Wrap-Up, Day 3, DC 3-Day For The Cure

[jayfurr]

It's Tuesday, October 12... and the 2010 Washington, DC Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure has been over for more than 48 hours. Predictably, I'm only just now beginning to think about summing up. I doubt that I'll inspire anyone with the post below, but my sense of completeness mandates that I at least acknowledge that the event is over.

The final afternoon of the DC 3-Day was not without incident. When I last posted, at lunch on Day 3, I was at the University of the District of Columbia ... or at some large ominous building that seemed to belong to the university, in any case. I stood up, packed away my netbook, and toddled over to the beverage station to refill my beloved pink quart-sized Nalgene bottle... draining it first, then refilling it. As I went to attach it back to my backpack's shoulder strap, it slipped from my hands and went straight to the bricks below. Bounced surprisingly high. I grabbed for it and succeeded only in smacking it right back into the bricks.  I was able to seize it on the second carom ... but when I held it up to look,  a lovely crack ran halfway around the bottle... and here I'd always thought the damn things were supposed to be well-nigh bulletproof.  I wondered if it was cosmetic only and would hold up, but my rapidly dampening hands showed otherwise.  What could I do?  I unscrewed the top and drank it down again.  (This will be relevant later.)

Then I began walking.  It was around, oh, 1 pm. I had four hours to cover 6.3 miles.  (Closing ceremonies were scheduled to begin at 5 pm.)   From lunch, I continued southeast on Connecticut Avenue, arriving at the cheering station at Dupont Circle after three miles' walk.   Unfortunately, the cheering station was very lightly attended when I got there, walking with a pod of about twenty walkers who were all moving at about the same 2.5 mph pace.  Little surprise -- the cheering station had been scheduled to be open from 10:45 until 2:30, but my experience has been that in some cases people leave cheering stations when their walkers have gone through.  When I made my last-minute trip to cheer Carole during the Dallas 3-Day last year, the cheering station I showed up at was PACKED at the beginning and steadily diminished as each family's walkers had come through.  By the scheduled end of the cheering station, it was just me, still waiting on my walker, who was walking actually behind the caboose because she'd ducked into a church to use the bathroom.  So: I sort of assume that Dupont Circle had been packed around 11 am.  It would have been nice to see that, but instead, we had maybe twenty people there, all cheering lustily but barely able to be heard over the traffic.  I was very grateful they'd stuck it out.   It's always nice to have people cheering you on even if you're toward the tail end of the walk.

I picked up the pace considerably after the cheering station.  Remember my infarction with the Nalgene bottle?  I'd drunk a quart of Gatorade, gone over to the beverage station to refill it, had dropped the bottle, and immediately drank down another quart before it all leaked out.   Two quarts of Gatorade now urgently wanted out of my system.  Fortunately, it was only .5 miles from Dupont Circle to the next pit stop.   I found that Pit Stop 4 was at the same Masonic temple that Day 1's lunch had been at -- and I felt rather cross about having to walk around three sides of a square to get into the pit.    "ARRRRGH", I said, cheerfully smiling at anyone who got in my way.  A few people gave me nervous, worried looks but I paid them no heed: I was prepared to walk around, over, and potentially through anyone who got in my way on the way to the bathroom. That's when my wife called my cell phone to inform me that our home computer network was, in her words, "having problems". 

Since this could mean anything from "A weird error message I don't understand is showing up on my PC's desktop" to "the server is on fire" I knew I'd have to take the call, but it would have to wait.  "Astfgl", I gibbered, and hung up. 

Five minutes later, a happier Jay called his wife back and found out what the problem was.  Home folders had mysteriously come unmapped.  I walked her semi-patiently through the process of fixing the problem, sitting on a stone wall in the shadow of a giant bust of George Washington, who, a plaque informed us, had been a Mason, father of our country, and inventor of the reticulating spline.  When we had it all solved and everything was reported working, a big chunk of time had gone by and the pit stop was much emptier than when I'd arrived.

It's always something.  :)

From that pit it was about a mile and a half to the other cheering station of the day at Farragut Square.  Likewise, this cheering station was nearly depopulated.   The time spent blogging at lunch and the time spent being Mister 24-Hour Computer Helpdesk had eaten into the cushion I had and I was now in a position of again being nearly the last to each mile marker.   Despite that, I felt pretty good.  The picture at the top of this entry was taken at that last cheering station, and if I do say so myself, I look semi-decent in my fuchsia and hot pink regalia.  I wasn't hurting in any significant way and my chest was no longer feeling as constricted and tight as it had been on Day 1 and 2.   Nonetheless, I did not speed-walk the rest of the way.  I tried harder than ever to talk to my fellow walkers, ask them how they felt, answer their questions about closing and about the 3-Day schedule and found myself fielding a LOT of questions about what it's like to crew.   Many of my fellow tail-end Charlies and tail-end Sues were thinking seriously about alternating walking and crewing.. having found that they'd only just managed to make their $2,300 fund-raising minimums for the DC walk and not relishing at all the prospect of starting it again in a few short months.  

Shout-out to Minnesota:  when asked what my favorite 3-Day has been so far, I said "Well, okay, they're all good in a way.  Even the Philly 3-Day last year had its high points, despite having two days rained out and stuff.  But in terms of the community support, Twin Cities was just incredible.  You could hardly walk a block without kids and moms and dads out cheering for you."  I may have drummed up some recruits for next year's Twin Cities event, at that.  I almost convinced myself to go back and walk Twin Cities again next year.  Almost.  My desire for variety and an opportunity to see a couple more 3-Day cities won out, and I'm still planning on walking Atlanta and San Francisco Bay Area.   Maybe I'll head back north in 2012 or 2013.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Kristian Kauker and all the other folks on the DC Route Safety crew.  I admire every crew; having done crew duties at two 3-Days myself, I know how much work is involved.  But I'm especially impressed by the women and men of the Route Safety crew, who were out there in traffic at every major intersection and stoplight all weekend long, dealing with cranky DC drivers and cranky tourists and cranky tour-bus drivers, to say nothing of the men in black suits and black sunglasses driving the identical black Suburbans with Maryland plates that came gunning out of an office building with lights flashing and sirens blaring, paying little or no heed to the walkers they rushed by.  (Seriously.  No one ever told me that Route Safety would involve frequent interaction with the Men in Black, but you learn something new every day.)  I never saw a Route Safety person stop smiling for a second, nor did they stop cheering the walkers on at the same time they were protecting our lives from the maniacs infesting DC streets.  :)  I'd love to do Route Safety, but I neither own a motorcycle nor do I possess the stone-cold confidence on a bicycle to ride it in driving rain or heavy wind.  Not that the DC walk featured either of those obstacles, but the requirement for being on that crew is that you be up for anything, including Oobleck.

There was definitely a sense of excitement as we neared the Washington Monument.  I had to tell a lot of disappointed people that we wouldn't be going directly to the monument... that we'd be having holding at the Reagan building.  Then people got even more confused and disappointed when our route veered way off to the east, around a block, and back to the west instead of going directly to closing.  People did like going behind the White House, though, and we all took turns using one another's cameras to take photos.   President Obama did not come out to visit; he was off on state business somewhere else, I understand.   We kept on going, smiling affably at bemused tourists who had been coached to expect politicians on the take and ravening mobs of K Street lobbyists, but had no idea what to make of legions of women in pink with bras on their heads, to say nothing of six-foot two bearded guys in pink shorts and pink hard hats.  Finally, though, we saw the Holding One Mile sign and people perked up considerably.

When I finally reached the "inflatables" -- the giant inflatable cubes that mark the theoretical "finish line" at the entrance to holding, the courtyard inside the Reagan Building was packed.  And I mean packed.  Between walkers, crew, and families, people were stacked in there like cord wood.  I got scanned in, worked my way through the crowd to pick up my official long-sleeved Victory t-shirt, and then looked around for ... the bathroom.   That's what hydrating thoroughly on a 3-Day gets you: a very, very avid interest in plumbing facilities of all kinds. 

Anyone who visited the facilities at holding on Sunday knows what happened next: I had to go through airport security-level security to get in to the building just to widdle.  That meant showing ID, running my backpack and everything I had hanging off my person on various carabiners through an X-ray machine, and even detaching pins and buttons and things so I'd be metal-free.  Some people had attached the names of people for whom they were walking to their shirts via safety pins; it made me just twitch watching them having to remove a dozen names just to get in to use the bathroom.  One person cleverly pulled her victory shirt on and then wormed her way out of the pin-bedecked t-shirt she'd been wearing,  Modesty preserved, she eagerly ventured on in to use a toilet that flushed.

When we came back out, it was already time to get the families on over to the Washington Monument, the survivors over there, and everyone else over here.   The usual scheme is to try to group the walkers into groups of five per row, half going to the right as they enter closing, and half going to the left.  Having encountered Boston 3-Day field coordinator Meredith Cleasby, in DC walking as a member of the sizable Million Dollar Babies team, though, I inadvertently found myself walking in with her team as Meredith companionably linked her arm with mine as groups began to form up.   I found a few members of her team glancing curiously at the strange apparition in their midst, but hey.   The walk from the Reagan Building on to the grounds of the Washington Monument did not take us right up to the Monument proper, but rather to a stage and closing area on the northeast corner of the grounds.   Sensibly, they'd left the Monument proper for the tourists to enjoy, and I did see many gawking down in our direction as we paraded in.

I wound up at the very back of the crowd during closing, but that was fine -- at the Twin Cities 3-Day I'd been in the very front row, close enough to throw my underwear and/or hotel key at Elvis if he'd somehow found his way onto the stage in place of country music star Candy Coburn, who was there.   And I've been through closing enough times to know what to expect.  It's a great show and very emotional, especially if you haven't been through it before.   The best part, as always, is when we're all in the circular rings (crew in a smaller circle surrounded by walkers), watching the survivors come in from the rear to take position in the very center ring.  I love the experience of slipping one shoe off and then, all of us together, holding our shoes up high to honor the survivors... in whose sake we're walking, that there may be many many more of them in the future, and fewer sad memories.

When closing ceremonies came to an end, I had one final burst of chaos that nicely wrapped up the weekend.   I collected my gear bag and put it on a shuttle back to long-term parking at Nationals Park -- then had a bit of craziness as I fielded a call from a late-arriving DC-area friend, tafkad, who was apparently somewhere in the vicinity of the Washington Monument, but neither of us could work out where he was relative to the bus I was about to board.  I got on the bus, rode it back to Nationals Park, and then had absolute heart failure when all the bags came out from the bus's cargo area and mine wasn't among them.  I had absolute kittens there on the sidewalk for a few minutes, interrupted by the arrival of tafkad, who'd caught a taxi or the Metro over -- I wasn't sure which -- until another shuttle pulled up with my gear bag on board.  I hadn't boarded the bus that my bag had gone onto -- I hadn't even realized that there were two buses both going back to long term parking.  Whee!

You'll note that throughout the blog entries from the DC 3-Day I've stuck to a chronological version of events and haven't summed up the really worthwhile part of the weekend -- the conversations I had with 3-Day walkers and crew.  That's yet to come -- I didn't carry a little pink notebook with me and make notes all weekend for nothing.  But from the standpoint of "Project Bloop" -- my plan to finish with the caboose each day in order to appreciate better how things are among the people who can't walk over four miles an hour or DON'T want to walk fast, fast, fast -- well, rest assured that the plan worked.  I spent more time on this event talking to people who had to make painful decisions -- walk in pain, or take a sweep van and give up on walking for the rest of the day -- than I ever did on any other walk.  And if that doesn't sound like a hard decision to you -- rest assured, it is.  If you're walking in honor of your mother, who you lost to breast cancer seven years ago, and in honor of your sister, who just received a very, very bad diagnosis -- you DO NOT WANT to give up.  But sometimes your body simply has different ideas.  (Heck, mine certainly did for long, long stretches of Days 1 and 2.   Boy, I felt rotten most of those days.  I'm grateful that my insane determination to stay off the sweep vans didn't wear me out completely.)

On Day 2 of the DC 3-Day, I was reminded that John Lennon had died thirty years ago to the day.  And that reminded me of his quip: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."  

I guess maybe it's time I stopped planning so much and trying to control everything and worked on just being happy in the moment.  Because you never know ... sometimes, well, life happens.