Walk Diary #3: So How Was It?

If anyone tells you that walking a marathon is easy, they are just simply full of shit.  I don’t care how well trained you are – 26 miles in the sun, up and down hills — is tough. Can it be done?  Yes.  I just did it- the Santa Barbara Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.  I walked 26 miles on September 22 and another 13 the next day.

Some of the highlights and lowlights:

• I made a pact with a friend to stick together — this made all the difference.  That she was younger than me and capable of going faster made me all the more grateful.  I tried to hold up my end of the bargain by introducing new topics of conversation – like the Holocaust – when things looked particularly bleak.
• Support is huge.  The Avon Walk organizes people at cheering stations, enlists motorcycle guys/gals to be crossing guards, plants people with very loud car stereos at key points, and encourages neighborhood residents to turn out.  And they do – with candy, slices of lemon, spritzes of water, POPSICLES – the woman who gave me a red popsicle is now in my will.  People holding signs – my favorite held by a pretty nice looking Latino guy: “Check yourselves, ladies, or I will.” T-shirts, some funny, some poignant, like this one with the writing on the front, “Yes, these are fake, my real ones tried to kill me.”
• Walking behind people with deep stories, like the two sisters with ‘Walking in Memory of Our Mom 1957 to 2010’ on the back of their T-shirts.  We came up the last hill – which went on for MILES – one’s hair is falling out of her ponytail and she’s sweated through her shirt, the other is limping with obviously bad blisters on one foot. All the while we’re walking, I’m looking at their shirts – so incredibly unfair for their mom and them.  But I’ll tell you – there was no quit in those girls. Their mom would have been proud.
• Our friend Mary who we met standing in line at the Event Check-In the night before the walk.  This was Mary’s 7th Avon Walk – by happenstance she found us the next morning and we started out the walk together.  After a couple of hours, Mary took an awful fall coming up on a curb from the street, gashed her leg and elbows.  No broken bones but it was painful and major in terms of walking.  We stopped with her while she cleaned up her wounds.  Looking up, I knew that waiting with Mary would put us way behind timewise but neither my friend nor I made a move to leave her.  We watched over Mary all day long – not always walking with her but always knowing where she was.  My friend later said, “Hey, this is supposed to be about sisterhood, right?”  It was.  And the kindness we showed to Mary, a woman walking alone, someone we had just met the day before, became the metaphor for us for the entire walk.
• Women are amazing.  At the rest stops, I sat next to women with blisters as big as your fist, women with ice packs on their shins, Ace bandages on their ankles.  I walked behind women who were limping, walked behind one woman who was walking so slow and sadly that I thought her entire body and mind must be in terrible pain. Even though there are sweep vans that will give people a ride to the next stop or to the finish, very few women take that option.  Each has their reason. Me?  I want to be with the people who persevere although I will tell you – it was plenty hard to be in that group. The walk itself starts to represent everything about one’s life — about one’s commitment, stamina, and ability to beat back the little taunting no-can-do devils in your brain.  Many, many times I remembered what a friend had told me months ago — “The walk is not a race, it’s a test.” And it is a test — of one’s stamina and sense of sisterhood.
• And last, the walk had a couple of moments of pure joy.  Here is one of them – getting surprised at Mile #23 by my daughter whom I hadn’t seen in months.

This is when I was reminded that I am so lucky to be alive, to be able to walk 26 miles, to breathe the air and feel the blisters.  And to have this daughter.

The day is happy now.  Yes, it is.