Walking Alone
Sep. 30th, 2010 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurr"So, I'm a first-time 3-Day walker and my team bailed on me -- one of them gave up after only raising $200, one started a new job and can't get any time off, and a third just got a new boyfriend who thinks the 3-Day is 'silly'. So I'm walking alone and I'm really, really bummed. Is there anyone out there who would be willing to let me walk with their team? I promise I won't be a problem."
If I've encountered that question once, I've seen it or heard it a hundred times. And the answer, as always is, "You're NEVER ALONE ON THE 3-DAY."
There, I said it. But now, let me back up a bit and explain WHY I thought it was important to write this journal entry tonight.
I'm a relatively frequent visitor to the message boards hosted by the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure website and over the years I've gotten used to seeing a wide variety of questions come up over and over and over.
I'm not writing this blog entry to complain per se about the same questions being asked over and over... and yes, before you suggest it, I know we could write a FAQ on the common questions new walkers bring up. Fact is, several such FAQs exist -- from the walker handbook that you're sent a link to once you register, to the "Event Info" links on each walker's Participant Center, to the legendary 2010 Underground Guide to the Breast Cancer Walks, to, well, the official FAQ. Nonetheless, no matter how many FAQs you put out there, the people who aren't extra-comfortable with poking around online aren't going to find them. It's for that reason that I do sort of wish that the Komen folks hadn't made an eco-friendly decision to stop mailing out walker handbooks this year. They used to send a copy to ever registered walker -- now, if you want a paper copy you have to request it, and otherwise you have to follow a link from your Participant Center on the 3-Day website to read the thing. It's a wonderful guide, but again, the net-challenged tend to not know the thing is there.
But that's all water under the bridge. As I said, no matter how many FAQs you put out there, and no matter how many panels you hold at the 3-Day Preview Expos on various topics, and no matter how many 3-Day coaches we have standing by at all hours of the day and night, there will always be insecurity and insecurity leads to worry and worry leads to those "OH NO" moments where you suddenly think of something you hadn't considered at all -- and all of a sudden there's the sudden, panicky belief that NO ONE ELSE would be SO DUMB as to have SUCH A SILLY QUESTION. (People love to believe that they're stupid when they have absolutely predictable first-timer questions. News flash: YOU'RE NOT DUMB.)
What sort of questions come up a lot? Well, there's the "Do we HAVE to camp out?" question. (Answer: no. But it's strongly recommended that you do so. A huge percentage of the 3-Day experience comes while you're sitting around after a long day of walking talking with your fellow walkers and crew about your own personal reasons for taking part.) And there's the "What sort of backpack or fanny pack does everyone carry?" (Answer: everything from 'none at all' to 'various kinds of lumbar waist packs and Camelbak backpacks' to 'a full military rucksack, Marine Corps surplus, dyed pink'.) And "Why am I getting so many BLISTERS when I train?" (Answer: there are lots of reasons -- but try using BodyGlide and maybe walking in shoes a half size too large so that when your feet swell, they won't rub uncomfortably against the inside of the shoe.)
These are all good questions.
But the question that I'm seeing coming up a lot lately is one that I really don't recall seeing quite as often in past years: "I'm walking alone because everyone else on my team bailed, or wasn't able to raise the money, and I'm sad and lonely and worried that I won't have anyone to talk to." Okay, that's not really a question, but you know what I mean. It does come up, and it is a reasonable worry.
People often assume that the 3-Day is entirely a team-based event. Perhaps that's because of experience with the Relay For Life, where teams pitch little encampments, put up huge team banners, etcetera, etcetera. While many 3-Day walkers do form teams, and some teams are very, very large (some teams have dozens of members and raise in excess of a hundred thousand dollars a year), not everyone walks as part of a team.
I can speak from experience -- I just got done walking 60+ miles in the 2010 Twin Cities 3-Day, and I most certainly was not part of a team. I was what you call a solo walker... a misleading term if there ever was one. "Solo walker" makes it sound like I spent the event all by myself, ignored by everyone around me, often walking with no one else in sight. While that was sorta true for about 90 minutes on the afternoon of Day 1 because I was walking so quickly that I outdistanced almost everyone else, it wasn't true the rest of the time. I always had fellow walkers walking with me, people I had never met before in my entire life, people who matter-of-factly waited for me at pit stops without having to be asked.
And unless you're the all-time champion introvert, the same thing is going to happen to pretty much any solo walker. Granted, a really gregarious, outgoing person will probably have a slightly easier time of it than someone who's naturally quiet, but it is actually quite hard to be a solo walker, thanks to the generally accepting, understanding, welcoming culture that the 3-Day walkers and crew have built over the last decade and change.
To be fair, and to be completely honest, I should state that if you're a solo walker hoping to make friends on Day 1 that you'll hang out with all weekend, you may get a slightly depressing comeuppance as you wander around before and during the opening ceremonies. I've been to my share of openings, and hardly anyone seems to be in the that-person-looks-lonely-let's-make-her-feel-welcome mindset. They're generally worrying about getting their gear dropped off, get checked in, get a sleeve and lanyard for their credentials, get a good place near the front of the stage, you name it. Solo walkers will be more or less overlooked during all that hustle and bustle. Again, if you're outgoing, you can simply turn to the person standing next to you as you wait for opening to really get started and say "A lot of pink here today, huh?" And who knows, that may be enough to get a whole conversation started. But I'd be surprised if you leave opening ceremonies feeling as though you've made lifelong friends with some people you just met.
Instead, you'll start to make friends once everyone's out on the route. Typically, we're all in a very heads-down, shuffle-shuffle-shuffle mindset as we wait for a crew member with a bar code reader to scan us out onto the route at the end of closing ceremonies. Then we're all working our way in one giant mob, three or four abreast, down narrow sidewalks near whatever mall or park or office complex opening took place at. You really don't hear a lot of people making small talk at that point, either. It's not until there starts to be a bit of separation, as the fast walkers move ahead and the slow walkers drop behind and the people with a major, major coffee monkey on their back duck into the nearest Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts to reload, that you start having a chance to chat with the people you're at that moment walking near. At that point, as the exuberance of opening ceremonies starts to fade a bit and the reality that you still have 58 miles to go starts to dawn on people, people start wanting to talk. People start wanting to tell a bit of their own personal story and to hear yours. And that's when you'll really start to feel like maybe you're not a solo walker after all.
I won't say that the people you chat with on the morning of Day 1 are absolutely guaranteed to encourage you to eat with them at camp that night... people do get a bit distracted when they arrive at camp and have so much to deal with, from getting their gear bag to setting up their tent to grabbing a bite to eat to taking a shower and finally to taking their turn on the big camp Slip-and-Slide, the one that runs down the hill and into the big tank of pink champagne. (I made that one up.) But even if they don't, you really don't need to feel alone at dinner. There will be other solo walkers hanging around as well. If you walk into the dining tent and you see a single person here and a single person there, they're probably solo walkers just like you, all wishing that they had a big team to walk with as well. Sit down with one or two of them. Introduce yourself. If you brought business cards with you giving your email address and name, feel free to hand them out. It helps build a sense of "who knows, I might talk with/walk with this person again sometime". And once again, you'll feel right at home.
I've found that some of the best conversations I had were in some of the oddest situations. Take the time the morning of Day 2 at camp in Boston this year. I was a member of the Pit Stop 4 crew and was up early thanks to the folks from the breakfast crew who had their tents next to ours. They had to get up at 4:00 to get ready to serve breakfast, so they figured, hey, if they were getting up, might as well get EVERYONE up, right? And they talked in their loudest Fry Cook On Duty In A Noisy Kitchen voices, right outside my tent. (Thanks, folks.) So I went ahead and got up and got showered and was waiting in the breakfast line at 5 am when they started serving... and wouldn't you know it, coffee wasn't ready? The caterers who actually cook and prepare the food and give it to the meals crew were very apologetic and said it'd be another ten or fifteen minutes before it was finished brewing. So I went over and took a seat at a table in the meals tent with some early rising walkers and some members of the Bus crew and the Medical Transport crew and ... okay, I'll say it... grumped. And I had a lot of company. "Muttermuttermutter COFFEE muttermutter." Evidently I'm not the only person who considers himself just this side of a Neanderthal until I've had a morning cup of coffee. But from that mutual grumbling about coffee, which led us to mutual grumbling about the incredibly rainy evening we'd had the night before, which led us to talking about all manner of things, some really interesting conversations were born. I learned all sorts of things about people that morning. ALL SORTS of things. Many which I won't repeat here, but it's impressive how indiscreet people are when they've just gotten done walking twenty miles, gotten soaked, gotten a fitful night's sleep in a pink tent, and NOW they have to wait for COFFEE.
Something similar happened in Twin Cities this year when I was there taking part as a walker. I'd just gotten done with my shower on the morning of Day 2 and was lumbering about in the dark and the dew outside the shower trucks when I happened, just as one of those random things, to make small talk with a woman who'd just finished HER shower and was untangling her hair in the murky pre-dawn light. I don't actually remember exactly how the conversation got started, but a half hour later I knew basically everything about her medical background as it related to breast cancer, her double mastectomy, her reconstructive surgery, her physical therapy, you name it. I've said it before and I'll say it again, people will share intimate personal details with people who are essentially complete strangers simply based on the fact that we're all members of the big 3-Day family.
I could go on ... but the essential point is that I never felt alone because I knew that with a minimum of effort I could get involved in absolutely fascinating discussions with people around me simply by making a random remark or, heck, by simply looking at the person next to me and saying "So... what brings you here? What's your story?"
Trust me, that really works. I truly never felt alone at any point on a 3-Day this year.
But I do understand why it's easy to feel alone. When I was a first-time walker, back in 2008 walking the Washington, DC 3-Day, I was completely wet behind the ears. I made a lot of mistakes. I decided to walk the event wearing my favorite hiking boots that I'd broken in on mountain trails in Vermont ... boots that were ideal for mountain trails but were completely unsuitable for the pound-pound-pounding on asphalt and concrete that a 3-Day consists of. TONS of blisters resulted. So there I was: I felt like I was really doing something pretty impressive, and I was achy and stiff and in a bit of pain, and I was posting to my blog using my smartphone and checking my email frequently hoping to see a lot of "YOU GO, JAY!!!" responses from people, and ... well, there wasn't much. I wanted some appreciation and some recognition, and frankly, it wasn't forthcoming. And even though I was part of a small team that year, the team was a bit dysfunctional, to say the least, and I was the only guy on the team. I had no tent mate, as it turned out, and this led to a lot of time to brood and ponder and feel petulant. I got over those feelings each morning when it was time to get up and get back on the route, but in the middle of the night when you're worn out and cold and achy, it's very easy to listen to those nagging inner voices. Just remember: even if your sacrifice and fundraising and personal reasons for being involved in the 3-Day go overlooked by the vast majority of your family and acquaintances and co-workers, we appreciate you... we who walk with you, hand you Gatorade to drink and lift your gear bag onto the truck on the third morning and give you rides to the next pit stop if you're sagging. Your fellow walkers and crew very much appreciate you.
And remember: while you may at times feel a bit lonely the first time you walk a 3-Day, we hope you'll be back year after year to do more events, either as a crew member or volunteer or walker. And if, in future years, you happen to be walking along the route with your team -- or by yourself -- and you see another walker looking a bit lost and sad, remember what it felt like your first year. And ask them to tell you their story, and walk with them, and make them feel welcome and accepted.
The 3-Day is about family and community and support and acceptance. You do not need to feel alone on a 3-Day. No one should. Working together, looking out for one another, reaching out to one another, everyone should arrive at the finish line feeling part of the only team that really matters, Team Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure.
If I've encountered that question once, I've seen it or heard it a hundred times. And the answer, as always is, "You're NEVER ALONE ON THE 3-DAY."
There, I said it. But now, let me back up a bit and explain WHY I thought it was important to write this journal entry tonight.
I'm a relatively frequent visitor to the message boards hosted by the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure website and over the years I've gotten used to seeing a wide variety of questions come up over and over and over.
I'm not writing this blog entry to complain per se about the same questions being asked over and over... and yes, before you suggest it, I know we could write a FAQ on the common questions new walkers bring up. Fact is, several such FAQs exist -- from the walker handbook that you're sent a link to once you register, to the "Event Info" links on each walker's Participant Center, to the legendary 2010 Underground Guide to the Breast Cancer Walks, to, well, the official FAQ. Nonetheless, no matter how many FAQs you put out there, the people who aren't extra-comfortable with poking around online aren't going to find them. It's for that reason that I do sort of wish that the Komen folks hadn't made an eco-friendly decision to stop mailing out walker handbooks this year. They used to send a copy to ever registered walker -- now, if you want a paper copy you have to request it, and otherwise you have to follow a link from your Participant Center on the 3-Day website to read the thing. It's a wonderful guide, but again, the net-challenged tend to not know the thing is there.
But that's all water under the bridge. As I said, no matter how many FAQs you put out there, and no matter how many panels you hold at the 3-Day Preview Expos on various topics, and no matter how many 3-Day coaches we have standing by at all hours of the day and night, there will always be insecurity and insecurity leads to worry and worry leads to those "OH NO" moments where you suddenly think of something you hadn't considered at all -- and all of a sudden there's the sudden, panicky belief that NO ONE ELSE would be SO DUMB as to have SUCH A SILLY QUESTION. (People love to believe that they're stupid when they have absolutely predictable first-timer questions. News flash: YOU'RE NOT DUMB.)
What sort of questions come up a lot? Well, there's the "Do we HAVE to camp out?" question. (Answer: no. But it's strongly recommended that you do so. A huge percentage of the 3-Day experience comes while you're sitting around after a long day of walking talking with your fellow walkers and crew about your own personal reasons for taking part.) And there's the "What sort of backpack or fanny pack does everyone carry?" (Answer: everything from 'none at all' to 'various kinds of lumbar waist packs and Camelbak backpacks' to 'a full military rucksack, Marine Corps surplus, dyed pink'.) And "Why am I getting so many BLISTERS when I train?" (Answer: there are lots of reasons -- but try using BodyGlide and maybe walking in shoes a half size too large so that when your feet swell, they won't rub uncomfortably against the inside of the shoe.)
These are all good questions.
But the question that I'm seeing coming up a lot lately is one that I really don't recall seeing quite as often in past years: "I'm walking alone because everyone else on my team bailed, or wasn't able to raise the money, and I'm sad and lonely and worried that I won't have anyone to talk to." Okay, that's not really a question, but you know what I mean. It does come up, and it is a reasonable worry.
People often assume that the 3-Day is entirely a team-based event. Perhaps that's because of experience with the Relay For Life, where teams pitch little encampments, put up huge team banners, etcetera, etcetera. While many 3-Day walkers do form teams, and some teams are very, very large (some teams have dozens of members and raise in excess of a hundred thousand dollars a year), not everyone walks as part of a team.
I can speak from experience -- I just got done walking 60+ miles in the 2010 Twin Cities 3-Day, and I most certainly was not part of a team. I was what you call a solo walker... a misleading term if there ever was one. "Solo walker" makes it sound like I spent the event all by myself, ignored by everyone around me, often walking with no one else in sight. While that was sorta true for about 90 minutes on the afternoon of Day 1 because I was walking so quickly that I outdistanced almost everyone else, it wasn't true the rest of the time. I always had fellow walkers walking with me, people I had never met before in my entire life, people who matter-of-factly waited for me at pit stops without having to be asked.
And unless you're the all-time champion introvert, the same thing is going to happen to pretty much any solo walker. Granted, a really gregarious, outgoing person will probably have a slightly easier time of it than someone who's naturally quiet, but it is actually quite hard to be a solo walker, thanks to the generally accepting, understanding, welcoming culture that the 3-Day walkers and crew have built over the last decade and change.
To be fair, and to be completely honest, I should state that if you're a solo walker hoping to make friends on Day 1 that you'll hang out with all weekend, you may get a slightly depressing comeuppance as you wander around before and during the opening ceremonies. I've been to my share of openings, and hardly anyone seems to be in the that-person-looks-lonely-let's-make-her-feel-welcome mindset. They're generally worrying about getting their gear dropped off, get checked in, get a sleeve and lanyard for their credentials, get a good place near the front of the stage, you name it. Solo walkers will be more or less overlooked during all that hustle and bustle. Again, if you're outgoing, you can simply turn to the person standing next to you as you wait for opening to really get started and say "A lot of pink here today, huh?" And who knows, that may be enough to get a whole conversation started. But I'd be surprised if you leave opening ceremonies feeling as though you've made lifelong friends with some people you just met.
Instead, you'll start to make friends once everyone's out on the route. Typically, we're all in a very heads-down, shuffle-shuffle-shuffle mindset as we wait for a crew member with a bar code reader to scan us out onto the route at the end of closing ceremonies. Then we're all working our way in one giant mob, three or four abreast, down narrow sidewalks near whatever mall or park or office complex opening took place at. You really don't hear a lot of people making small talk at that point, either. It's not until there starts to be a bit of separation, as the fast walkers move ahead and the slow walkers drop behind and the people with a major, major coffee monkey on their back duck into the nearest Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts to reload, that you start having a chance to chat with the people you're at that moment walking near. At that point, as the exuberance of opening ceremonies starts to fade a bit and the reality that you still have 58 miles to go starts to dawn on people, people start wanting to talk. People start wanting to tell a bit of their own personal story and to hear yours. And that's when you'll really start to feel like maybe you're not a solo walker after all.
I won't say that the people you chat with on the morning of Day 1 are absolutely guaranteed to encourage you to eat with them at camp that night... people do get a bit distracted when they arrive at camp and have so much to deal with, from getting their gear bag to setting up their tent to grabbing a bite to eat to taking a shower and finally to taking their turn on the big camp Slip-and-Slide, the one that runs down the hill and into the big tank of pink champagne. (I made that one up.) But even if they don't, you really don't need to feel alone at dinner. There will be other solo walkers hanging around as well. If you walk into the dining tent and you see a single person here and a single person there, they're probably solo walkers just like you, all wishing that they had a big team to walk with as well. Sit down with one or two of them. Introduce yourself. If you brought business cards with you giving your email address and name, feel free to hand them out. It helps build a sense of "who knows, I might talk with/walk with this person again sometime". And once again, you'll feel right at home.
I've found that some of the best conversations I had were in some of the oddest situations. Take the time the morning of Day 2 at camp in Boston this year. I was a member of the Pit Stop 4 crew and was up early thanks to the folks from the breakfast crew who had their tents next to ours. They had to get up at 4:00 to get ready to serve breakfast, so they figured, hey, if they were getting up, might as well get EVERYONE up, right? And they talked in their loudest Fry Cook On Duty In A Noisy Kitchen voices, right outside my tent. (Thanks, folks.) So I went ahead and got up and got showered and was waiting in the breakfast line at 5 am when they started serving... and wouldn't you know it, coffee wasn't ready? The caterers who actually cook and prepare the food and give it to the meals crew were very apologetic and said it'd be another ten or fifteen minutes before it was finished brewing. So I went over and took a seat at a table in the meals tent with some early rising walkers and some members of the Bus crew and the Medical Transport crew and ... okay, I'll say it... grumped. And I had a lot of company. "Muttermuttermutter COFFEE muttermutter." Evidently I'm not the only person who considers himself just this side of a Neanderthal until I've had a morning cup of coffee. But from that mutual grumbling about coffee, which led us to mutual grumbling about the incredibly rainy evening we'd had the night before, which led us to talking about all manner of things, some really interesting conversations were born. I learned all sorts of things about people that morning. ALL SORTS of things. Many which I won't repeat here, but it's impressive how indiscreet people are when they've just gotten done walking twenty miles, gotten soaked, gotten a fitful night's sleep in a pink tent, and NOW they have to wait for COFFEE.
Something similar happened in Twin Cities this year when I was there taking part as a walker. I'd just gotten done with my shower on the morning of Day 2 and was lumbering about in the dark and the dew outside the shower trucks when I happened, just as one of those random things, to make small talk with a woman who'd just finished HER shower and was untangling her hair in the murky pre-dawn light. I don't actually remember exactly how the conversation got started, but a half hour later I knew basically everything about her medical background as it related to breast cancer, her double mastectomy, her reconstructive surgery, her physical therapy, you name it. I've said it before and I'll say it again, people will share intimate personal details with people who are essentially complete strangers simply based on the fact that we're all members of the big 3-Day family.
I could go on ... but the essential point is that I never felt alone because I knew that with a minimum of effort I could get involved in absolutely fascinating discussions with people around me simply by making a random remark or, heck, by simply looking at the person next to me and saying "So... what brings you here? What's your story?"
Trust me, that really works. I truly never felt alone at any point on a 3-Day this year.
But I do understand why it's easy to feel alone. When I was a first-time walker, back in 2008 walking the Washington, DC 3-Day, I was completely wet behind the ears. I made a lot of mistakes. I decided to walk the event wearing my favorite hiking boots that I'd broken in on mountain trails in Vermont ... boots that were ideal for mountain trails but were completely unsuitable for the pound-pound-pounding on asphalt and concrete that a 3-Day consists of. TONS of blisters resulted. So there I was: I felt like I was really doing something pretty impressive, and I was achy and stiff and in a bit of pain, and I was posting to my blog using my smartphone and checking my email frequently hoping to see a lot of "YOU GO, JAY!!!" responses from people, and ... well, there wasn't much. I wanted some appreciation and some recognition, and frankly, it wasn't forthcoming. And even though I was part of a small team that year, the team was a bit dysfunctional, to say the least, and I was the only guy on the team. I had no tent mate, as it turned out, and this led to a lot of time to brood and ponder and feel petulant. I got over those feelings each morning when it was time to get up and get back on the route, but in the middle of the night when you're worn out and cold and achy, it's very easy to listen to those nagging inner voices. Just remember: even if your sacrifice and fundraising and personal reasons for being involved in the 3-Day go overlooked by the vast majority of your family and acquaintances and co-workers, we appreciate you... we who walk with you, hand you Gatorade to drink and lift your gear bag onto the truck on the third morning and give you rides to the next pit stop if you're sagging. Your fellow walkers and crew very much appreciate you.
And remember: while you may at times feel a bit lonely the first time you walk a 3-Day, we hope you'll be back year after year to do more events, either as a crew member or volunteer or walker. And if, in future years, you happen to be walking along the route with your team -- or by yourself -- and you see another walker looking a bit lost and sad, remember what it felt like your first year. And ask them to tell you their story, and walk with them, and make them feel welcome and accepted.
The 3-Day is about family and community and support and acceptance. You do not need to feel alone on a 3-Day. No one should. Working together, looking out for one another, reaching out to one another, everyone should arrive at the finish line feeling part of the only team that really matters, Team Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure.
