I’m still not entirely certain that it’s sane to walk 26.2 miles but, if I’m not altogether there, at least I’m in good company. On Sunday, I walked my third marathon in support of The Jimmy Fund – the fundraising arm of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. That part is completely sane…so sane, in fact, that I’m super-proud to say that I made “Pacesetter” again this year (which, this year, meant raising a minimum of $1,500).

The day started early enough: my alarm was set for 4:00am. Since I get really edgy when I have my alarm set for very early times, I slept fairly poorly and woke up a few minutes before the alarm went off. DH and I crept out of bed, got dressed and headed out the door at 4:30am, heading to Copley Square to park the car. The theory is, if you park the car in Copley, you take the shuttle bus to Hopkinton and walk back to your car. And so, we repeated what we’d done in the two prior years, making great time to Copley and boarding the first bus we were able to get on. After a quiet drive out the Mass Pike and a quick pit stop at the registration area for dh’s hat, we grabbed a bagel (thanks, Dunkin Donuts!) and hit the course at 6:18am.

I know this sounds like I’m just making it up, but the first 9-10 miles are always the easiest. You’re excited. You’re enthusiastic. You’re fresh. We took a couple of stops along this part of the route, pausing to change socks at the 8mi “refueling” station (the first of three such changes I’d make during the walk), and then on we went. It was at this point that the bursitis I’d been fighting all week – and that randomly, rather cruelly hobbled me for DAYS preceding the walk – started to come into play. Following the advice from the nurse practitioner I’d seen earlier in the week, I iced my hip at the 8mi point, while we stretched and rested, and I took 600mg of ibuprofen at the start and partway through the walk. It helped, but it only really took the edge off and never really made the discomfort go away entirely.

Welcome to Ashland…town #2 along the route

I felt like I ate my way through the course, though really all I ate on the course pre-lunch was a peanut butter and honey sandwich. My breakfast was a hardboiled egg eaten in the car, along with a granola bar, and half of a wheat bagel (dry, untoasted) before hopping on the course. Mostly, I tried alternating between water and Gatorade, just to try to stay hydrated. Lunch was a turkey and cheese sandwich, some chips and a couple of brownie bites. It was a fantastic balance of carbs, protein, sugar and salt to refresh myself. I only snacked minimally after that, although I have to say the Ritz Bits cheese sandwiches I had when we turned onto Beacon Street were all kinds of awesome.

The weather was rather lovely for the start – brisk without being chilly, and cloudy to a fault. But then, once we were about a third of the way through the walk, the clouds started to give way to the sun, and things started to warm up a bit. When we stopped in Natick, I changed my shirt from the long-sleeved “2012 Pacesetter” shirt to a tank top. I teased dh that I was probably challenging town decency laws, but he shrugged it off as, “Enh, you see more skin in a Target flyer.” Touché.

An institution for NINETEEN YEARS, they follow the walkers along the route

The latter portion of the middle third of the walk was probably the toughest. When we were deep into the hills of Newton – which are steep and tall – there was virtually no cloud cover and the trees were spaced out enough that there was very little shade to be had. Worse still, there was almost no breeze. For the last two years, our arrival at the Boston College refueling station was where I would hit a wall that I’d have to climb over. This year, I started to feel a bit out of it while climbing one of the last hills in The Heights (the area that includes BC), but I only needed a few minutes to sit in the shade and rehydrate to get myself back on track.

Manna from heaven…and The Orange Guy

Then, up I went..and up WE went. My slightly awkward gait from the bursitis flare-ups, combined with sweatier feet from heavier padded sneakers, led to a couple of blisters atop the balls of my feet. These managed to pop – or something – as we were making our way through the five miles from BC down to the finish, but I didn’t really mind. Fortune smiled on us during the last portion of the walk and most of the final stretch was done in shade and with a cool breeze blowing on us. I was loving every minute of it, while dh was actually complaining that he was getting chilly. I suppose it’s the few extra layers of fat I have on him that probably meant I’m better in cold than he is.

DONE-ZO!!!

Regardless, right around 4:20pm – nearly 10hrs to the minute  from when we walked across the official start line in Hopkinton – we crossed the finish line in Copley Square. This includes about 1-1/2hrs of stops and breaks along the way, so we still made fairly decent time (averaging about 19-1/2mins per mile). We flew through the early miles, but the ones in Newton were much slower due to heat and hills. (I’m utterly convinced that the person who designed the Boston Marathon course loved hills and hated people.) In reality, the time we made is a little better than that, since we walked MORE than 26.2 miles (the finish line of the walk is a good block farther down Boylston than the official finish line of the Boston Marathon, and we start our walk from the official start line of the Boston Marathon, rather than the slightly-farther-down walk start). No womens tee here, folks.

Anyway, it was a great day…so great, in fact, that I did a post-walk, post-stretch plank, just to prove that I could. We had so many great supporters along the way, like Joel & Jesse, and The Orange Guy, and there were so many others who were new or regulars that clapped, cheered, gave us MOAR COWBELL and all that, and it was phenomenal to know that there are others out there who were helping us along the way.

Why we walk…

I dedicated my walk to four people whose lives were directly affected by cancer. One year ago as of Saturday, we lost my dear, sweet aunt to lung cancer after a lengthy fight. Jackie had breast cancer twice before, and this was her second occurrence of lung cancer (most likely from having been a heavy smoker for years). Just a handful of weeks ago, we lost our friend Tim to mesothelioma after a battle that didn’t even last a year.  He will always be remembered as a sweet, kind, funny, and wonderful person. Within the last few months, a friend’s mother – Rosette – began her own battle with brain cancer. Rosette is another sweetheart, and she’s been quite perky in her updates as she has her appointments at the “Dana-Farber spa”, as she puts it. Clio is the only one of the four I haven’t yet met; she’s the young daughter of my sister’s neighbor, and she’s been fighting cancer for more than a year. It’s unfair that kids should have to deal with this crap. It’s bad enough that adults have to deal with it. If anyone ever asks me why I walk, why I’d be nuts enough to walk a marathon and spend a day on my feet, I can answer easily enough: because my marathon is nothing compared to that of a cancer patient.

I’ll leave with this quote, from a sign left to cheer on a walker up one of the nightmarish hills in Newton, because it made so many of us smile. It’s so true.

{In the prior parts of this series, I talked about selecting a walk & gearing up, training & fundraising, and actually DOING the walk. This last post focuses on the recovery, which was an area where I had difficulty my first year. As with the other posts, when you think about doing a walk like this – make sure you talk to a doctor and maybe someone who does personal training. They can give you far more tips than I can as to what’s appropriate for YOU. I can only comment on my experience and I don’t claim to have any medical training, professional certification, etc.}

Last year, when I finished the walk, I was tired and in massive amounts of pain. When we got back to the house after the Walk, my temperature dropped and I was then coping with pain and something that felt much like the worst chills I’d ever had in my life. The next few days I was sore – intensely sore – but after a week I was back to normal.

This year was COMPLETELY different.

For starters, I had my fuzzy slippers and a zip hoodie sweatshirt waiting for me at the car. I ditched my shoes and socks in the back seat and switched to the slippers, then I put on the hoodie and zipped it up. The whole point of this was to keep my body warm. Sure enough, I had stretched for a bit after the walk was over, but that’s not enough to cool your body down enough to resist the fact that it’s just done SO MUCH WORK for SO LONG. So, the extra heat from the slippers and hoodie kept my body at a stable enough temperature that the transition from Walk to home was an easy one.

When we got home, the kids were waiting eagerly for us and we managed to have dinner in tow (we’d called our local pizza joint on the ride home), so that made life a lot easier. I took some more ibuprofen, since I was starting to stiffen up a bit, and I took a lukewarm shower so I could wash off all the salt and sweat without setting my muscles off. Getting the kids to bed was easier than expected, and we all managed to sleep through the night this time – no nocturnal freak-outs from either child.

The next day, both dh & I pushed fluids and kept the protein going, and we both kept moving. Even when we were a little stiff or sore, the idea was not to just spend the entire day on the couch. Two days after the walk, my quads hurt, but that was to be expected. Typically, it’s not the day after a workout that gets you; it’s the day AFTER the day after a workout that has the peak pain. Even so, somehow, my body was in a better state for this Walk than it had been the year before, and I felt like I could go up and down stairs, walk around and generally be in less pain than I had been in the recovery period last year.

Next year, I think the plan will be much the same – have warm gear to change into at the car before the drive home, push ibuprofen as needed and don’t stop moving for an entire day. While I took a few days off from actual exercising, that doesn’t mean I didn’t get moving again quickly. Within a couple of days, I was doing strolls at lunchtime with co-workers, and I think that definitely helped me recover. I’m still amazed at how well everything went before, during and after the Walk. Honestly, all the planning in the world couldn’t have made it go any better.

And so I can close the book on the 2012 Walk and plan for 2013. Who’s with me?

{As mentioned in the prior two posts – the first on selecting your walk & gearing up, and the second on training & fundraising – it’s incredibly important that you understand this is what I did and these are the choices I made based on my experience. Before you get into doing a walk like this, you should definitely talk with medical professionals, like your doctor, a personal trainer, etc., to make sure it’s the right thing for you. Also, another reminder: none of the companies mentioned in these posts asked me to mention them or compensated me for talking about them in the context of my marathon walk.}

And now we come to the big dance:

Walking

The Walk has a rolling start, beginning at 5:30am, and since it can take 8-9hrs to walk a marathon, there was no way I wanted to start it late. So, we got up at 4am and started preparing to go. I will also note that dd, who didn’t want us to go, kept us up from 12:45am until we gave up and turned off the alarm a little before 4am, so we were already operating at a deficit.

We made a couple of peanut butter sandwiches for each of us, stuffed those and some granola bars in our bags, and off we went. DH had a couple of bottles of water, and I had my Camelbak hydration pack (which I’d filled about halfway with water, since I didn’t go through all of the water I brought last year, when I’d filled the pack’s bladder). We drove up to Copley Square and parked, then hopped one of the schoolbuses chartered to bring walkers out to Hopkinton. Some people chatted loudly, others (like us) nodded off and slept most of the way out the Mass Pike to the start line.

Once we got to Hopkinton, it was ON. DH and I got to the start line and just started moving. Knowing that I would probably start to have hip and knee problems about halfway through, I’d taken some ibuprofen at the start, just before we got on the road. This turned out to be a more common practice than I’d suspected; many of the veteran walkers I spoke to had done the very same thing. I’d even dumped a bottle into a baggie to bring with me, in case others needed some (much as I’d been helped by an angel at the lunch tent last year).

Every mile marker we passed was a sweet reminder of why we did this Walk.

Each marker brought you one step closer to the finish line, one step closer to a cure for the cancers that plague Dana-Farber’s patients. The walkers’ tradition is to touch each mile marker as you pass it, to acknowledge the amazing heroes chronicled on each sign.

I didn’t start to feel twingy, really, until around the 9th mile, at which point I knew we weren’t too far off from the halfway point. We had stopped to stretch a little more than last year, and I was good about grabbing snacks at the various “hydration stations” situated a few miles apart along the route. My typical take was a bottle of red Gatorade and something with some carbs and/or protein, here a Larabar, there a banana, occasionally a package of pretzels. I tugged on my hydration pack’s drinking tube here and there, and the rest of the time I was rocking the Gatorade. After having had such great success with it during last year’s walk, there was no way I would abandon a winning formula in the current year. I also brought more socks with me this year, and I changed my socks when we were at the 8th mile marker, planning to do one more change when we got to Boston College (mile 21).

On and on we went, and the twinges in my knee were starting to bug me. It wasn’t so horrible as last year, though, so I soldiered on until we hit the halfway point in Wellesley. When we stopped to stretch, I took more ibuprofen and ate a peanut butter sandwich, figuring that would give me some more power for the next portion of the Walk.

Just after the halfway point, around about mile 13 or 14, we made it to the lunch tent, where we reunited with a pair of walkers we’d met earlier on in the day. That’s the great thing about doing such a long event; you tend to see the same folks over and over again, and you use them as some way of determining where you are in the “pack”, especially when it’s not a well-defined grouping like you’d see with a shorter distance event. The lunch tent was filled with sandwiches of all kinds – peanut butter and jelly, ham, turkey…as well as Cape Cod chips, Fig Newtons and fruit. DH and I grabbed hefty lunches: a sandwich, a bag of chips, a bag of cookies and a banana. Everything has its purpose; aside from the tremendous number of calories you burn by walking for so long, you also lose minerals and you dehydrate, so everything you take is there to help replace what you’re using up.

Feeling refreshed, we got back on the road, and I can’t even say how happy I was that I wasn’t limping. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never been in tremendous hip and/or knee pain, but when you are able to WALK TALL when the prior event you were limping and shuffling, it’s an amazing difference and a huge confidence boost.

Coming into the hills in Newton, year in, year out, you come across “The Orange Guy” – a resident who passes out pounds and pounds of orange wedges to the hungry and thirsty walkers who pass him by. He and his wife were such sweethearts, and I’d been given the head’s up last year to expect their tasty oranges. Sure enough, both years, I’ve seen them out there dishing out tasty treats to keep us moving. They do this same drill for the Boston Marathon (race) in April, and I think it’s just fantastic. They’re not the only ones who come out to cheer on the walkers, but they are certainly the most intrepid…and scurvy-preventing.

On and on we walked, and here’s where I start to get a sense that even my not-quite-optimal training schedule managed to get me closer to where I needed to be. One girl, sporting a back sack covered in pins from an herbal supplement company that she (clearly) worked for, was having quite a bit of trouble making her way up the hills. I could tell she was in pain, as she held her hip and moved stiffly. I offered her some ibuprofen, but she had already taken some, so she thanked me and limped along. I felt somewhat proud that I’d been able to make it so far without much difficulty.

NO PARKING means “KEEP MOVING” in walker-ese

The sun and heat were starting to get to me by the time we reached BC. I’m not great in heat, and I’d already stripped down to my tank top (I started the Walk wearing a tech t-shirt over my tech-tank, along with tech capris). At Boston College, I pulled off my tank and replaced it with a fresh one, just to try to cool me down a little further – and reduce the goat factor. Another change of socks, a swig of Gatorade for strength, and back down the hill, out of the Heights, we went. I knew…only five miles left…I have to make it better than I did last year.

We kept moving and sometime between a few minutes and forever later, we came upon Kenmore Square, only two miles from the finish. At this point, I’m still WALKING. No limping. I have a pair of very small blisters starting to form on the bottoms of my feet, but they weren’t bugging me at all. It seems improbable, impossible, even, that I’m feeling less pain than dh claims to have. How is this happening? Even ibuprofen isn’t THAT good.

And then the amazing happens. We get to the finish line and I could RUN across it. I won’t lie – I was tired, and I was warm, and I was ready to SIT DOWN FOR A WEEK – but I danced across the finish line, so incredibly thrilled that not only did I finish the marathon, but I finished it strong. I surprise myself sometimes. Ask me if I want to walk another 26.2 for The Jimmy Fund and the answer is OH MY YES. It’s not that it’s not a challenge; it’s a huge challenge. But what an amazing thing to do that helps so many.

YYYYYEEEEESSSSSS!!!!!

Next post (and final in the series): Recovery