Advice for First-Time 3-Day Walkers

[jayfurr]

There are probably a jillion blog posts and FAQ lists on this very topic, but that being said, there's always room for Jell-O.  I have a lot of friends and acquaintances out there on the Net who actually know very little about what a 3-Day is really like, and so this entry is aimed at them, too.  I guess you could say this was written in part because, well, I seem to have so little trouble on a 3-Day, and I didn't want to give everyone out there the impression that a 3-Day walk is really as effortless as I guess I sometimes make it look.

First: I know a lot of you did little or no training for the walk.  You kept meaning to, but what with work, and American Idol and Project Runway and Castle to watch, and kids to look after, and so on, and so on, you frankly just never got around to it.  I know it's not like you intentionally said "Aw, I'll be fine, there's really no need."  You really meant to... but it's hard to start an exercise and training regimen if you've never been all that active, and if you don't have friends and co-workers and stuff to drag you out to train with your 3-Day team. 

So now what? 

Well, you raised $2,300 (or more) for the walk, or at least you expect to, and that means that you're pretty committed to the cause of finding a cure for breast cancer.  You promised your donors you'd walk sixty miles in three days, and in return, they donated a decent chunk of change to help fund the search for a cure.  I assume you'd like to do well at it -- and walk every foot of the way, if at all possible.  I know there are some people, a very small number of them, but they exist, who really only walk two or three miles a day and spend the rest of the event riding sweep vans and shuttle buses.  Some of them do it because they're physically unable to do more, but others do it because they really come to the 3-Day for the party atmosphere and to hang out with pals.  If that's what you want, okay... but generally speaking I assume that you want to walk all sixty miles.  You want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the third day and tell yourself "you DID it!" 

Side note: if you really cannot walk all sixty miles, either because of a medical condition, injury, heatstroke, or whatever, DO NOT BEAT YOURSELF UP ABOUT IT.   Not everyone, especially people who've had surgery, chemo, and radiation, really needs to be out there absolutely ruining themselves on the route by plowing ahead despite their bodies saying "STOP!"  But right here, right now, I'm really addressing the people who ought to be able to walk all sixty miles, the ones who set out with that as their goal.  The ones who, unfortunately, didn't really train.

What are you gonna do?

Shoes: if you haven't already done so, go out and get yourself some running shoes.  Running shoes a half size too large for your feet.  If you can, wear them at least once on a five to eight mile walk.  Ideally, I'd like to see you walk much more than that to really break them in, but you definitely don't want to go out there wearing shoes that are just off the store shelves and totally new and not broken in.  Why a half-size too large?  Your feet are going to swell from all the walking.  Don't be surprised by it.  Mine do, and I've done this kind of thing before.  You want to make sure that your feet have room to expand without rubbing up unnecessarily against the inside of the shoes and experiencing a lot of friction.  With friction you get blisters.

Where do you GET your shoes?  I also understand that you can't necessarily go out and blow $200 on a top-of-the-line set of running shoes.  I did that, and while I'm perfectly happy with the shoes I spent all that cash on, I'm just as happy with another pair of shoes made by the same manufacturer that I got on clearance at Sears for $35.   Which brand?  I worked out that New Balance shoes seem to work for me and I've been buying all of mine by going to their website, clicking on "clearance", and buying whatever running shoe they've got in my size for a decent price.   Really.  You can go there via this link. 

Socks:  You could do a whole blog entry on socks.  I personally prefer Smartwool hiking socks -- not the thickly padded alpining socks they make for mid-winter wear, but their basic hiking socks.  If you have an REI or EMS store, or something similar, in your neck of the woods, you should be able to find several pairs that will work.  That being said, I've found that I also like wearing sock liners inside my Smartwool socks.  Sock liners eliminate a lot of the friction, acting as a second skin that helps minimize blisters.  In both cases, the socks and the liners wick excess moisture away from your feet, and the socks provide some helpful additional cushioning.  I followed that scheme when I walked the Twin Cities 3-Day in August of 2010 and didn't have a single blister.

By the way, I would advise against wearing short little footie socks, the kind that barely come above your shoes.  My wife has a strong preference for that kind of sock, but nearly every time we go out for a training walk we're stopping every few miles so she can take her socks off and shake out grit and sand and small pebbles that somehow worked their way inside.  Not fun. 

How many pairs of socks should you take with you on a 3-Day?  At a minimum, six.  And maybe more.  The goal is to change socks at lunchtime each day, putting on fresh socks and perhaps giving your feet a little bit of an opportunity to breathe while you eat.   Furthermore, if it rains you'll REALLY REALLY want to have a dry pair to put on at some point.    Rain is the reason why I also bring a second pair of shoes in my gear bag so that if I get drenched on Day 1 I can walk in dry shoes on Day 2.  And I bring along a few sheets of newspaper to cram into my wet Day 1 shoes to help suck the moisture out while I'm out on the route for Day 2.  You may even want more socks to wear at camp in the evening... or you may prefer to bring a pair of sandals to change into.  It's up to you.   I bring a pair of sandals that can double as shower shoes and wear those, unless it's really chilly, and then I put on my third pair of socks of the day and then put on whichever of my two pairs of running shoes is driest.

While we're on the subject of feet: invest in a stick or two of BodyGlide.  The medical crews you'll meet at pit stops and at camp will have moleskin to put on and around blisters (though many walkers hit their local pharmacy's foot care aisle and buy some of their own), but the medical folks won't have BodyGlide.  Slather the stuff on your feet before putting your socks on, and reapply at lunch, at a minimum, and you'll probably have a lot fewer friction-induced blisters.  My wife swears by the stuff; I've used it on occasion but usually go without, since my feet are really toughened up from all the training I've done.  It's ideal for people whose feet don't have nice thick callouses built up.

Finally -- while we're still on the subject of how to avoid your feet turning into hamburger because you didn't do as much training as you'd have liked: remember, it may RAIN.  I've alluded to this already when I counseled people to bring some dry newspaper with them in their gear bag (preferably folded, in a watertight ZipLoc bag, so it stays dry until you need it), but that's for at the end of the day, to try to dry your wet shoes out from the inside.  What do you do if it rains hard WHILE you're walking?  Which it may well do?   Me, I just put my head down, sigh, and keep walking (and remind myself that I have dry socks in my backpack to change into if it gets really bad), but some people like to bring plastic bags to wear over their socks, inside their shoes.  I've seen people using the kind of plastic bags you get from the grocery checkout, loosely fastened at the top with twist ties or rubber bands.  That always looks unpleasant to me because I think "wow, now all my sweat will be trapped inside and my feet are going to turn into prunes", but many people seem to like that kind of thing.  Might not be a bad idea to bring along a cloth bandanna or two on the route to perform critical foot-drying, sweat-wiping, etcetera, etcetera.

Now, let's change gears.  Now that you're ready with good socks, shoes your feet can swell in without blistering, what else?

Well, how about stretching?  The 3-Day guideline is five minutes every hour.  Stretching is not guaranteed to prevent injury or to keep you from tightening up unpleasantly while out on the route, but it rarely hurts.  If you have done little or no training, you will probably benefit a lot from spending those five minutes.    If you know absolutely nothing about stretching, you can find three pages of suggested stretches on pages 36-38 of your 2010 Susan G Komen 3-Day For The Cure walker handbook, which you can view here.  (Incidentally, since the 3-Day went to electronic distribution of the walker handbooks the number of people who ACTUALLY read their handbook seems to have really dropped.  If you're a first timer, READ THE THING.   You can read it online or click the icon at the top of the screen to download it to your PC as an Adobe Acrobat .PDF file.)

Next:  DRINK.   And when I say "drink" I mean "drink healthy sports drink and water".  I do not mean "stop off at bars you pass on the route for a beer or three."  A cold beer may be very pleasant at times but it has no place on the route while you're walking a 3-Day.  An already tired walker, possibly a little dehydrated on a hot day, does NOT need beer or a glass of wine or any sort of mixed drink in their system when she's stepping off curbs into streets and intersections and trying to look both ways and avoid cars and bikes.  

And you know what else is bad about alcohol on a 3-Day?   Imagine that you're doing well -- you're not at the very back of the pack.  You and your teammates decide to duck into a bar for a beer and you pass an hour watching walkers go by.  Then you look at your watch and say "we'd better get going."  And you step out of the bar and... huh, that's odd.  There're no walkers in sight.  So you start off following the route signs... and then suddenly a white van pulls up and tells you "the caboose went by here a half hour ago."  And makes you hop in the sweep van to be taken to camp or to closing. 

On every 3-Day route, there's a 3-Day staff member on a bicycle slowwwwly riding along behind the last walkers.  When that person, the "caboose rider", goes by a point, the route from that point back is closed.  If you keep walking ahead of that rider, you'll be fine... but if you're in a bar watching the NFL game and having a couple of cold ones and the caboose rider goes by, well... you're out of luck. 

I can't imagine a much more depressing way to end a 3-Day than to arrive at closing in a sweep van, not because I was injured or feeling ill, but rather because I spent so much time in a bar that the section of route I'd been on closed while I was inside.

So, yes, when I say "DRINK" I mean "drink healthy liquids".  If you don't like Gatorade-brand sport drink, bring your own mix and make it up yourself using water from pit stops.  There are ZILLIONS of brands of sport drink that come in little self-mixing tablets that you can buy at sporting goods stores, running stores, cycling stores, even online.  I personally prefer a brand called "Camelbak Elixir" that comes in lemon-lime, berry, and orange.  The orange is caffeinated; the others are not.  But drink SOMETHING.  A lot of people hate sport drink so much that they ONLY drink water on a 3-Day... and then they say "well, I'll eat salty snacks to make up for the electrolytes I'm losing by not drinking sport drink."    Within reason, that plan will work -- but you may want to read the labels on the "salty snacks".  Some snacks you'd assume would have tons of sodium actually don't have nearly as much as you'd think.  When I worked as a crew member at Pit Stop 4 this year in Boston we actually lined up the snacks from saltiest to least salty -- and the potato chips, which everyone assumed were saltiest, actually were only fifth or so if memory serves.  The pretzels and string cheese were much higher.

When I walk a 3-Day I carry a 1.5 liter water bottle with a wide mouth with me for putting water and ice in and a second 1.5 liter bottle with a narrower mouth that I fill with sport drink.  It's next to impossible to jam chunks of ice into a narrow-mouth bottle, so if you want to get ice in your drink on a really hot day, bring a wide-mouth bottle.   Sometimes I carry a Camelbak backpack with me, the kind with a hydration bladder inside that I can drink from via a long hose that runs to my mouth, but if you want the truth, I find the time it takes to stop, take off my pack, work the bladder out, open it, fill it, put it back in, put all my gear back in the pack, somewhat annoying.  I may get over that feeling in time and be back to using it primarily and only carrying one bottle with me.  It's hard to say; my opinion changes from one year to the next.  But remember one key thing:  the crew working the pit stops DO NOT SUPPLY CUPS OR BOTTLES FOR YOUR BEVERAGES.   You MUST bring your own.

What happens if you don't drink?  Or if you don't drink enough?  Worst case scenario: you faint and are taken to Medical and Medical sizes you up and decides that you're so dehydrated that you need to be transported to an area hospital for intravenous hydration.  Almost as worse-case scenario: faint, they take you to Medical, you feel better after a while, but not 100% and they red-card you.  Red-carding means that they take your walker credential away, put a red card in its place... and if you're red-carded, you're not allowed out of camp and onto the route the next day until you've passed a physical.   What if neither of those things happens?  Well, you still finish the walk feeling poorly, with stiff, aching, cramped muscles, and all evening and all night you're stiff and cramping because your body is so starved for electrolytes.   

There's a term you should know.  It's "hyponatremia".   It's bad.  If you don't know all about it, and if you haven't checked in for your 3-Day walk online yet, you better read about it here.  It'll be on the quiz you have to pass during online check-in.  It happens to people who just flat-out don't drink enough AND to people who won't drink sport drink and tell themselves "I'll eat lots of salty snacks" and then DON'T.   A teammate of mine in the Washington, DC 3-Day two years ago spent most of the event battling it -- all because, as she kept telling us, she hates to feel "waterlogged" while out walking. So she didn't drink, and she cramped up, and had to be taken to the hospital for intravenous hydration, and got red-carded, and frankly, I wish they hadn't allowed her back out on the route the next day because damned if she didn't turn around the next day and refuse to drink again.  I mean, cripes.  DON'T BE LIKE HER.

So we've talked about keeping your feet happy.  And we've talked about stretching.  And we've talked about avoiding unhealthy liquids and staying sufficiently hydrated and loaded with electrolytes.  All with an eye toward you successfully finishing your first 3-Day walking under your own power, not riding a sweep van or shuttle bus.  Is there anything else you really, really ought to plan ahead for?

Yes.  Heat.

I feel a tiny bit weird bringing that subject up given that last year I walked the Philadelphia 3-Day basically clad from head to toe in winter gear.  It was that cold and awful and rainy and nasty out.  But each year I've crewed the Boston 3-Day we've had at least one day that was so incredibly hot and humid that walkers were literally passing out on the grass at our pit stop because they were just that overheated.  Whenever you're walking a 3-Day there are signs up at each pit stop advising what the heat danger for the day is: moderate, severe, extreme, etcetera.  Each year the "black signs" have come out by afternoon.  The same thing happened this year when I walked the Twin Cities 3-Day.  It was really hot on Day 3 and the black signs reading HEAT DANGER: EXTREME were definitely out.  The staff and crew had parked buses at the pit stops with the air conditioning running full blast in hopes walkers would take a cooling break inside the buses... and you'd be surprised how many walkers said "aw, if I get on that bus to cool down I'll never be able to get off again."  And so they'd stagger off on unsteady feet and I'd wonder how far they'd make it before a sweep van would find them sitting in the shade, head between their knees, somewhere along the route. 

It was so hot in Boston this year on Day 2 that I saw a walker go down right in front of my table at the pit stop I was working.  She seemed okay one moment ... then her sister came up and put a wet, ice-filled cloth bandanna or something on the back of her neck... and BAM down went that walker right on the grass.  Vertical one moment -- horizontal the next.  (She's okay now, but it was scary for all of us.)   When it gets hot like that, you need to take precautions.  Seriously: DRINK MORE.  Make sure to get sports drink in you, even if you don't like the taste.  Ask the crew to add ice to your water bottle; they'll be happy to.  I should know, that's pretty much all I did on one of the three days I worked as crew this year in Boston. (Just remember my advice from a few paragraphs up: bring a WIDE MOUTH bottle to make it easier to get ice in.)

Some years we've had what are called 'dunking stations' -- bins full of ice water that walkers can dunk their bandannas in.  You dunk, you wring a bit, and then you wrap that cold, wet bandanna around your neck.  Bliss, for a while.  But they made us stop doing that because it was actually really really unsanitary for everyone to be re-using the same sweaty water, no matter how often we added fresh ice.   Some pits will offer sponges that you can dunk instead, keeping the water clean enough not to raise medical alarms.  :)   But if it's hot and a pit you come to doesn't have a formal dunking station, consider just getting some ice at the beverage station and making a cold compress yourself out of a spare bandanna.  It's amazing how much better you feel after a few minutes resting in the shade with a cold pack on your neck or forehead.

It's also a really good idea to pack a sun hat.  A baseball cap might seem logical, but it doesn't protect the nape of the neck, and if you're walking east at the end of the route you can really suffer with the sun's heat beating down on you from behind.  A hat with a wide brim, or a hat with a cloth drape that hangs down the back to provide cover for your neck, is better.   And along that same line of reasoning, bring sunscreen.  Nothing's less fun than sitting in the dining tent at the end of a long day of walking, utterly miserable because you forgot to put sunscreen on earlier in the day.

The last point I'd like to make for a first-time 3-Day walker is this: don't rush.  Don't be in a hurry.  If you're a runner or a veteran hiker walking solo or with a small group of similarly disposed buddies, okay, FINE: walk as fast as you like.  I walked the Twin Cities 3-Day this year as a solo walker and was making about 4 miles an hour, if not faster, for most of the distance.  I won't say it wasn't fun to really let my body go all out and ker-zoom, but I missed out on a lot, too.  I was often the only walker at a pit stop when I passed through and other than saying "howdy howdy" to the crew members on duty, I really didn't get a ton of opportunities to talk to my fellow walkers until we were all at camp that night.   It was okay, though, because it wasn't my first 3-Day and it won't be my last.  I've got two more coming up in just a few weeks: DC at the beginning of October and Tampa Bay at the end of October.   I've personally vowed to finish with the last walkers each day in DC to make sure that I get to spend time with the real heroes of the 3-Day: the ones who may not be former track stars or experienced hikers, but whose passion to help pay for a cure for breast cancer is so strong that they keep on walking when others might have given up and caught a sweep van to camp. 

But if this is your FIRST 3-Day coming up, seriously:  don't power-walk the event.  Talk to people you meet at opening.  Talk to walkers you encounter along the way.  Talk to the crew -- they're giving up four whole days of their lives just to make sure you have food to eat, water to drink, and safe transport and access to medical services.  Take some time at each pit stop to sit down and stretch and drink and ask yourself how you feel.  If you feel a little dizzy, grab an extra salty snack and drink some more sport drink.  If you feel 'hot spots' cropping up on your feet, stop and apply some moleskin or band-aids to keep them from turning into big scary blisters.  Don't worry if you're not the in the pack of walkers leading the way.  Focus on walking at a pace that works for you.

See, what it all comes down to in the end is this: the Susan G Komen 3-Day For The Cure is not a race.  A lot of people get it confused with the Race for the Cure, which is a race.  The 3-Day is a sixty-mile endurance event that requires special training and special preparation.  If this is your first 3-Day, and if you really haven't gotten a chance to do much training, make sure that you take good care of yourself and your feet so you can confidently say to anyone who asks that it most certainly won't be your last one either.   We may not all walk together and we may walk at different speeds, but we want everyone to arrive at the finish line happy, healthy, and proud of what they did.