Overcommitted?

Hi.  I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day walker.  I'm taking part as a walker in two 2011 3-Day walks: San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta.   I'll be walking sixty miles in three days in September to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer... and then I'll be doing it all over again a month later.   If you wouldn't mind helping me raise funds toward the $2,300 fundraising minimum per city ($4,600 total) that I have to collect just to take part, I'd be very grateful.  You can donate to my San Francisco fund-raising total at http://www.the3day.org/goto/jay_sf or you can donate to my Atlanta total at http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurr.   I'll match any donation made on my behalf, and my employer will match me, so a $50 donation from you will result in my total going up by $150 in all.   Thank you for any help and support you wish to give -- it helps me walk but more importantly, it helps thousands upon thousands of women and men you may never even meet with their battle with an awful disease.



Hi.  I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day training walk leader.  Although there aren't a lot of 3-Day walkers in the state of Vermont, I nonetheless do my best to scout out and map and publish training walks for my fellow participants to take part in, steadily adding distance each week as the time until the 3-Day walk in Boston takes place in late July.   It's a surprising amount of work, being a training walk leader.  Once you've had your official training and gotten the credential that lets you list official walks on the 3-Day website, you've got to do no end of planning.  You've got to find a safe place for your fellow walkers to walk, a place with sidewalks or wide shoulders.  You've got to scout out bathrooms at friendly businesses or government offices -- or failing that, at the homes of friends and fellow participants -- at two or three-mile intervals along the route.  You've got invite people to your walk and wait for the inevitable "That's not a good day for me.  And you're starting too far from my house.  And will you be providing snacks?"

I envy the heck out of people who lead training walks in metropolitan areas.  I've seen photos of training walks in places like Tampa and Dallas with thirty participants all smiling and having a great time; I've never gotten more than seven at one of mine.  But: that's Vermont for you.  Little state.  Not many public restrooms along the back roads.  But we bring maple syrup with us on our walks, so it's all good.  :)



Hi, I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day crew member.   This will be my third year volunteering as a member of the Boston 3-Day support crew.  We're the women and men in the teal Crew t-shirts that provide four days of cheerful support to the participants of a 3-Day.   In order to make the event as cost-effective as possible, the hundreds and hundreds of crew members who serve meals at camp, refill the dozens of water stations and provide snacks at the pit stops, drive sweep vans to give a ride to exhausted or footsore participants... well, they're not paid.  There are some professional staff who work for the event organizers, but the rest of us, hundreds per event, are volunteers.

We get to sleep in the same pink tents as the walkers, eat in the same gi-normous dining tent, shower in the same tractor trailers (the showers are actually quite nice)... and at the end of the weekend, we get a loud round of applause and a t-shirt.   In 2009 and 2010 I worked as a member of a Pit Stop crew, handing out snacks and water and Gatorade to the walkers as they came through our stop each day.   That may not sound like a lot of work, but it was: we had to erect shelters, mix and ice down Gatorade, keep perishable snacks cool and in the shade, keep an eye out for walkers who were suffering from exhaustion or blisters, and catch the occasional walker who flat-out passed out on especially hot days.   (Day 2 of Boston last year was hot.)   Crew members don't have to raise $2,300 -- they're donating their time, after all.   But many do raise money anyway -- in some cases, a lot of it.  Crew have moms and sisters and nieces and friends too -- and you might be surprised how many crew members are breast cancer survivors themselves.  It's a privilege working alongside them.



Hi, I'm Jay Furr: 3-Day team captain.  After three years of walking in the 3-Day as a solo walker or as a member of a tiny team of two or three or four walkers, I'm taking the big leap in 2011 and serving as team captain of a big team.  Well, big by my standards: 26 members and counting.   There are certainly 3-Day teams with many more members, but 26 seems like a lot, especially when you consider that the whole state I live in barely has that many people registered altogether.   Our team is loosely based on our mutual use of Twitter to jabber about our 3-Day experiences.  In 2010 we had dozens of Twitter users cheering one another on as we did our respective 3-Day walks all over the USA and waited impatiently for our own turns to come.   When the 3-Day season ended in 2010, it just seemed obvious, somehow, to see how many of the inveterate Tweeters we could get together on one team in one city -- raising mental images of a whole bunch of geeky types all hunched over their smartphones, Tweeting away about the same things, all at the same time.

I won't say "In the end, we got..." because we're still getting more members for our team every week.   We're going to go walk and crew the Atlanta 3-Day together in October -- 14 walkers, 12 crew.   Our imaginative, original, and oh-so-neat-o team name: "Team Twitter ATL".    You can visit our team page at http://www.the3day.org/goto/teamtwitteratl.    As team captain it's my job to help keep members all over the country thinking as a team until we finally come together... to provide fundraising encouragement... and to make sure that during the event I walk into camp with the last of our walkers, even if the first walkers on our team arrived in camp hours earlier and are already lined up to get a massage from a hunky masseuse named Sven.



Hi, I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day Ambassador.   I blog and Tweet about the 3-Day and I get to show a cool little "3-Day Ambassador" logo on my blog.   I get no pay for this solemn responsibility either -- which is good, because this year there are several hundred of us across the nation.  Hypothetically, some of us might even be called on to do TV or radio or print interviews about the 3-Day, but in actual practice, I'd sort of expect that to involve people who don't live in the sticks in Vermont, 200 miles from the nearest 3-Day city, and if possible, have actually had breast cancer or have a family connection to the disease.   Once in a while, if I write something actually kind of witty or moving or actually interesting, my blog entry might be shared on the 3-Day Facebook page... but again, with hundreds of us writing, I'm sure that won't happen all that often.   My main responsibility is to provide advice and encouragement for walkers and crew, especially first-timers, and also explain what the 3-Day is all about to those of you who haven't experienced the heady joys of sleeping in a pink tent yourself.



Hi, I'm Jay Furr, 2011 Boston 3-Day Route Cleanup Crew Captain.    No, that's not me in the photo above -- that's the 2010 Boston Route Cleanup Crew.  Yes, that's all of them.   Route Cleanup is the smallest crew: two members.  They're the last to leave camp each morning and the last into camp at night.  Their job: garbage pick-up.    They drive a 24' truck along the 3-Day route each day, stopping at each pit stop, grab and go, and lunch and cleaning up.   It's a lot of heavy lifting and you can't be afraid of getting dirty, because, let's face it, you're going to.   And when I signed up to crew Boston this year and filled out my crew assignment questionnaire indicating what sort of jobs I'd like to do or be willing to do, I asked for it.   I said to myself, "Leave the easy crew jobs for others.  I want to be DIRTY."   (There are, actually, no easy crew jobs.)

Well, okay, actually it was more of a "Someone's got to do it, and it'd probably be fun, coming along at the end of the route cheering the last walkers and cleaning up all the bagged garbage at each pit stop."  And I said that I'd be willing to be a crew team captain, knowing that it's a responsibility that falls on a relatively small number of crew members.  Tonight I found out that I'd not only gotten my choice of crew teams, but had been named captain as well.    As a friend put it upon hearing the news, that means I'll get to add another shirt color to my large collection of 3-Day shirts.  Along with all the teal shirts from crewing in previous years and my long-sleeved white and gray "Victory" shirts from walking five 3-Days and crewing two more, I'll be able to add a couple of the light blue crew team captain shirts.  That's assuming that the 3-Day stays with the same color scheme as in previous years, of course.  Perhaps this year they'll switch to mauve.

For each crew, there's a a crew captain, but out of the hundreds and hundreds of crew at each event, there are only 27 (give or take) crew captains.  Some crew captains oversee crews of a couple dozen members.   Some have ten.    Some have more.  Some have less.  But regardless, the job of a crew captain involves communicating with the event organizers via radio and cell phone, encouraging and motivating the members of their crew team, seeing to it that the work gets done AND that everyone has a good time.   Crew members often raise funds as a crew team and can make a big impact in the fight against breast cancer... and the crew captain helps coordinate that.  As crew captain, you want to do everything you can to leave everyone involved with the event -- walkers, crew members, spectators, and local residents -- impressed with the professionalism and energy of the event.  It's a big job.  

I do not know who my crew member will be.  I sat through a 90 minute, very inspirational let's-go-get-'em-Crew-Captains teleconference tonight and heard no end of good advice about contacting my team members, motivating them, encouraging them, helping them get to know one another, and so on.   I look forward to applying all these concepts to my crew.  Whoever he or she is.  :)



When I sat down tonight to write this, I think it was out of a sense of "Jeez.  What have I gotten myself in for?"  Because I realized during the conference call that tonight I need to post a training walk on the calendar for Saturday now that the weekend forecast here in Vermont isn't calling for ice and snow after all.  And I remembered that I need to finish publishing our Team Twitter ATL roster with photos and bios for everyone on the team to read.  And I need to get going on my own fundraising for Atlanta and San Francisco.   And now, on top of all that, I've got my responsibilities as a crew captain to begin thinking about.  And of course, I've got to keep talking about the 3-Day on Twitter and Facebook and my blog and everywhere else.   After all, I'm an Ambassador, right?

I have no idea how many 2011 3-Day participants are walking, crewing, serving as training walk leaders, serving as crew captains, and serving as walker team captains... and when they're not doing any of that, blogging about it as Ambassadors.  Probably a lot more than I realize.  But I'm not saying all this to brag.   Really.  I'm saying all this to go "Jay, I think most people aren't as crazy as you are.  Some people actually have kids and hobbies that don't involve dressing up in pink and walking for hours and hours."

Yeah, I imagine so.   But I don't have children and my wife and I aren't likely to have any -- I travel too much to ever be a good father.   And as I've told many, many people who've asked why I seem to be so dedicated (although, again, I am far from the only person who works hard for the 3-Day and to bring about the end of breast cancer), I don't want to look back at the end of my life and have nothing more to say than "I watched a lot of TV and ate a lot of meals and slept my eight hours a night."  I'd like to think that my life counted for more than that.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to go into a lab and find the cure for breast cancer.  But lacking as I do any skills in molecular biochemistry or miracle working, about all I'd accomplish, in all likelihood, would be inventing a new and wonderful floor polish.  If that.

So until someone else does find the cure, or a bunch of little treatments and vaccines that all add up to one big cure, I've got to do what I can.   And if that means crewing, walking, captaining, and talking, talking, talking ... then that's what I'm going to do.

Until the day cancer isn't staring us all in the face.   And until all our daughters and sons and nieces and nephews don't have to walk and don't have to fight.   I don't know when that day will come... but until it does, you can call me Jay Furr, Pink Warrior.

Overcommitted?

Hi.  I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day walker.  I'm taking part as a walker in two 2011 3-Day walks: San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta.   I'll be walking sixty miles in three days in September to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer... and then I'll be doing it all over again a month later.   If you wouldn't mind helping me raise funds toward the $2,300 fundraising minimum per city ($4,600 total) that I have to collect just to take part, I'd be very grateful.  You can donate to my San Francisco fund-raising total at http://www.the3day.org/goto/jay_sf or you can donate to my Atlanta total at http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurr.   I'll match any donation made on my behalf, and my employer will match me, so a $50 donation from you will result in my total going up by $150 in all.   Thank you for any help and support you wish to give -- it helps me walk but more importantly, it helps thousands upon thousands of women and men you may never even meet with their battle with an awful disease.



Hi.  I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day training walk leader.  Although there aren't a lot of 3-Day walkers in the state of Vermont, I nonetheless do my best to scout out and map and publish training walks for my fellow participants to take part in, steadily adding distance each week as the time until the 3-Day walk in Boston takes place in late July.   It's a surprising amount of work, being a training walk leader.  Once you've had your official training and gotten the credential that lets you list official walks on the 3-Day website, you've got to do no end of planning.  You've got to find a safe place for your fellow walkers to walk, a place with sidewalks or wide shoulders.  You've got to scout out bathrooms at friendly businesses or government offices -- or failing that, at the homes of friends and fellow participants -- at two or three-mile intervals along the route.  You've got invite people to your walk and wait for the inevitable "That's not a good day for me.  And you're starting too far from my house.  And will you be providing snacks?"

I envy the heck out of people who lead training walks in metropolitan areas.  I've seen photos of training walks in places like Tampa and Dallas with thirty participants all smiling and having a great time; I've never gotten more than seven at one of mine.  But: that's Vermont for you.  Little state.  Not many public restrooms along the back roads.  But we bring maple syrup with us on our walks, so it's all good.  :)



Hi, I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day crew member.   This will be my third year volunteering as a member of the Boston 3-Day support crew.  We're the women and men in the teal Crew t-shirts that provide four days of cheerful support to the participants of a 3-Day.   In order to make the event as cost-effective as possible, the hundreds and hundreds of crew members who serve meals at camp, refill the dozens of water stations and provide snacks at the pit stops, drive sweep vans to give a ride to exhausted or footsore participants... well, they're not paid.  There are some professional staff who work for the event organizers, but the rest of us, hundreds per event, are volunteers.

We get to sleep in the same pink tents as the walkers, eat in the same gi-normous dining tent, shower in the same tractor trailers (the showers are actually quite nice)... and at the end of the weekend, we get a loud round of applause and a t-shirt.   In 2009 and 2010 I worked as a member of a Pit Stop crew, handing out snacks and water and Gatorade to the walkers as they came through our stop each day.   That may not sound like a lot of work, but it was: we had to erect shelters, mix and ice down Gatorade, keep perishable snacks cool and in the shade, keep an eye out for walkers who were suffering from exhaustion or blisters, and catch the occasional walker who flat-out passed out on especially hot days.   (Day 2 of Boston last year was hot.)   Crew members don't have to raise $2,300 -- they're donating their time, after all.   But many do raise money anyway -- in some cases, a lot of it.  Crew have moms and sisters and nieces and friends too -- and you might be surprised how many crew members are breast cancer survivors themselves.  It's a privilege working alongside them.



Hi, I'm Jay Furr: 3-Day team captain.  After three years of walking in the 3-Day as a solo walker or as a member of a tiny team of two or three or four walkers, I'm taking the big leap in 2011 and serving as team captain of a big team.  Well, big by my standards: 26 members and counting.   There are certainly 3-Day teams with many more members, but 26 seems like a lot, especially when you consider that the whole state I live in barely has that many people registered altogether.   Our team is loosely based on our mutual use of Twitter to jabber about our 3-Day experiences.  In 2010 we had dozens of Twitter users cheering one another on as we did our respective 3-Day walks all over the USA and waited impatiently for our own turns to come.   When the 3-Day season ended in 2010, it just seemed obvious, somehow, to see how many of the inveterate Tweeters we could get together on one team in one city -- raising mental images of a whole bunch of geeky types all hunched over their smartphones, Tweeting away about the same things, all at the same time.

I won't say "In the end, we got..." because we're still getting more members for our team every week.   We're going to go walk and crew the Atlanta 3-Day together in October -- 14 walkers, 12 crew.   Our imaginative, original, and oh-so-neat-o team name: "Team Twitter ATL".    You can visit our team page at http://www.the3day.org/goto/teamtwitteratl.    As team captain it's my job to help keep members all over the country thinking as a team until we finally come together... to provide fundraising encouragement... and to make sure that during the event I walk into camp with the last of our walkers, even if the first walkers on our team arrived in camp hours earlier and are already lined up to get a massage from a hunky masseuse named Sven.



Hi, I'm Jay Furr, 3-Day Ambassador.   I blog and Tweet about the 3-Day and I get to show a cool little "3-Day Ambassador" logo on my blog.   I get no pay for this solemn responsibility either -- which is good, because this year there are several hundred of us across the nation.  Hypothetically, some of us might even be called on to do TV or radio or print interviews about the 3-Day, but in actual practice, I'd sort of expect that to involve people who don't live in the sticks in Vermont, 200 miles from the nearest 3-Day city, and if possible, have actually had breast cancer or have a family connection to the disease.   Once in a while, if I write something actually kind of witty or moving or actually interesting, my blog entry might be shared on the 3-Day Facebook page... but again, with hundreds of us writing, I'm sure that won't happen all that often.   My main responsibility is to provide advice and encouragement for walkers and crew, especially first-timers, and also explain what the 3-Day is all about to those of you who haven't experienced the heady joys of sleeping in a pink tent yourself.



Hi, I'm Jay Furr, 2011 Boston 3-Day Route Cleanup Crew Captain.    No, that's not me in the photo above -- that's the 2010 Boston Route Cleanup Crew.  Yes, that's all of them.   Route Cleanup is the smallest crew: two members.  They're the last to leave camp each morning and the last into camp at night.  Their job: garbage pick-up.    They drive a 24' truck along the 3-Day route each day, stopping at each pit stop, grab and go, and lunch and cleaning up.   It's a lot of heavy lifting and you can't be afraid of getting dirty, because, let's face it, you're going to.   And when I signed up to crew Boston this year and filled out my crew assignment questionnaire indicating what sort of jobs I'd like to do or be willing to do, I asked for it.   I said to myself, "Leave the easy crew jobs for others.  I want to be DIRTY."   (There are, actually, no easy crew jobs.)

Well, okay, actually it was more of a "Someone's got to do it, and it'd probably be fun, coming along at the end of the route cheering the last walkers and cleaning up all the bagged garbage at each pit stop."  And I said that I'd be willing to be a crew team captain, knowing that it's a responsibility that falls on a relatively small number of crew members.  Tonight I found out that I'd not only gotten my choice of crew teams, but had been named captain as well.    As a friend put it upon hearing the news, that means I'll get to add another shirt color to my large collection of 3-Day shirts.  Along with all the teal shirts from crewing in previous years and my long-sleeved white and gray "Victory" shirts from walking five 3-Days and crewing two more, I'll be able to add a couple of the light blue crew team captain shirts.  That's assuming that the 3-Day stays with the same color scheme as in previous years, of course.  Perhaps this year they'll switch to mauve.

For each crew, there's a a crew captain, but out of the hundreds and hundreds of crew at each event, there are only 27 (give or take) crew captains.  Some crew captains oversee crews of a couple dozen members.   Some have ten.    Some have more.  Some have less.  But regardless, the job of a crew captain involves communicating with the event organizers via radio and cell phone, encouraging and motivating the members of their crew team, seeing to it that the work gets done AND that everyone has a good time.   Crew members often raise funds as a crew team and can make a big impact in the fight against breast cancer... and the crew captain helps coordinate that.  As crew captain, you want to do everything you can to leave everyone involved with the event -- walkers, crew members, spectators, and local residents -- impressed with the professionalism and energy of the event.  It's a big job.  

I do not know who my crew member will be.  I sat through a 90 minute, very inspirational let's-go-get-'em-Crew-Captains teleconference tonight and heard no end of good advice about contacting my team members, motivating them, encouraging them, helping them get to know one another, and so on.   I look forward to applying all these concepts to my crew.  Whoever he or she is.  :)



When I sat down tonight to write this, I think it was out of a sense of "Jeez.  What have I gotten myself in for?"  Because I realized during the conference call that tonight I need to post a training walk on the calendar for Saturday now that the weekend forecast here in Vermont isn't calling for ice and snow after all.  And I remembered that I need to finish publishing our Team Twitter ATL roster with photos and bios for everyone on the team to read.  And I need to get going on my own fundraising for Atlanta and San Francisco.   And now, on top of all that, I've got my responsibilities as a crew captain to begin thinking about.  And of course, I've got to keep talking about the 3-Day on Twitter and Facebook and my blog and everywhere else.   After all, I'm an Ambassador, right?

I have no idea how many 2011 3-Day participants are walking, crewing, serving as training walk leaders, serving as crew captains, and serving as walker team captains... and when they're not doing any of that, blogging about it as Ambassadors.  Probably a lot more than I realize.  But I'm not saying all this to brag.   Really.  I'm saying all this to go "Jay, I think most people aren't as crazy as you are.  Some people actually have kids and hobbies that don't involve dressing up in pink and walking for hours and hours."

Yeah, I imagine so.   But I don't have children and my wife and I aren't likely to have any -- I travel too much to ever be a good father.   And as I've told many, many people who've asked why I seem to be so dedicated (although, again, I am far from the only person who works hard for the 3-Day and to bring about the end of breast cancer), I don't want to look back at the end of my life and have nothing more to say than "I watched a lot of TV and ate a lot of meals and slept my eight hours a night."  I'd like to think that my life counted for more than that.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to go into a lab and find the cure for breast cancer.  But lacking as I do any skills in molecular biochemistry or miracle working, about all I'd accomplish, in all likelihood, would be inventing a new and wonderful floor polish.  If that.

So until someone else does find the cure, or a bunch of little treatments and vaccines that all add up to one big cure, I've got to do what I can.   And if that means crewing, walking, captaining, and talking, talking, talking ... then that's what I'm going to do.

Until the day cancer isn't staring us all in the face.   And until all our daughters and sons and nieces and nephews don't have to walk and don't have to fight.   I don't know when that day will come... but until it does, you can call me Jay Furr, Pink Warrior.