Promises Kept: Day One
Sep. 19th, 2006 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saffronhareDay-um. I'm all done with the Breast Cancer 3-Day, but it's not quite done with me yet. :) I have so many hugs and thanks to deliver to people -- it could take a while. All those well-wishes really made a difference. I truly felt "lifted up," surrounded by kindness and protection and joy the whole time. It was amazing. Made my job not so hard at all.
Really, that's the silent response I had to nearly every challenge the whole weekend: Not so hard. Sort of like the way ancient heroes and bards responded to challenges in the stories. :)
Day One started stupid early, but not so early as for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zylch and the rest of the crew. Not even a hint of light on the horizon yet, but the starting zone outside the Speedway was full of music and cheer and all sorts of nervous/excited people. Marvelous bouncy power and attitude music -- stuff like "Movin' Right Along" and "I Will Surive" and "She's Got Legs" -- had me bouncing and bopping. Once I was in the corral and up by the stage, I sat down and put on my Body Glide. Wonderful stuff, by the way. Regrettably, I neglected to put on my sunscreen. Because it was dark. Why would I need sunscreen in the dark. I ask you. (This becomes important later.) I met a couple of other ladies who were walking alone, and gaped at the groups of people all around me. There were a few moments of introvert panic, but mostly it was great and everyone was so excited.
All the way through, there was some powerful psychology at work. I recognized it right away, and chose to ride along with it. So, there would be part of my mind noticing how hokey something was and sort of cringing, but mostly I just let it wash over me and feed me some pink-ribbon juju, you know? Acting as if, and all that.
The graphic silhouette they had on the backdrop for opening ceremonies looked startlingly like the Tribe portrait ofbreathofgold -- the one where her eyes are softly closed, and she's smiling with her arms sort of flying? The resemblance was stunning and distracted me for a goodly portion of the speechifying. I do recall the "Go, beautiful [noun]!" bit that zylch had so much fun with. I filked it too, on the second day somewhere, but it was judged by my fellow walkers to be Not Funny. (shrug)
We started with some marvelous Celtic thrash music -- aural sex from bagpipes, frenzied fiddles and thrumming drums. Yay! After that, the first 2.5 miles involved going through the tunnel and taking a lap at the Speedway. I'd hoped to avoid ever going there, but hey, it was really impressive to see the whole lot of us spread out over those two miles. The Speedway is HUGE. My pace put me somewhere in the middle of the pack, which is about where I stayed until Day Three. My aim was to have the first few miles be as lazy as possible, so as to settle into my body and let some of the nerves pass, while people all around me were in a frenzy to go-go-go! I recall that kind of starting mentality being Bad Idea when I ran cross-country, and it seemed to me the logic would hold for a 20-mile distance too.
We followed Kansas Avenue for a very long time, merged onto K-something (K-7?) and crossed the river. We were on the trail system for a while too, and sweet jeebus were there hills. I'd trained plenty of distance, but not for hills. My legs handled it just fine -- usually, I'd pass a few dozen people on the hills -- but my feet were not conditioned to withstand the pressure on those hill-walking zones. I started to feel it on the balls of my feet and the backs of my heels. That got real fun.
More trails, more hills. Excellent lunch eaten under friendly shade trees. On future days, I totally started to kick it when I saw the "one mile to lunch" sign because the food was Just That Good. I don't think we ever went more than 3.3 miles without a pit stop of some kind (usually, it was about 2.5 miles). Cheering people in wacky costumes, tons of water and gatorade, a marvelous buffet of snacks (salted peanuts and pretzels, bananas, cheese sticks, peanut butter crackers, etc.), and more portajohns than 1,100 walkers would ever need. Seriously. It was the best portajohn experience I've ever had. Plenty of stalls, clean and good-smelling (even unto the last day), and not once did we run out of TP. Well, once, but that was because we were going in and out so fast that the crew couldn't get in to install a fresh roll. She finally just handed it to the next walker in line to just carry in.
I realized I was seeing a pretty consistent group of walkers by this point. Our paces weren't exactly the same, and there was some variance in how long we'd take to eat/drink/stretch/pee at the pit stops, but we started to recognize each other. I found a comfortable rhythm of walking with a group, then walking on my own, then floating into another group, and so on. The Sweep Vans and Safety Patrol folks were terribly upbeat. There was one person I started to refer to as "Safety Broad," who was wonderful. I was exhausted just thinking about all that good cheer they were dishing out, and gave thanks that all I had to do was walk. :) Honestly, compared to everything the crew was doing, I felt like I had the easy job. Walking was simple, you know? But maybe I'm just crazy like that.
Finally, we entered Shawnee Mission Park. Walking, walking, walking. Really ready to be all done now. Lost track of where in the park I was, and where the heck they had us. I began to hear rumors of this place called camp. And then, there was uphill. I felt it in my feet and legs, but they couldn't make me look at it. Nope. Wasn't gonna look. Suddenly, there were walkers going the Other Way. These were the people who had finished and were heading home for the overnight at their own homes. Pussies. Anyway, it was reassurance that camp did exist. They said there was spagetti with meat sauce for dinner. And eclairs. Very motivating, that. I got a picture of my left foot crossing the finish line.
I took significantly more Bad Pictures on Day One than on any other day, partly due to remembering, and partly due to wardrobe choice. There's a shot of my right foot "exceeding" a posted speed limit, my left hand holding a yummy sandwich at lunch, etc. Pictures on the other days aren't any less bad, I bet. There are just fewer of them. :)
From there, I figured I should go set my things at my tent and pick up my gear before I sat down for dinner, so I asked somebody where the tents were. This person pointed me to an area on top of a Hill in the Distance. Ugh. I took a picture from the sign pointing to the tents. So. More walking. Down a hill, then up a hill, and searching for my tent: F33. The tent city was much more jumbled than it had looked in the publicity pictures. Huh. Not so much with the "grid" thing, then. Soon, I began to see that there were little markers in the ground which appeared to have some sort of grid-like pattern to them. And then there were tents, set up with only the loosest of associations with this grid. Huh. And then, there it was: F33. A little marker in the ground, with a skull scarf cheerfully fluttering in the breeze next to it, placed by the resourcefulzylch. It was as I'd feared: I would have to set up my own damn tent. Shit. I gave in to dismay for a moment and sat down to blink at my tent marker. Took a picture of it. Look! I said, as I snapped the photo. Here's where my tent is supposed to be! When I thought about it, it made perfect sense that we'd be setting up our own tents. Still. Wah. Then, it was off to the gear trucks -- on the other end of this hilltop field, over course -- for my gear and a tent-in-a-bag. When I returned to F33, I placed the tent bag by the marker and took another picutre. Look! There's my tent! And then I set that suckah up all by myself. It was windy. But not so hard. I'd managed to get everything set (including the rain fly, which was a neat trick in that wind, let me tell you), tossed my gear inside to weigh things down, and had crawled into the tent for a private moment of "Now what" by the time zylch showed up with some more of those plastic marker thingies so we could pretend to stake my tent down. I'm afraid I was wimpy about it, and completely failed to actually push them into the ground. I was all out of "oomph" for the day, you know? It was embarrassing, but she stuck around for a bit to make sure all was secure before dashing off to her superhero crew duties.
It was a pretty nice spot -- only two tents in on the row, so the chaos of the not-grid did not impact me at all -- less than thirty steps from the portajohns (upwind), and situated not far from a light tower. Turns out, my randomly assigned tentmate never showed up, so I got the whole 2-man tent to myself. Sure, two people will fit in there, but it would have been pretty close quarters for people who didn't know each other. I suspect Random Tentmate showed up before me, assessed the situation, and decided "fuck a bunch of that." It worked out okay for me.
Plus, I got an extra eclair for dessert. Then a warm shower in the shower trucks, which are god's own gift to campers. There was a lot of joking about the sounds people would make when the warm water hit their bodies. What do you have in there, anyway? It was in the shower that I discovered my sunburn. Oh, sooper. I'd remembered to put sunscreen on at lunch, but it was Too Late by then. All day on Day Two, ever walker that passed me was like, "Ooh, honey. You should put on some sunscreen." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gah.
Finally, a visit to the medical tent to get a Truly Impressive blister drained. I managed the rest of my feet with self-care stuff, but this one was big enough that I didn't want to drain it myself -- and I sure didn't have a band-aid big enough for it. There was a very amusing range of folks in the blister care section of the medical tent. At the table next to me, we had an actual podiatrist volunteering his time. He was friendly and gentle and thorough, but sort of quietly horrified by the walker's intention to continue walking. Are you sure? he'd say, with a little frown on his face. Yup, she'd say. And then he'd sigh, and his shoulders would slump, and he'd go fetch the moleskin. The volunteer working on my feet was from the athletic department at KU. He was like, dude, that's a big one...can I pop it? we'll tape that up good and you'll be good to go...you've got motrin, right? Very funny contrast. I'm very grateful to have had all those years of ballet en pointe to harden me to the necessities of shoving one's feet back into the shoes. I'll say it again:featherynscale should not look at my feet for at least a week.
Really, there were tons of people much worse off than me. Even on Day Three, I was seeing walkers with knee braces, walkers with blisters so bad they were literally tip-toeing along. I'd think of my own condition and think I didn't have it so bad after all. I mean, once you walk about a quarter-mile, the feet sort of settle in, you know? As long as I didn't take the shoes off, I was okay. Ha.
They had karaoke in the dining tent, which I almost totally managed to avoid hearing. Was snuggled up in my tent before 9 p.m., which was the official lights-out time. The night wasn't very awful. Since I had the tent to myself and it was staked down like a muthah, I was able to sleep sort of cross-wise and not have the tent hit me in the head very often when it bowed under the wind. Got up at 5 a.m. to get Day Two started -- I wanted plenty of time to shuffle around and stretch and have some drugs solidly in my system before the course opened at 7 a.m. But that's another post. :)
Really, that's the silent response I had to nearly every challenge the whole weekend: Not so hard. Sort of like the way ancient heroes and bards responded to challenges in the stories. :)
Day One started stupid early, but not so early as for
zylch and the rest of the crew. Not even a hint of light on the horizon yet, but the starting zone outside the Speedway was full of music and cheer and all sorts of nervous/excited people. Marvelous bouncy power and attitude music -- stuff like "Movin' Right Along" and "I Will Surive" and "She's Got Legs" -- had me bouncing and bopping. Once I was in the corral and up by the stage, I sat down and put on my Body Glide. Wonderful stuff, by the way. Regrettably, I neglected to put on my sunscreen. Because it was dark. Why would I need sunscreen in the dark. I ask you. (This becomes important later.) I met a couple of other ladies who were walking alone, and gaped at the groups of people all around me. There were a few moments of introvert panic, but mostly it was great and everyone was so excited.All the way through, there was some powerful psychology at work. I recognized it right away, and chose to ride along with it. So, there would be part of my mind noticing how hokey something was and sort of cringing, but mostly I just let it wash over me and feed me some pink-ribbon juju, you know? Acting as if, and all that.
The graphic silhouette they had on the backdrop for opening ceremonies looked startlingly like the Tribe portrait of
breathofgold -- the one where her eyes are softly closed, and she's smiling with her arms sort of flying? The resemblance was stunning and distracted me for a goodly portion of the speechifying. I do recall the "Go, beautiful [noun]!" bit that zylch had so much fun with. I filked it too, on the second day somewhere, but it was judged by my fellow walkers to be Not Funny. (shrug)We started with some marvelous Celtic thrash music -- aural sex from bagpipes, frenzied fiddles and thrumming drums. Yay! After that, the first 2.5 miles involved going through the tunnel and taking a lap at the Speedway. I'd hoped to avoid ever going there, but hey, it was really impressive to see the whole lot of us spread out over those two miles. The Speedway is HUGE. My pace put me somewhere in the middle of the pack, which is about where I stayed until Day Three. My aim was to have the first few miles be as lazy as possible, so as to settle into my body and let some of the nerves pass, while people all around me were in a frenzy to go-go-go! I recall that kind of starting mentality being Bad Idea when I ran cross-country, and it seemed to me the logic would hold for a 20-mile distance too.
We followed Kansas Avenue for a very long time, merged onto K-something (K-7?) and crossed the river. We were on the trail system for a while too, and sweet jeebus were there hills. I'd trained plenty of distance, but not for hills. My legs handled it just fine -- usually, I'd pass a few dozen people on the hills -- but my feet were not conditioned to withstand the pressure on those hill-walking zones. I started to feel it on the balls of my feet and the backs of my heels. That got real fun.
More trails, more hills. Excellent lunch eaten under friendly shade trees. On future days, I totally started to kick it when I saw the "one mile to lunch" sign because the food was Just That Good. I don't think we ever went more than 3.3 miles without a pit stop of some kind (usually, it was about 2.5 miles). Cheering people in wacky costumes, tons of water and gatorade, a marvelous buffet of snacks (salted peanuts and pretzels, bananas, cheese sticks, peanut butter crackers, etc.), and more portajohns than 1,100 walkers would ever need. Seriously. It was the best portajohn experience I've ever had. Plenty of stalls, clean and good-smelling (even unto the last day), and not once did we run out of TP. Well, once, but that was because we were going in and out so fast that the crew couldn't get in to install a fresh roll. She finally just handed it to the next walker in line to just carry in.
I realized I was seeing a pretty consistent group of walkers by this point. Our paces weren't exactly the same, and there was some variance in how long we'd take to eat/drink/stretch/pee at the pit stops, but we started to recognize each other. I found a comfortable rhythm of walking with a group, then walking on my own, then floating into another group, and so on. The Sweep Vans and Safety Patrol folks were terribly upbeat. There was one person I started to refer to as "Safety Broad," who was wonderful. I was exhausted just thinking about all that good cheer they were dishing out, and gave thanks that all I had to do was walk. :) Honestly, compared to everything the crew was doing, I felt like I had the easy job. Walking was simple, you know? But maybe I'm just crazy like that.
Finally, we entered Shawnee Mission Park. Walking, walking, walking. Really ready to be all done now. Lost track of where in the park I was, and where the heck they had us. I began to hear rumors of this place called camp. And then, there was uphill. I felt it in my feet and legs, but they couldn't make me look at it. Nope. Wasn't gonna look. Suddenly, there were walkers going the Other Way. These were the people who had finished and were heading home for the overnight at their own homes. Pussies. Anyway, it was reassurance that camp did exist. They said there was spagetti with meat sauce for dinner. And eclairs. Very motivating, that. I got a picture of my left foot crossing the finish line.
I took significantly more Bad Pictures on Day One than on any other day, partly due to remembering, and partly due to wardrobe choice. There's a shot of my right foot "exceeding" a posted speed limit, my left hand holding a yummy sandwich at lunch, etc. Pictures on the other days aren't any less bad, I bet. There are just fewer of them. :)
From there, I figured I should go set my things at my tent and pick up my gear before I sat down for dinner, so I asked somebody where the tents were. This person pointed me to an area on top of a Hill in the Distance. Ugh. I took a picture from the sign pointing to the tents. So. More walking. Down a hill, then up a hill, and searching for my tent: F33. The tent city was much more jumbled than it had looked in the publicity pictures. Huh. Not so much with the "grid" thing, then. Soon, I began to see that there were little markers in the ground which appeared to have some sort of grid-like pattern to them. And then there were tents, set up with only the loosest of associations with this grid. Huh. And then, there it was: F33. A little marker in the ground, with a skull scarf cheerfully fluttering in the breeze next to it, placed by the resourceful
zylch. It was as I'd feared: I would have to set up my own damn tent. Shit. I gave in to dismay for a moment and sat down to blink at my tent marker. Took a picture of it. Look! I said, as I snapped the photo. Here's where my tent is supposed to be! When I thought about it, it made perfect sense that we'd be setting up our own tents. Still. Wah. Then, it was off to the gear trucks -- on the other end of this hilltop field, over course -- for my gear and a tent-in-a-bag. When I returned to F33, I placed the tent bag by the marker and took another picutre. Look! There's my tent! And then I set that suckah up all by myself. It was windy. But not so hard. I'd managed to get everything set (including the rain fly, which was a neat trick in that wind, let me tell you), tossed my gear inside to weigh things down, and had crawled into the tent for a private moment of "Now what" by the time zylch showed up with some more of those plastic marker thingies so we could pretend to stake my tent down. I'm afraid I was wimpy about it, and completely failed to actually push them into the ground. I was all out of "oomph" for the day, you know? It was embarrassing, but she stuck around for a bit to make sure all was secure before dashing off to her superhero crew duties. It was a pretty nice spot -- only two tents in on the row, so the chaos of the not-grid did not impact me at all -- less than thirty steps from the portajohns (upwind), and situated not far from a light tower. Turns out, my randomly assigned tentmate never showed up, so I got the whole 2-man tent to myself. Sure, two people will fit in there, but it would have been pretty close quarters for people who didn't know each other. I suspect Random Tentmate showed up before me, assessed the situation, and decided "fuck a bunch of that." It worked out okay for me.
Plus, I got an extra eclair for dessert. Then a warm shower in the shower trucks, which are god's own gift to campers. There was a lot of joking about the sounds people would make when the warm water hit their bodies. What do you have in there, anyway? It was in the shower that I discovered my sunburn. Oh, sooper. I'd remembered to put sunscreen on at lunch, but it was Too Late by then. All day on Day Two, ever walker that passed me was like, "Ooh, honey. You should put on some sunscreen." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gah.
Finally, a visit to the medical tent to get a Truly Impressive blister drained. I managed the rest of my feet with self-care stuff, but this one was big enough that I didn't want to drain it myself -- and I sure didn't have a band-aid big enough for it. There was a very amusing range of folks in the blister care section of the medical tent. At the table next to me, we had an actual podiatrist volunteering his time. He was friendly and gentle and thorough, but sort of quietly horrified by the walker's intention to continue walking. Are you sure? he'd say, with a little frown on his face. Yup, she'd say. And then he'd sigh, and his shoulders would slump, and he'd go fetch the moleskin. The volunteer working on my feet was from the athletic department at KU. He was like, dude, that's a big one...can I pop it? we'll tape that up good and you'll be good to go...you've got motrin, right? Very funny contrast. I'm very grateful to have had all those years of ballet en pointe to harden me to the necessities of shoving one's feet back into the shoes. I'll say it again:
featherynscale should not look at my feet for at least a week. Really, there were tons of people much worse off than me. Even on Day Three, I was seeing walkers with knee braces, walkers with blisters so bad they were literally tip-toeing along. I'd think of my own condition and think I didn't have it so bad after all. I mean, once you walk about a quarter-mile, the feet sort of settle in, you know? As long as I didn't take the shoes off, I was okay. Ha.
They had karaoke in the dining tent, which I almost totally managed to avoid hearing. Was snuggled up in my tent before 9 p.m., which was the official lights-out time. The night wasn't very awful. Since I had the tent to myself and it was staked down like a muthah, I was able to sleep sort of cross-wise and not have the tent hit me in the head very often when it bowed under the wind. Got up at 5 a.m. to get Day Two started -- I wanted plenty of time to shuffle around and stretch and have some drugs solidly in my system before the course opened at 7 a.m. But that's another post. :)
