Komen Miles
Mar. 30th, 2011 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurr"I think we went 23."
"I heard it was more like 23 and a half."
"I got 24 on my pedometer."
"But I thought we were only supposed to do 22 miles today!"
All together: "Well, you know: 'Komen miles'."
When you take part in a Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure 60-mile 3-day walk to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer, simple arithmetic tells you that you're going to walk about 20 miles each day. Right? 60 miles, 3 days: that's 20 miles a day.
The truth is, it's not always exactly 20 miles each day. The total will indeed be as close to 60 miles as can be managed, sure... but each day may be less than 20, or more.
Each day's route is planned out in advance by the 3-Day staff and marked with directional arrows and distance signs. Day 1's route is usually around 21 miles. Day 2's route is often close to 24. That makes it possible to have a short route on Day 3 -- maybe only 15 miles -- and still have the total distance add up to 60. (The staff always plans a relatively short Day 3 route so people can complete the distance in time to attend closing ceremonies at 5 pm.)
When you finish the route each day -- arriving at camp on Day 1 and 2 or arriving at closing on Day 3 -- you overhear the same chatter every year. Year in, year out, it's a close contest between "Did you see that hot firefighter with his shirt off at the last cheering station?" and "I think we walked more than they said we were going to."
That's where the term "Komen miles" starts to come in. We may have been scheduled to walk 20 miles... but those are "Komen miles". Somehow, at the end of the day, the word will get around that even though the route was supposed to be 20.5 miles, we really walked 22. Or 23. Or 24. Or whatever. (In actual point of fact, we probably really did walk around 20.5 miles, but it all depends on who's measuring.)
Walkers always know how far they're supposed to walk each day. That's because at the start of each day you get a little cardboard "route card" that you can carry in your pocket or tuck into the clear plastic credential sleeve that you wear around your neck. It lists the mileage from the beginning of the route to each pit stop, grab-and-go stop, cheering station, and, of course, lunch. On average, there's a stop every three miles or so, giving everyone a chance to use a port-o-jon, load up on Gatorade, and grab any snacks they need. That being said, the wonderful event planners who get the difficult job of planning and mapping out the route don't always get to place their stops at exactly the points along the route that would be optimal and ideal.
Case in point: at the 2009 Boston 3-Day, I was part of the team of support crew assigned to Pit Stop 5 -- the last pit stop on the route before camp. We had everything: Gatorade, water, snacks, annoying disco music -- even a guy in a kilt who thought he knew how to dance but really, really didn't. (That was, um, me.) And curiously, hardly any of the walkers wanted snacks. Most 3-Day walkers coming into our pit stop waved happily at us and just kept on walking, knowing that camp was just three miles ahead. It wasn't until we'd been there an hour that we put two and two together and figured out why -- Pit Stop 4 was literally only a mile down the road. Everyone had already gone to the bathroom there and loaded up with snacks and Gatorade and water for the final stretch run into camp and had no real interest in doing it all over again a mile later. They had everything they needed already.
Some members of our crew asked "Why on Earth would they put two pit stops a mile apart?" Anyone who's done event planning (especially anyone who's planned out the route for a marathon or 5K or charity walk) knows the answer: You put the pit stops and water stations where you can... and where it doesn't cost anything. If there are two available public parks a mile apart, and no other really suitable location for a pit stop for two more miles in either direction... well, then you're probably going to have two pit stops a mile or so apart. We don't always use parks... sometimes we use a church, or a school, or even the parking lot of a local restaurant that's not open on a given day.
But that being said, the route planners don't make walkers go without for a corresponding extra distance just because they had to put two stops close together. They'll fill in the gaps with smaller "Grab and go" stops -- no snacks, just bathrooms and beverages -- where they need to. It's really kind of an art, planning out the ideal route that has stops at exactly the right intervals and in places that give people room to spread out, stretch, not trip over one another, etcetera. And if the weather's likely to be hot, having some nice shade trees is good too.
You don't always get what you want. The route planners try, but they're working within a budget. Rather than spend the proceeds of the event on renting space, they try to get free space wherever they can and save the funds raised by the event for the fight against breast cancer.
And once the route's all planned out, the 3-Day staff carefully measures the distance between each point and creates those little 'route cards' they hand out at the start of each day. And we look at them as we're walking and in the depths of our tired little hearts we believe them absolutely. When you're hot and weary and you've already walked 15 miles, you want to believe with every fiber of your being that the route card is telling the truth and that the next pit stop is right around the corner.
Only, we know they're really not as accurate as all that. Those route cards are printed up a couple of weeks before the event. Things have an, um, ... "unfortunate tendency to change" between the day that the route cards are printed up and Day 1 of the 3-Day.
The year I did my first 3-Day walk, the route was still being adjusted right up until the walk started. If I understand correctly, two locations that had agreed to host pit stops pulled out almost at the last minute and with very little warning... and suddenly, the event planners had to scramble and find somewhere... anywhere... that would make for a suitable pit stop and not take the walkers too far off the planned route. I believe that's why a pit stop wound up in a grassy field by the side of the road at a historical marker informing us that we were the site of a former Cold War missile defense station.
So much for the accuracy of the route cards that year. There's a reason the cards always say "(Note: Mileage may not be exact.)"
Take a look for yourself: if you total up the listed mileage below, it totals 54.6 (that's if you assume that the "10.0" for Day 1 was meant to be 20.0). In actual fact, we did walk just about 60 miles, and that's not counting the distance walked at the camp going to and from the dining tent and showers. But any at any number of spots on the route we were supposed to be right at a pit stop -- only there was no sign of any as far as the eye could see. (Generally, the stop was a half mile ahead, around a corner.) Or we weren't expecting the stop just yet and bam, there it was. Komen miles.
You could look at the person next to you and ask "So, how far until the next pit stop?" And they'd say "2.8 miles... but those are Komen miles." And you'd both grin and keep on going.
It's not that the planners don't try to make the route cards as accurate as possible. But if a city government gives permission for the 3-Day route to go through a particular area, and changes its mind at the last minute and says "Y'all can't go through there -- they're repaving that street that week" -- a little 'jog' might creep into the route. Things happen. If the mayor of some local town retires and her replacement as mayor doesn't quite "get" what the 3-Day is all about, a town that formerly might have rolled out the pink carpet for all the participants might give very grudging support the next year. A church might agree to host a pit stop only to have the long-time lay leader of the congregation pass away that week -- and schedule the funeral for the exact time most of the walkers would have been coming through.
I'm still not sure what happened in 2008 in DC, but stops actually occurred out of order. I think the planners had to significantly juggle things as various rugs were pulled out from under 'em. If there's a harder event to plan than a major walk involving thousands of participants over a three-day time frame in the nation's capital then I don't know what it is. Must have been a fun and very trying time for the organizers, I can say that much.
Logistically, all the planning and permitting for a 3-Day is a real nightmare at times. I've talked to enough members of the staff to know how much work they put in and how painstaking their attention to every detail is... and even so, there're always the curve balls that you never expect. It's part of why the organizers don't move the event around the country doing a different 15 cities each year... it's hard enough doing the walks in areas that have hosted them many times, let alone start completely from scratch every year.
So, no, the distances on the route cards are not always as accurate as one would like. Tweaks to the route can add distance here and subtract it there. The organizers do try.
But the complexity of the route planning process doesn't account for all the laughter at the end of each day about "Komen miles". Sure, the route cards are a bit comic in their hopeful portrayal of the route... but what really brings the term home is the inevitable disputes about how far we walked in all. The reason for the end-of-the-day kibitzing about the total distance and the sarcastic references to "Komen miles" can be summed up in one word: pedometers.
A lot of 3-Day walkers train for the event and record mileage during the event by walking with pedometers. If you've never used one, they're basically simple little devices that count your strides and estimate distance based on your average stride distance. The trick, of course, when you're calibrating them is to know your average stride. One way to get them to be fairly accurate is to walk a measured distance along a straight, flat road -- or to walk the track at a local high school. Then see if the pedometer's distance estimate agreed with what you know the distance actually was.
But what people always forget is that your stride when you're out walking by yourself after work isn't going to be the same stride you're using when you're shuffling along in a big pack of 3-Day walkers. The difference is probably greatest at the start of the day when everyone is all bunched up together and at the end of the day when everyone's tired and dragging and really looking forward to getting to camp. You may be taking a lot more steps then ... a lot of short little steps that aren't really eating up much distance. And your pedometer's going to clucking away happily to itself, recording mile after mile. It all depends on the pedometer, of course. But trust me: they're not that accurate if you're not consistently taking the same stride.
I walk with an actual GPS unit... a pretty modern one, used for trail hiking and finding your way out of the woods when you're lost, that kind of thing. And I dutifully record a track as I go, just so I can show my wife, later on, where we walked. But a consequence of that is that I do get a recording of the distance walked -- a pretty darn accurate recording. It's not going to be 100% accurate if we're walking through a city center surrounded by high buildings that block the view of the sky and the orbiting GPS satellites to the south, but generally speaking, if it says we walked 24 miles, I'm willing to bet we walked 24 miles. I've used it enough times on the same routes around my home in Vermont to know that it agrees with published distances on maps and with the odometer of my car.
So when I hit the "finish line" (a term we actually don't like to use because it implies that the 3-Day is a race, which it isn't), I look down and go "Huh. We walked 22.8 miles." And I go about my business, while all around me the "I got 24!" and "I got TWENTY FIVE MILES" cries ring out.
Tired people can be a little teensy tiny bit paranoid at times. People do want to walk the 60 miles they promised their donors... but they're not terribly interested in walking more. Imagine how ticked off a marathon runner would be if you told them that the marathon route was screwed up and everyone had really run 27.3 miles. Even if they're not trying to set a Boston Marathon qualifying time, they're going to be peeved. Juuuuuuust a tiny bit. And I think something similar creeps in on a 3-Day. It's human nature to want the route cards to be accurate and know how far we're going to walk and be able to rely on that.
Me, I think the "Komen miles" phenomenon sort of adds to the fun of the event. Life is unpredictable and weird things happen. Why should a 3-Day breast cancer walk be any different?
"I heard it was more like 23 and a half."
"I got 24 on my pedometer."
"But I thought we were only supposed to do 22 miles today!"
All together: "Well, you know: 'Komen miles'."
When you take part in a Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure 60-mile 3-day walk to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer, simple arithmetic tells you that you're going to walk about 20 miles each day. Right? 60 miles, 3 days: that's 20 miles a day.
The truth is, it's not always exactly 20 miles each day. The total will indeed be as close to 60 miles as can be managed, sure... but each day may be less than 20, or more.
Each day's route is planned out in advance by the 3-Day staff and marked with directional arrows and distance signs. Day 1's route is usually around 21 miles. Day 2's route is often close to 24. That makes it possible to have a short route on Day 3 -- maybe only 15 miles -- and still have the total distance add up to 60. (The staff always plans a relatively short Day 3 route so people can complete the distance in time to attend closing ceremonies at 5 pm.)
When you finish the route each day -- arriving at camp on Day 1 and 2 or arriving at closing on Day 3 -- you overhear the same chatter every year. Year in, year out, it's a close contest between "Did you see that hot firefighter with his shirt off at the last cheering station?" and "I think we walked more than they said we were going to."
That's where the term "Komen miles" starts to come in. We may have been scheduled to walk 20 miles... but those are "Komen miles". Somehow, at the end of the day, the word will get around that even though the route was supposed to be 20.5 miles, we really walked 22. Or 23. Or 24. Or whatever. (In actual point of fact, we probably really did walk around 20.5 miles, but it all depends on who's measuring.)
Walkers always know how far they're supposed to walk each day. That's because at the start of each day you get a little cardboard "route card" that you can carry in your pocket or tuck into the clear plastic credential sleeve that you wear around your neck. It lists the mileage from the beginning of the route to each pit stop, grab-and-go stop, cheering station, and, of course, lunch. On average, there's a stop every three miles or so, giving everyone a chance to use a port-o-jon, load up on Gatorade, and grab any snacks they need. That being said, the wonderful event planners who get the difficult job of planning and mapping out the route don't always get to place their stops at exactly the points along the route that would be optimal and ideal.
Case in point: at the 2009 Boston 3-Day, I was part of the team of support crew assigned to Pit Stop 5 -- the last pit stop on the route before camp. We had everything: Gatorade, water, snacks, annoying disco music -- even a guy in a kilt who thought he knew how to dance but really, really didn't. (That was, um, me.) And curiously, hardly any of the walkers wanted snacks. Most 3-Day walkers coming into our pit stop waved happily at us and just kept on walking, knowing that camp was just three miles ahead. It wasn't until we'd been there an hour that we put two and two together and figured out why -- Pit Stop 4 was literally only a mile down the road. Everyone had already gone to the bathroom there and loaded up with snacks and Gatorade and water for the final stretch run into camp and had no real interest in doing it all over again a mile later. They had everything they needed already.
Some members of our crew asked "Why on Earth would they put two pit stops a mile apart?" Anyone who's done event planning (especially anyone who's planned out the route for a marathon or 5K or charity walk) knows the answer: You put the pit stops and water stations where you can... and where it doesn't cost anything. If there are two available public parks a mile apart, and no other really suitable location for a pit stop for two more miles in either direction... well, then you're probably going to have two pit stops a mile or so apart. We don't always use parks... sometimes we use a church, or a school, or even the parking lot of a local restaurant that's not open on a given day.
But that being said, the route planners don't make walkers go without for a corresponding extra distance just because they had to put two stops close together. They'll fill in the gaps with smaller "Grab and go" stops -- no snacks, just bathrooms and beverages -- where they need to. It's really kind of an art, planning out the ideal route that has stops at exactly the right intervals and in places that give people room to spread out, stretch, not trip over one another, etcetera. And if the weather's likely to be hot, having some nice shade trees is good too.
You don't always get what you want. The route planners try, but they're working within a budget. Rather than spend the proceeds of the event on renting space, they try to get free space wherever they can and save the funds raised by the event for the fight against breast cancer.
And once the route's all planned out, the 3-Day staff carefully measures the distance between each point and creates those little 'route cards' they hand out at the start of each day. And we look at them as we're walking and in the depths of our tired little hearts we believe them absolutely. When you're hot and weary and you've already walked 15 miles, you want to believe with every fiber of your being that the route card is telling the truth and that the next pit stop is right around the corner.
Only, we know they're really not as accurate as all that. Those route cards are printed up a couple of weeks before the event. Things have an, um, ... "unfortunate tendency to change" between the day that the route cards are printed up and Day 1 of the 3-Day.
The year I did my first 3-Day walk, the route was still being adjusted right up until the walk started. If I understand correctly, two locations that had agreed to host pit stops pulled out almost at the last minute and with very little warning... and suddenly, the event planners had to scramble and find somewhere... anywhere... that would make for a suitable pit stop and not take the walkers too far off the planned route. I believe that's why a pit stop wound up in a grassy field by the side of the road at a historical marker informing us that we were the site of a former Cold War missile defense station.
So much for the accuracy of the route cards that year. There's a reason the cards always say "(Note: Mileage may not be exact.)"
Take a look for yourself: if you total up the listed mileage below, it totals 54.6 (that's if you assume that the "10.0" for Day 1 was meant to be 20.0). In actual fact, we did walk just about 60 miles, and that's not counting the distance walked at the camp going to and from the dining tent and showers. But any at any number of spots on the route we were supposed to be right at a pit stop -- only there was no sign of any as far as the eye could see. (Generally, the stop was a half mile ahead, around a corner.) Or we weren't expecting the stop just yet and bam, there it was. Komen miles.
You could look at the person next to you and ask "So, how far until the next pit stop?" And they'd say "2.8 miles... but those are Komen miles." And you'd both grin and keep on going.
It's not that the planners don't try to make the route cards as accurate as possible. But if a city government gives permission for the 3-Day route to go through a particular area, and changes its mind at the last minute and says "Y'all can't go through there -- they're repaving that street that week" -- a little 'jog' might creep into the route. Things happen. If the mayor of some local town retires and her replacement as mayor doesn't quite "get" what the 3-Day is all about, a town that formerly might have rolled out the pink carpet for all the participants might give very grudging support the next year. A church might agree to host a pit stop only to have the long-time lay leader of the congregation pass away that week -- and schedule the funeral for the exact time most of the walkers would have been coming through.
I'm still not sure what happened in 2008 in DC, but stops actually occurred out of order. I think the planners had to significantly juggle things as various rugs were pulled out from under 'em. If there's a harder event to plan than a major walk involving thousands of participants over a three-day time frame in the nation's capital then I don't know what it is. Must have been a fun and very trying time for the organizers, I can say that much.
Logistically, all the planning and permitting for a 3-Day is a real nightmare at times. I've talked to enough members of the staff to know how much work they put in and how painstaking their attention to every detail is... and even so, there're always the curve balls that you never expect. It's part of why the organizers don't move the event around the country doing a different 15 cities each year... it's hard enough doing the walks in areas that have hosted them many times, let alone start completely from scratch every year.
So, no, the distances on the route cards are not always as accurate as one would like. Tweaks to the route can add distance here and subtract it there. The organizers do try.
But the complexity of the route planning process doesn't account for all the laughter at the end of each day about "Komen miles". Sure, the route cards are a bit comic in their hopeful portrayal of the route... but what really brings the term home is the inevitable disputes about how far we walked in all. The reason for the end-of-the-day kibitzing about the total distance and the sarcastic references to "Komen miles" can be summed up in one word: pedometers.
A lot of 3-Day walkers train for the event and record mileage during the event by walking with pedometers. If you've never used one, they're basically simple little devices that count your strides and estimate distance based on your average stride distance. The trick, of course, when you're calibrating them is to know your average stride. One way to get them to be fairly accurate is to walk a measured distance along a straight, flat road -- or to walk the track at a local high school. Then see if the pedometer's distance estimate agreed with what you know the distance actually was.
But what people always forget is that your stride when you're out walking by yourself after work isn't going to be the same stride you're using when you're shuffling along in a big pack of 3-Day walkers. The difference is probably greatest at the start of the day when everyone is all bunched up together and at the end of the day when everyone's tired and dragging and really looking forward to getting to camp. You may be taking a lot more steps then ... a lot of short little steps that aren't really eating up much distance. And your pedometer's going to clucking away happily to itself, recording mile after mile. It all depends on the pedometer, of course. But trust me: they're not that accurate if you're not consistently taking the same stride.
I walk with an actual GPS unit... a pretty modern one, used for trail hiking and finding your way out of the woods when you're lost, that kind of thing. And I dutifully record a track as I go, just so I can show my wife, later on, where we walked. But a consequence of that is that I do get a recording of the distance walked -- a pretty darn accurate recording. It's not going to be 100% accurate if we're walking through a city center surrounded by high buildings that block the view of the sky and the orbiting GPS satellites to the south, but generally speaking, if it says we walked 24 miles, I'm willing to bet we walked 24 miles. I've used it enough times on the same routes around my home in Vermont to know that it agrees with published distances on maps and with the odometer of my car.
So when I hit the "finish line" (a term we actually don't like to use because it implies that the 3-Day is a race, which it isn't), I look down and go "Huh. We walked 22.8 miles." And I go about my business, while all around me the "I got 24!" and "I got TWENTY FIVE MILES" cries ring out.
Tired people can be a little teensy tiny bit paranoid at times. People do want to walk the 60 miles they promised their donors... but they're not terribly interested in walking more. Imagine how ticked off a marathon runner would be if you told them that the marathon route was screwed up and everyone had really run 27.3 miles. Even if they're not trying to set a Boston Marathon qualifying time, they're going to be peeved. Juuuuuuust a tiny bit. And I think something similar creeps in on a 3-Day. It's human nature to want the route cards to be accurate and know how far we're going to walk and be able to rely on that.
Me, I think the "Komen miles" phenomenon sort of adds to the fun of the event. Life is unpredictable and weird things happen. Why should a 3-Day breast cancer walk be any different?
