As someone who has taken part in seven Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure walks (both under that name and under the former event name, the "Breast Cancer 3-Day"), I'm often asked what advice I have for new walkers.
I have any amount of advice, a lot of it very situational depending on the fitness level and personal situation of the walker.
For example, I
might say "Get out and do lots of walking. Don't just walk five miles every other Saturday ... try to get out every other night after work and do at least a few miles." But that might be impossible-to-follow advice for a mom who works two jobs and has kids to look after. Everyone has their own issues and few people have the luxury of being able to walk whenever they want, wherever they want.
Or I might say "Wear sock liners and wicking socks, and carry enough socks with you while walking the 3-Day that you can change socks at lunchtime each day, at a minimum." But not everyone can afford to go out and buy lots and lots of high-tech socks at their local sporting goods store.
I might even say "Hydrate like crazy while you're training and while you're actually walking the walk. If you're not
peeing every hour, you're doing it wrong." But that advice, while perfectly valid, might just creep out the person I'm talking to. A lot of people aren't comfortable discussing their bathroom tendencies with a perfect stranger. :)
Yeah, I have
lots of advice. Some of it good, some of it sort of "ehh". But there's
one piece of advice that I
really, really wish
everyone would follow:
get yourself on the Share List. Huh?
What's the Share List, you ask?
The "Share List" is the list of 3-Day walkers and crew in your area. It's available on the 3-Day website to any registered walker or crewmember. It's grouped by zip code, so if you input a given zip code it'll give you (at most) fifty registered participants who live in or near that zip code. It will
not give you the last names or home addresses or phone numbers of people in your area, but it
will give you their first names, last initial, whether they're walking or crewing, which 3-Day events they're signed up for, and their email addresses. And all that comes with the firm admonition to use it
only for contacting other participants about 3-Day stuff.
You can look up a list of registered participants in your area. You can look up a list of team captains with open teams in case you're looking for a 3-Day walker team to join. You can even look up a list of official 3-Day training walk leaders.
The output gives you enough information to contact your fellow participants via email and get a sense of who's walking or crewing where:
But here's the thing that most people don't seem to realize:
The Share List doesn't include everyone. That's right. The Share List doesn't include everyone. It
only includes those people who
agree to be on it. And a surprisingly large number of people don't seem to realize that a simple choice they made during registration resulted in their
own name being left off the list.
Now, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking "Well, I can understand that -- it's a privacy thing."
Sure. That's why people are given the option to
not be on the list. But it's an opt-in kind of thing -- if you don't
agree to be on the list, then you're
not on it. And
that's why you don't get invitations to come to local training walks in your area.
That's why you wind up meeting people while taking part in the 3-Day who turn out to be from just down the street, only you never knew they were even registered.
If you're a member of an established team, not being contacted by others may not seem like such a bad thing. After all,
you've got your own teammates to go train with, fundraise with, and walk with.
But what about the woman who lives around the corner from you, who just lost her mother to breast cancer last year and who's kinda concerned about a lump in her
own breast, who sure could use people to walk and train with and network with... and get support and encouragement from?
She's not going to have any idea that she's got people right in her neighborhood that she could look to for that support and companionship. Maybe she raises enough money to walk the event on her own; maybe she makes friends during the 3-Day weekend and it's all good. But
maybe she gets discouraged, has a hard time raising funds, has a hard time getting motivated to go out and train, and she
gives up.
All because she thought she was all alone.
It's not about
you. It's about being part of the
larger community of 3-Day walkers and crew all supporting one another.
The Share List is a
huge part of that.
I'm an official 3-Day training walk leader. I live in an extremely rural New England state. I wouldn't have it any other way. I love the great outdoors and I love being able to see the stars at night and I don't mind in the slightest that my nearest major supermarket is
ten miles away. Sure, that can be an inconvenience when I need ingredients for eggplant parmigiana in a hurry... but on the other hand,
I live ten miles from the Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory.
I'll cope.
But when it comes time to find 3-Day walkers to train with, I don't have it easy. There are, to the best of my knowledge,
six registered 3-Day participants living within 25 miles of me. And most of those participants are over the river and through the woods and on the far side of the mountain ... not exactly "local." I publish training walks on a weekly basis from early March until the Boston 3-Day in July and I send out invites to every registered participant on the Share List who's local to me -- and if I'm
lucky I get two or three people to show up. More commonly it's just my wife and me.
But each year when I crew the Boston 3-Day I meet people who come up and say "You're from Vermont? I'm from Middlesex." Or "I'm from Huntington." Or "I'm from Waterbury." And I go "Huh. I never saw you on the Share List. Sure wish I'd known about you, I'd have invited you to our training walks." I smile when I say that -- the fact that they're
there means they raised the money and presumably did some training, but heck, it sure would have been nice to have some company on our training walks. My wife and I have been married for 13 years -- there are times that I think we've exhausted all the small talk there is in one couple. It would've been
GREAT to have new friends to train with.
But I also wonder how many people there were who opted out of being on the Share List without even realizing it, who didn't even know it was there, and who had to go out and train on their own and had no one to exchange ideas and pats on the back with -- people who didn't manage to raise their fundraising minimum and never even made it to the event. I sure wish I'd known about them so I could've cheered them on and answered their questions and given my advice. I was a first-time walker once myself and I can say in all honesty that there are some mistakes I made as a first-time walker that any veteran walker would probably have been able to steer me clear of.
If there'd only
been any veteran walkers around me to train with, that is. And for all I know there
were -- I just had no way of knowing they were there.
I know there are lots of walkers out there who aren't on the Share List. I've been told so by the 3-Day coaches on enough occasions. But they can't
make people agree to be on the Share List.
So do me a favor, willya? If you're not 100% certain that you're showing up on the Share List,
check. You can get to the Share List
here or from your 3-Day Participant Center under the "Resources" heading in the upper left hand corner of the page:
If you're not on the Share List, you can correct that: the instructions for doing so are
here.
In a nutshell, you need to edit your participant profile via the 3-Day website and put a checkmark next to the words: "I am willing to share my contact information with other participants for forming 2011 training and support groups."
That's all there is to it. Check that box, click "Save" at the bottom of the screen, and you've just made it possible for other walkers in your area to contact you and invite you to training walks, ask you questions, and
offer their support.
No one's going to spam you. The Share List is only available to registered walkers and crew who have a login for the 3-Day website ... and in four years of 3-Day involvement I've never gotten a non-3-Day related email as a result of having my information out there for fellow walkers and crew to use.
A 3-Day friend of mine commented that she's never gotten email from anyone
at all by being on the Share List -- but I suspect that's because so few people seem to know about it ... and so many people aren't on it in the first place. So a quick suggestion: once you get yourself
on the list, consider looking at walkers in your area and send an email introducing yourself and asking if they'd like to train with you. You never know: you might wind up with a new teammember, training buddy, or heck, a potential friend for life.
So anyway, why
is "get yourself on the Share List" my number one piece of advice?
Because it's the one piece of advice I can give that absolutely applies to everyone. People are different. They walk differently, they train differently, some are single with no kids and some are twice-married with ten kids. Some have had breast cancer, some haven't. Some have lost friends and family to breast cancer... and some haven't. Some work three jobs and spend half their lives commuting and some work out of their home. Everyone's different.
But the one thing we
all have in common is that
we're all stronger when we join together and help one another.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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caroleotter made the most of the opportunity to mock me, asking if I needed to be taken to the emergency room and stuff. I kept telling her "It'll be fine in the morning." Carole tends to over-dramatize things when she's ill or stiff or sore, no matter how much TLC and help I give her, and on occasion I've had to do the whole "if it hurts so much I guess we'll just have to CUT IT OFF" thing that moms sometimes do. 
