The Hardest Step I Ever Took
Jan. 1st, 2012 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrFor years now I've had a particular quote from French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery featured on my Facebook profile:
"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it."
Faced with a challenge, faced with adversity, to overcome you must keep trying, keep on going, no matter what.
And I've tried to live my life that way. I haven't always succeeded, but I've tried.
Another man, President Calvin Coolidge, said:
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
Winston Churchill expressed the same point in typical Churchillian fashion:
"Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up."
None of these men, however, with all their wisdom and sagacity, could top my dad.
When I was a kid, my father was fond of predicting that I would quit and give up. Gratutiously so. I will never forget the time I signed up to walk in the Blacksburg, Virginia "Hunger Hike" charity walk. I was 11 or 12. Dad ridiculed the idea of me walking 11 miles and spent a merry few weeks offering various predictions on how far into the walk I'd be when I decided to quit.
When the day of the walk came, I did just fine and spent most of the walk well in front of the mass of walkers; I arrived at the finish line (a few hundred yards from the starting line -- we'd walked a big loop and returned) just in time to see my parents' familiar green Chevrolet van pulling up. Dad and Mom were inside, still arguing over how absolutely pointless it was to be there so early when (according to Dad) I was no doubt sitting on my butt somewhere or trailing along at the back of the pack.
When I opened the door of the van and said "Hi!" his congratulatory words were absolutely heart-warming, just the kind of thing a young boy craving respect and approval would want to hear:
"You've been here the whole time, haven't you? You didn't even walk."
Yeah, Dad could be a little harsh with his criticism. He's mellowed as he's gotten older, but when I was a kid, he was absolutely withering in his belief that I'd give up on everything, every time.
But I've taken his words, and the words of Saint-Exupery, Coolidge, and Churchill to heart. When you start something, you finish it. You don't cut corners. You do it right. In fact, if there's a way to hilariously over-do something, then I'll do that. I'm kind of legendary among some of my friends for being bullheaded, stubborn, and annoyingly inflexible on this subject.
And that brings me to the point of this article.
This past October, I took part in the Atlanta Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure -- a 60-mile, 3-day walk to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer. I walked as a member and co-captain of a group of 32 walkers and crew, "Team Twitter ATL". We drew our members from all over the USA; the largest number, to be sure, were from the southeast, but we had two members from California, one from Illinois, two from Massachusetts, and so on, and so on -- and the two captains flew in from Connecticut and Vermont. Every walker member had raised at least $2,300 (the event minimum) for the fight against breast cancer, and some had raised much more. Collectively, we raised just over $50,000 -- and I salute the members of my team for their tireless efforts to spread the word and pass the hat.
As founder of the team, I had espoused a simple rule: we leave no walker to struggle in on their own while the rest of us race on ahead. I have heard too many stories of walkers who are all but abandoned by their speed-walking teams and left to trail in to camp hours after the rest of the team has finished for the day, and I promised that sort of thing would not happen. People could go on ahead, but I would stay behind with any slow-paced walker, no matter how slowly they went. If they wound up having to hop on a sweep van, I'd then hurry forward to catch up to whomever was next slowest, and so on. If this all makes it sound like I was pretty darn confident in my own walking abilities, then, well, I summed things up accurately.
As a walker, I'm usually one of the most fit and most able 3-Day participants. I walk a lot as I train for each event. I walk home from work once or twice a week during the warm summer months ... and I live 18 miles from my office. I've speed-walked two 3-Days; sometimes it just feels good to cut loose (but never when I was a member of a team). The Atlanta 3-Day would be my eighth 3-Day walk and I was quite, quite sure that I'd be able to rise to any challenge on the route. It turns out that I was wrong: what I had not counted on was the physical strain of going slow.
I'm a tall guy. I stand 6'2" and I've got long legs. When I walk home from work, I walk four miles an hour without even really working hard. I rarely take breaks; I just keep on going and going and going like a big ungainly ugly bearded Energizer bunny.
When I walked with my team in Atlanta, wonderful lovely people each and every one of them, I was not walking at my normal pace. I was walking 2.5 miles an hour at times and when we came to a pit stop we took some pretty long breaks. And I have no problem with that. If 2.5 miles an hour is the best my teammates could do, que sera sera. And if they needed a long break, then c'est la vie. Philosophically, I was absolutely okay with taking all day long to do the 20 mile route --and in actual point of fact, that was pretty much what it took us. Just as Andrew Marvell wrote, "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near", we were acutely aware that not far behind our little gaggle of Team Twitter ATL walkers was a 3-Day staff member on a mountain bike, the "caboose" rider. Fall behind the caboose, get swept. It's that simple -- and none of us wanted to get swept.
We kept on going. Some of our team had to take sweep vans during Day 1 just to get by. Not everyone has the flexibility of schedule and/or time to get in all the training needed to really kick butt on a 3-Day route, and some of the team weren't in the best shape. There's no shame in riding a sweep van if you're in pain, you're injured, or you're just flat out not able to make the distance and need a break. By sweeping forward to the next pit stop, you can get some attention from the medical crew, take a break, get a drink and a snack, and get ready to go on.
That maxim, of course -- "no shame in taking a sweep van" -- applies to everyone but me.
We finished the Day 1 route almost at the end of the pack. And I finished in a bit of pain. Shin splints. I don't know what exactly caused it -- was it the speed? The long breaks? The extremely hilly route? Or combinations of all three? That night I took time to visit the Medical crew at camp and got my legs looked at. With some ice and some rest, I figured, I'd be right as rain in the morning.
In the morning, I felt mostly okay, but as the day wore on, the pain returned, and got worse, and worse, and worse. Our team spread out along the route but I continued to stay with the slowest walkers -- and to my immense surprise, this was becoming less of a choice than a necessity. Our team would typically gather back together again at pit stops but then spread out again after we departed the pit. I found that my continuing along the route required me to spend a lot of time doing the stretches the sports medicine professionals on the Medical team had shown me the previous night .. and even then, I found myself literally (and I mean that in the actual, correct sense) yelping in pain at random, unpredictable intervals. It did not help that the route was extremely hilly. When I walked on the infrequent level ground, my shins didn't hurt anywhere near as much as the did on the ascents and descents... but the route was far from level.
Periodically, my bemused teammates would ask me if I wanted to take a sweep van. Stubbornly, I'd say "No, I'll continue on, I'll be fine." In other words, precisely the kind of dogged claptrap that I've heard from other walkers during other 3-Day walks. Only, when those walkers gritted their teeth and said "I'll be fine," it was often the case that they really wanted to take a sweep van and were looking for reinforcement and encouragement that they wouldn't be seen as quitters for doing so. (How do I know this? People in pain can sometimes be fairly candid when they feel that they're not going to be judged.)
Me? When I said "I'll be fine" I meant it. I'd take a sweep van, I thought, when pigs fly. But it wasn't easy to stick to that vow. I spent most of the afternoon of that Saturday, Day 2 of 3, mechanically muttering Saint-Exupery's words. "What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it." And I'd take another step. And another. I wasn't the same merry, carefree, devil-may-care Jay that some members of my team may have expected, but I was in pain.
When the pain got really bad, I'd just go "Jay never sweeps. Jay never sweeps. Jay never sweeps. Jay never sweeps." Under my breath. I assume no one heard me because no one showed up from a local mental hospital to take me away for psychiatric evaluation.
We encountered some non-participating supporters of our team at a bus shelter along the route late on the afternoon of Day 2. Among them was everyone's favorite doctoral candidate, Kristen, who wasn't walking this year in order to focus on completing her dissertation. Kristen had been following our progress on Twitter during the day and had some idea of what I was going through -- not that I was openly moaning about agonizing pain on Twitter, but apparently I'd been open enough that she knew I wasn't having a good time. Kristen knows me pretty well and came up to me as our little pod of walkers was getting ready to continue on and asked me, sotto voce, if I was refusing to take a sweep van. "Yeah," I muttered. "Typical," she replied, and shooed us on down the route.
So yeah, I guess it was becoming pretty obvious to casual observers that I was not in good shape. And it was becoming obvious to my teammates as well. But they'd worked out that I wasn't going to take a sweep van unless Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen For The Cure personally showed up and ordered me onto a van. Or, of course, if a member of the Medical crew saw me gimping it into a pit and just flat-out red-carded me... so I tried to show a brave face whenever I saw the red shirts of Medical crew around.
I finished Day 2 without having swept and promptly got myself showered and fed and to the Medical tent for more ice and more stretching and kneading and massaging. I actually found myself feeling halfway human by bedtime that evening and had great hopes for the future. I was not the only member of Team Twitter ATL to be in pain -- other walkers had wound up sweeping to pit stops and a couple had wound up taking the so-called SAG bus from the pit back to camp. Again, there's no shame there -- we had a pregnant member of the team, two cancer survivors, and several members who simply hadn't been able to fit in all the training they needed. Every one of them had raised the $2,300 or more required to enter the walk, and that's the main thing -- the walking is symbolic and is meant to increase awareness and motivate donors to give generously.
I was back at the Medical tent the moment they opened on Day 3, having gotten up extra early to pack up my gear and my tent and have nothing between me and sweet, sweet ice. I wasn't in a huge amount of pain but I wanted to keep things that way, and I knew ice would help.
When I got out on the route that Sunday morning, though, things took a turn for the worse. I started hurting a lot about as soon as I began striding. My left leg was especially bad; my right hurt, but not excruciatingly, while my left felt like someone was trying to chop it in two at the shinbone with a very dull cleaver. I was unable to keep up with the bulk of my team -- only one walker, Kathleen, stayed with me for very long, and the rest kept going, having their own crosses and burdens to bear. We had a couple of walkers who were in such pain that they'd been held at medical and were taking the SAG bus directly to the lunch stop, so Kathleen and I formed the Team Twitter ATL caboose that morning.
I'm very grateful to Kathleen for sticking with me -- I know she was doing well enough that she could have been much further down the route but she stuck with me, apparently having reasoned that if the team captain was unwilling to leave an injured walker trailing along by themselves, it would have been just as wrong for a walker to leave an injured team captain trailing along by himself.
I made it to Pit Stop 1 -- but only just. I found myself popping ibuprofen even though I'd had four when I got up and two more when I stepped onto the route. I insisted I was competent to leave Pit 1 and continue, but with my condition steadily deteriorating I could see the frustration on Kathleen's face. I think it probably bears some similarity to the look on someone's face when they see a co-worker well in their cups insisting that they're okay to drive, even though they're having to cling to the door of their car to keep from falling down: just sheer "how can someone be this much of an idiot?"
And I think that's what did it. I was limping along, a mile or two past Pit 1, sitting down every hundred feet to try to stretch and flex some life back into my shins, when I saw her looking down at me and went "I can't do this to her. And I'm setting an appalling example for other walkers."
And I said, "Okay. Flag down a sweep van."
We didn't have too terribly long a wait. But as I sat there on the curb I felt lower than low; I was giving up. I was quitting. Part of me wanted to jump up and go "No! Never mind! I can keep going." But the larger part of me said "Remember all those times you told people that there was no shame in taking a sweep van? That by raising the $2300 they've already made a huge difference? Was that all a lie?"
The hardest step I ever took was the step onto that sweep van that cold Sunday morning in Atlanta, Georgia in October of 2011.
The crew on the Sweep Van couldn't have been nicer; they passed us stickers to write our names on and had us stick them to the ceiling of the van, and they reminded us not to be sorry or ashamed, that we'd done great, that we could rest at the next pit stop and then keep going. I kept my head down and said nothing at all to anyone and kept planning my next move. Ice was clearly in my future, but then what?
As it happened, I had a long walk ahead of me to get to the ice -- the sweep van could not get into the public park where the pit stop was set up, so they let us out a quarter mile away and I had to hobble back, against the flow of walkers, just to get to the pit and get some ice.
I wound up, after some reflection, taking a SAG bus on from that pit stop to the lunch stop, trimming 5 or 6 miles off the route.
And then I sat at the lunch stop for an hour with bags of ice on both shins for the better part of an hour, chatting with Belinda and Lisa, our two walkers who'd been SAG'd from camp directly to lunch, before we decided we were tired of waiting for the rest of the team to catch up and started walking. I hurt, but after an hour with ice on my shins, I didn't hurt so badly that I couldn't continue. I knew that my immaculate record of walking every mile of every 3-Day I'd signed up for had been wrecked, but at least I could try to walk as much as I could. So we walked from lunch to the next stop at Grab and Go A, then made it a mile and a quarter further to Pit 4, and then sat down to wait for the rest of the team to catch up.
The rest of the team was in no huge hurry -- remember, we'd finished well back at the end of the pack on Day 1 and 2... so we had a long wait. And that meant "more ice".
But finally Team Twitter ATL was all back together and we walked the last two miles together from Pit 4 to the finish line and holding area at Turner Field.
And even though half us were in pain and all of us were tired, we were still very proud of the effort each one of us had showed and were proud to walk in as a team:
In the end, what matters is not that we didn't all walk all 60 miles -- although I know that every one of us would have preferred to do so. Did some of us "give up" along the route?
Yes.
But we did not give up for good -- we got back up off the ground when we'd been knocked down, and resumed walking. We kept on fighting, and I know I speak for the rest of my team when I say that when it comes to the real fight -- the fight against breast cancer...
We will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up.
"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it."
Faced with a challenge, faced with adversity, to overcome you must keep trying, keep on going, no matter what.
And I've tried to live my life that way. I haven't always succeeded, but I've tried.
Another man, President Calvin Coolidge, said:
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
Winston Churchill expressed the same point in typical Churchillian fashion:
"Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up."
None of these men, however, with all their wisdom and sagacity, could top my dad.
When I was a kid, my father was fond of predicting that I would quit and give up. Gratutiously so. I will never forget the time I signed up to walk in the Blacksburg, Virginia "Hunger Hike" charity walk. I was 11 or 12. Dad ridiculed the idea of me walking 11 miles and spent a merry few weeks offering various predictions on how far into the walk I'd be when I decided to quit.
When the day of the walk came, I did just fine and spent most of the walk well in front of the mass of walkers; I arrived at the finish line (a few hundred yards from the starting line -- we'd walked a big loop and returned) just in time to see my parents' familiar green Chevrolet van pulling up. Dad and Mom were inside, still arguing over how absolutely pointless it was to be there so early when (according to Dad) I was no doubt sitting on my butt somewhere or trailing along at the back of the pack.
When I opened the door of the van and said "Hi!" his congratulatory words were absolutely heart-warming, just the kind of thing a young boy craving respect and approval would want to hear:
"You've been here the whole time, haven't you? You didn't even walk."
Yeah, Dad could be a little harsh with his criticism. He's mellowed as he's gotten older, but when I was a kid, he was absolutely withering in his belief that I'd give up on everything, every time.
But I've taken his words, and the words of Saint-Exupery, Coolidge, and Churchill to heart. When you start something, you finish it. You don't cut corners. You do it right. In fact, if there's a way to hilariously over-do something, then I'll do that. I'm kind of legendary among some of my friends for being bullheaded, stubborn, and annoyingly inflexible on this subject.
And that brings me to the point of this article.
This past October, I took part in the Atlanta Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure -- a 60-mile, 3-day walk to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer. I walked as a member and co-captain of a group of 32 walkers and crew, "Team Twitter ATL". We drew our members from all over the USA; the largest number, to be sure, were from the southeast, but we had two members from California, one from Illinois, two from Massachusetts, and so on, and so on -- and the two captains flew in from Connecticut and Vermont. Every walker member had raised at least $2,300 (the event minimum) for the fight against breast cancer, and some had raised much more. Collectively, we raised just over $50,000 -- and I salute the members of my team for their tireless efforts to spread the word and pass the hat.
As founder of the team, I had espoused a simple rule: we leave no walker to struggle in on their own while the rest of us race on ahead. I have heard too many stories of walkers who are all but abandoned by their speed-walking teams and left to trail in to camp hours after the rest of the team has finished for the day, and I promised that sort of thing would not happen. People could go on ahead, but I would stay behind with any slow-paced walker, no matter how slowly they went. If they wound up having to hop on a sweep van, I'd then hurry forward to catch up to whomever was next slowest, and so on. If this all makes it sound like I was pretty darn confident in my own walking abilities, then, well, I summed things up accurately.
As a walker, I'm usually one of the most fit and most able 3-Day participants. I walk a lot as I train for each event. I walk home from work once or twice a week during the warm summer months ... and I live 18 miles from my office. I've speed-walked two 3-Days; sometimes it just feels good to cut loose (but never when I was a member of a team). The Atlanta 3-Day would be my eighth 3-Day walk and I was quite, quite sure that I'd be able to rise to any challenge on the route. It turns out that I was wrong: what I had not counted on was the physical strain of going slow.
I'm a tall guy. I stand 6'2" and I've got long legs. When I walk home from work, I walk four miles an hour without even really working hard. I rarely take breaks; I just keep on going and going and going like a big ungainly ugly bearded Energizer bunny.
When I walked with my team in Atlanta, wonderful lovely people each and every one of them, I was not walking at my normal pace. I was walking 2.5 miles an hour at times and when we came to a pit stop we took some pretty long breaks. And I have no problem with that. If 2.5 miles an hour is the best my teammates could do, que sera sera. And if they needed a long break, then c'est la vie. Philosophically, I was absolutely okay with taking all day long to do the 20 mile route --and in actual point of fact, that was pretty much what it took us. Just as Andrew Marvell wrote, "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near", we were acutely aware that not far behind our little gaggle of Team Twitter ATL walkers was a 3-Day staff member on a mountain bike, the "caboose" rider. Fall behind the caboose, get swept. It's that simple -- and none of us wanted to get swept.
We kept on going. Some of our team had to take sweep vans during Day 1 just to get by. Not everyone has the flexibility of schedule and/or time to get in all the training needed to really kick butt on a 3-Day route, and some of the team weren't in the best shape. There's no shame in riding a sweep van if you're in pain, you're injured, or you're just flat out not able to make the distance and need a break. By sweeping forward to the next pit stop, you can get some attention from the medical crew, take a break, get a drink and a snack, and get ready to go on.
That maxim, of course -- "no shame in taking a sweep van" -- applies to everyone but me.
We finished the Day 1 route almost at the end of the pack. And I finished in a bit of pain. Shin splints. I don't know what exactly caused it -- was it the speed? The long breaks? The extremely hilly route? Or combinations of all three? That night I took time to visit the Medical crew at camp and got my legs looked at. With some ice and some rest, I figured, I'd be right as rain in the morning.
In the morning, I felt mostly okay, but as the day wore on, the pain returned, and got worse, and worse, and worse. Our team spread out along the route but I continued to stay with the slowest walkers -- and to my immense surprise, this was becoming less of a choice than a necessity. Our team would typically gather back together again at pit stops but then spread out again after we departed the pit. I found that my continuing along the route required me to spend a lot of time doing the stretches the sports medicine professionals on the Medical team had shown me the previous night .. and even then, I found myself literally (and I mean that in the actual, correct sense) yelping in pain at random, unpredictable intervals. It did not help that the route was extremely hilly. When I walked on the infrequent level ground, my shins didn't hurt anywhere near as much as the did on the ascents and descents... but the route was far from level.
Periodically, my bemused teammates would ask me if I wanted to take a sweep van. Stubbornly, I'd say "No, I'll continue on, I'll be fine." In other words, precisely the kind of dogged claptrap that I've heard from other walkers during other 3-Day walks. Only, when those walkers gritted their teeth and said "I'll be fine," it was often the case that they really wanted to take a sweep van and were looking for reinforcement and encouragement that they wouldn't be seen as quitters for doing so. (How do I know this? People in pain can sometimes be fairly candid when they feel that they're not going to be judged.)
Me? When I said "I'll be fine" I meant it. I'd take a sweep van, I thought, when pigs fly. But it wasn't easy to stick to that vow. I spent most of the afternoon of that Saturday, Day 2 of 3, mechanically muttering Saint-Exupery's words. "What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it." And I'd take another step. And another. I wasn't the same merry, carefree, devil-may-care Jay that some members of my team may have expected, but I was in pain.
When the pain got really bad, I'd just go "Jay never sweeps. Jay never sweeps. Jay never sweeps. Jay never sweeps." Under my breath. I assume no one heard me because no one showed up from a local mental hospital to take me away for psychiatric evaluation.
We encountered some non-participating supporters of our team at a bus shelter along the route late on the afternoon of Day 2. Among them was everyone's favorite doctoral candidate, Kristen, who wasn't walking this year in order to focus on completing her dissertation. Kristen had been following our progress on Twitter during the day and had some idea of what I was going through -- not that I was openly moaning about agonizing pain on Twitter, but apparently I'd been open enough that she knew I wasn't having a good time. Kristen knows me pretty well and came up to me as our little pod of walkers was getting ready to continue on and asked me, sotto voce, if I was refusing to take a sweep van. "Yeah," I muttered. "Typical," she replied, and shooed us on down the route.
So yeah, I guess it was becoming pretty obvious to casual observers that I was not in good shape. And it was becoming obvious to my teammates as well. But they'd worked out that I wasn't going to take a sweep van unless Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen For The Cure personally showed up and ordered me onto a van. Or, of course, if a member of the Medical crew saw me gimping it into a pit and just flat-out red-carded me... so I tried to show a brave face whenever I saw the red shirts of Medical crew around.
I finished Day 2 without having swept and promptly got myself showered and fed and to the Medical tent for more ice and more stretching and kneading and massaging. I actually found myself feeling halfway human by bedtime that evening and had great hopes for the future. I was not the only member of Team Twitter ATL to be in pain -- other walkers had wound up sweeping to pit stops and a couple had wound up taking the so-called SAG bus from the pit back to camp. Again, there's no shame there -- we had a pregnant member of the team, two cancer survivors, and several members who simply hadn't been able to fit in all the training they needed. Every one of them had raised the $2,300 or more required to enter the walk, and that's the main thing -- the walking is symbolic and is meant to increase awareness and motivate donors to give generously.
I was back at the Medical tent the moment they opened on Day 3, having gotten up extra early to pack up my gear and my tent and have nothing between me and sweet, sweet ice. I wasn't in a huge amount of pain but I wanted to keep things that way, and I knew ice would help.
When I got out on the route that Sunday morning, though, things took a turn for the worse. I started hurting a lot about as soon as I began striding. My left leg was especially bad; my right hurt, but not excruciatingly, while my left felt like someone was trying to chop it in two at the shinbone with a very dull cleaver. I was unable to keep up with the bulk of my team -- only one walker, Kathleen, stayed with me for very long, and the rest kept going, having their own crosses and burdens to bear. We had a couple of walkers who were in such pain that they'd been held at medical and were taking the SAG bus directly to the lunch stop, so Kathleen and I formed the Team Twitter ATL caboose that morning.
I'm very grateful to Kathleen for sticking with me -- I know she was doing well enough that she could have been much further down the route but she stuck with me, apparently having reasoned that if the team captain was unwilling to leave an injured walker trailing along by themselves, it would have been just as wrong for a walker to leave an injured team captain trailing along by himself.
I made it to Pit Stop 1 -- but only just. I found myself popping ibuprofen even though I'd had four when I got up and two more when I stepped onto the route. I insisted I was competent to leave Pit 1 and continue, but with my condition steadily deteriorating I could see the frustration on Kathleen's face. I think it probably bears some similarity to the look on someone's face when they see a co-worker well in their cups insisting that they're okay to drive, even though they're having to cling to the door of their car to keep from falling down: just sheer "how can someone be this much of an idiot?"
And I think that's what did it. I was limping along, a mile or two past Pit 1, sitting down every hundred feet to try to stretch and flex some life back into my shins, when I saw her looking down at me and went "I can't do this to her. And I'm setting an appalling example for other walkers."
And I said, "Okay. Flag down a sweep van."
We didn't have too terribly long a wait. But as I sat there on the curb I felt lower than low; I was giving up. I was quitting. Part of me wanted to jump up and go "No! Never mind! I can keep going." But the larger part of me said "Remember all those times you told people that there was no shame in taking a sweep van? That by raising the $2300 they've already made a huge difference? Was that all a lie?"
The hardest step I ever took was the step onto that sweep van that cold Sunday morning in Atlanta, Georgia in October of 2011.
The crew on the Sweep Van couldn't have been nicer; they passed us stickers to write our names on and had us stick them to the ceiling of the van, and they reminded us not to be sorry or ashamed, that we'd done great, that we could rest at the next pit stop and then keep going. I kept my head down and said nothing at all to anyone and kept planning my next move. Ice was clearly in my future, but then what?
As it happened, I had a long walk ahead of me to get to the ice -- the sweep van could not get into the public park where the pit stop was set up, so they let us out a quarter mile away and I had to hobble back, against the flow of walkers, just to get to the pit and get some ice.
I wound up, after some reflection, taking a SAG bus on from that pit stop to the lunch stop, trimming 5 or 6 miles off the route.
And then I sat at the lunch stop for an hour with bags of ice on both shins for the better part of an hour, chatting with Belinda and Lisa, our two walkers who'd been SAG'd from camp directly to lunch, before we decided we were tired of waiting for the rest of the team to catch up and started walking. I hurt, but after an hour with ice on my shins, I didn't hurt so badly that I couldn't continue. I knew that my immaculate record of walking every mile of every 3-Day I'd signed up for had been wrecked, but at least I could try to walk as much as I could. So we walked from lunch to the next stop at Grab and Go A, then made it a mile and a quarter further to Pit 4, and then sat down to wait for the rest of the team to catch up.
The rest of the team was in no huge hurry -- remember, we'd finished well back at the end of the pack on Day 1 and 2... so we had a long wait. And that meant "more ice".
But finally Team Twitter ATL was all back together and we walked the last two miles together from Pit 4 to the finish line and holding area at Turner Field.
And even though half us were in pain and all of us were tired, we were still very proud of the effort each one of us had showed and were proud to walk in as a team:
In the end, what matters is not that we didn't all walk all 60 miles -- although I know that every one of us would have preferred to do so. Did some of us "give up" along the route?
Yes.
But we did not give up for good -- we got back up off the ground when we'd been knocked down, and resumed walking. We kept on fighting, and I know I speak for the rest of my team when I say that when it comes to the real fight -- the fight against breast cancer...
We will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up.
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Date: 2012-01-02 05:29 am (UTC)I remember the second day of my first 3-Day, in DC, I was similarly stubborn in my determination to avoid being swept. As a result, due to extreme pain during nearly every step of the last 2-3 miles, anyone listening would have heard me swearing, "Fuck! Motherfucker! Kelly Clarkson! Nipplefuck!" a la Steve Carell's chest-waxing scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin. I wasn't the last person to make it to camp, but I was close to it. And when my husband, who was crewing, met me at the gate, I threw my arms around him and sobbed on his shoulder for 5 minutes. Oy. I had to take the sag bus to lunch the next day after only 3 miles, but that strategic decision (and a lot of ice) allowed me to finish the rest of the walk under my own power.
(And sheesh, your dad sounds like he was rather a jerk.)