her daughter, Jennifer Timberlake, and Sue Biliouris, but no one else. She didn’t want to look foolish if she failed.

By summer, Renda, 50, was running a few minutes at a time. By September, word had spread about the 5K and Alan’s team — her team — rallied around her for support. 

“(Alan) would be proud of me, but he would be proud of the whole team, because when that team could have fallen apart last year, it got stronger,” she said. 

Since last year, Fitness Fanatics has grown from about 15 members to more than 20. Last year, the team raised about $4,300. This year, its raised more than $11,000 through myriad fundraisers, including a 10-mile and 20-mile May cycling event called Alan’s Ride.

Team members say that though the money goes to the Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer Hope & Healing, they hope they’re also fighting heart disease through awareness.

“They’re two different things but two awful, awful diseases,” Biliouris said. “They kind of run side by side. We’re doing this to stay focused for the Dempsey Center, for all those people, those survivors and those people who have passed away from cancer. And for Alan.”

Although today marks Renda’s first 5K run, it likely won’t be her last. She and the team have been talking about next year’s Dempsey Challenge. 

“I want to continue with the Fitness Fanatics,” Renda said. “I want to be heart-healthy. I want to raise money.”

[email protected]