Jay Furr's LiveJournal

Originally published at The Guy In The Pink Helmet. You can comment here or there.

This September I will walk sixty miles in three days in Seattle, Washington as part of the 2012 Seattle 3-Day For The Cure.  

My walking will not cure breast cancer.  

I may, by my presence, cheer up some breast cancer patients and survivors who often feel lost and alone and without support, and I’m glad to show them that I care… but when you get down to it, my walking isn’t going to make a huge difference in anyone’s life.  Except, perhaps, mine.  It’ll show me that I’m still capable of walking sixty miles in three days and coming up smiling, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, but that’s not the reason I walk.

I walk one or more 3-Day walks each year because too many friends and co-workers and acquaintances and friends of friends have had breast cancer.    Many of them have done well, thanks to medical advances that have been funded in part by donations to Susan G. Komen For The Cure, donations from people like you.   Some of the most important developments in the fight against breast cancer have come about because of dollars raised in events just like this one.

But while many patients have done well, many have not done well.  I’ve commented before that it seems like every day I log in to Facebook and read the news of a friend or acquaintance getting horrible news that their cancer has recurred.  Or worse, that they’re entering hospice.  Or even worse, that they didn’t make it. 

I can’t stop fundraising and walking for a cure until the my daily Facebook dip isn’t so full of woe.  And until breast cancer becomes a treatable, chronic condition and not a potential death sentence.   Will we find a cure?  I don’t know.  But with your help, we can at least increase the odds.

One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime.   The odds of survival with early detection go up every year.   Your dollars can help fund mammograms, treatment, education, and research.   Your dollars can improve the odds of survival.

Will you help?

I am $2,258 short of my goal for the Seattle 3-Day.   Will you sponsor me with a donation?

If you would, you can do so here:  http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurr — and you’ll have my deep gratitude for help you can lend.   Together, we can make a difference!

Originally published at The Guy In The Pink Helmet. You can comment here or there.

Many of you have seen me wandering around the Internet, hat in hand, begging for money to find a cure for breast cancer, jabbering something about “The Three Day”. Once in a while, though, I’ve had to be reminded that the average person has NO IDEA what this thing I’m talking about actually IS.

So here’s a go at answering that question: “What is the 3-Day”?

Let me start by saying, what is it NOT?

It’s not a race.

I happened to be wearing a “Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure” shirt at church the other day and had a fellow churchgoer look at me and ask “Have you been in the race?” I suspect she was thinking of the Race for the Cure, which is also Komen-affiliated, but not the same thing. The Race is a 5K fitness run; the 3-Day is about twenty times the distance and trust me, you’re not running that.

And it’s not some sort of weird “Last Woman Walking” stamina test. People sometimes get the idea that this three-day, sixty-mile walk is some sort of endurance battle. I’ve literally been asked if we’re allowed to drink or eat while on the walk… and once I was even asked “Do they let you take breaks?” Yeah, no, it’s not some sort of weird reality show contest, people. It’s not a horror show out of Stephen King where we stagger blindly onwards, dropping out one by one until one remaining pink-clad zombie lurches over the finish line in the glare of flashbulbs.

Might get more TV coverage if it was.

Hmm.

Okay, no.

The 3-Day isn’t about endurance and it’s sure as heck not a race. It’s first and foremost about grit, determination, and making a difference. Making a difference by showing friends and family and acquaintances that you’re willing to go to a lot of effort in return for their donations toward the incredibly important cause of finding a cure for breast cancer. I mean, let’s get real: if I told a bunch of people that I’d be ever so grateful if they ponied up the downpayment on a Porsche Boxster to help cure breast cancer just because I thought it’d be a really spiff-tacular thing to do I doubt I’d raise all that much money. But tell people you’re going to go walk sixty miles over three days, camping in a tent two nights, while dressed from head to toe in fetching shades of fuchsia and cerise and hot pink, and tell them you have to raise $2,300 in order to do just that, they’re going to go “Hmm. How much did you want me to donate?”

Okay, then they’re going to go “And where will we be able to see photographic proof?”, but that’ll probably be a bit after the “and who do we make the check out to?”

Trust me: it works.

The Susan G. Komen 3-Day is a three-day event, held in fourteen cities across the USA, where participants walk about twenty miles each day. It usually works out that one or two of the days is a bit more than twenty miles and in exchange, the last day is usually a bit less. Having a fifteen mile walk on the last day helps the thing wrap up by a reasonable time in the afternoon so we can all get together at the finish line for a big celebratory PAR-TAY and then head home to a strange land where people DON’T cheer you when you walk by on the street and where people aren’t all wearing pink.

To put it another way, it’s not three twenty-mile walks… it’s fifteen four-mile walks. You start at a big outdoor opening ceremony where we throw everything at you short of Shamu leaping through three giant pink flaming hoops while whistling a medley of 1980s pop hits. Then you walk four miles along city sidewalks and streets. Then you stop at a “pit stop” and people you don’t even know press cookies and bananas and peanut butter and jelly “Grahamwiches”  at you and pat you on the back and tell you how great you are. Then you walk four more miles. Then more Grahamwiches. Then you walk four MORE miles. You’re probably expecting even MORE Grahamwiches at this point but no, we fake you out. This time you get lunch. Then you walk four more miles and maybe, just for variety, you get granola bars and orange slices and if you ask nice, some people will dump ice down your back to cool you off, especially if it’s a hot day or you look like the kind of person who misses their sorority or fraternity hazing experiences. Then four more miles and then you get to camp in a big sea of hot pink two-person tents. WOO!  

And if along the way you can’t make it because you simply become too tired, or it’s so hot you’re melting in your shoes, or your blisters become so large you start giving them names — well, then, there are sweep vans and buses to take you to the next pit stop or to lunch or to camp. We want everyone to finish together even if they can’t walk every inch of the route. I mean, some people practically come out of the chemo ward to walk the 3-Day: we’re not going to say “HEY SLOWPOKE, GET BACK ON YER FEET AND KEEP MOVING.”

If we did, they’d probably beat us up. Most of them are tougher than us. So there’s that.

Oh, and throughout the day you get all the sports drink you can suck down.  The 3-Day is sponsored by the good folks at Nuun so each pit stop has various flavors right out of a mad scientist’s laboratory.   If you mix them all together to make what we used to call “Bug Juice” when I was in the Girl Scouts (long story), no one’s going to make fun of you. It’s expected. Being silly is good.

I think you’ve gathered already that it’s kind of important to wear a lot of pink during the walk. I didn’t mention the rest, though … and I almost feel like I shouldn’t, because it’s entirely possible that you — yes, you – might one day decide to come walk a 3-Day and I’d hate to ruin the surprise for you when you find yourself surrounded by hundreds of women all wearing 46-DDDD bras on the outside of their clothing. And not necessarily in the usual place, either. Sometimes on their heads. Sometimes other places.

And then there’re the guys. Less said, the better.

This goes on for three days. In between all the walking there’s lots of other stuff going on: spontaneous hugs, people stopping to stretch or treat blisters, people bursting into song while dressed like Goofy and Snow White and, for reasons I never entirely understood, Al Davis, the late owner of the Oakland Raiders. You get to use all the port-o-jons you want, no charge. You get to sleep in a hot pink tent. Really. The 3-Day folks used to use regular old camp tents for the event, but decided it was more thematic to get pink ones, tents they give away to local non-profits after each walk. Lots of Girl Scout troops have surplus 3-Day pink tents. Not so many Boy Scout troops, but I imagine if the interest was there something could be worked out. There’s even karaoke.

Surprisingly good karaoke, actually. Seriously.

But in the end, despite all the silliness and whimsy, there’s a very real undercurrent of absolute stone-cold seriousness. When you meet a walker who’s got the photographs of each and every friend and family member they’ve lost to breast cancer pinned to their shirt — and you can’t really tell what color their shirt is… when you groan at the sight of a huge hill on the route and a scrawny, eighty-pounds-soaking-wet grandmother with no hair as a result of chemotherapy and radiation looks at you and says “it beats the hell out of chemo!” and powers right on up that hill… and when you walk into the Remembrance Tent at camp one evening and see people you’ve been laughing with all day bawling their eyes out as they write notes about loved ones they’ve lost to cancer… well, then, you realize that the fight against breast cancer is no laughing matter at all.

As I said above it’s really about the grit and determination… the will to do something that matters.

I mean, get serious. When’s the last time most people really did something that made a huge difference, a huge positive difference in the lives of other people… not just people they know and look out for, but in the lives of people they’ll never know, never meet, people yet unborn?

Not real often, unfortunately. We go to work, we go home, we watch TV, we go to bed. Along the way we eat way too much unhealthy food and care way too much about stuff that in the end doesn’t make a lick of difference in whether the world is a better place at the end of the day.

Sure, it’s not the walking we do on the 3-Day that finds a cure for breast cancer. Okay, the publicity sure as heck doesn’t hurt, because let’s face it, no one wants to go back to the day 25 and 30 years ago where women and men with breast cancer just didn’t talk about it because it was considered a shameful topic to bring up. The more conversations we start about it, the better, even if we have to be damn silly along the way. But yeah, walking doesn’t cure breast cancer and publicity doesn’t cure breast cancer, although it may help raise awareness and get people doing more to look out for themselves and get examined and treated before it’s too late.

So what does cure breast cancer? What’s the real goal of the Susan G. Komen 3-Day?

How does close to $75,000,000 raised in 2011 for the fight against breast cancer sound? How does over FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS raised by 3-Day events since 2003 sound? With promising clinical trials and research studies going on all around the country, that kind of funding can have some serious bang for the buck. A cure for breast cancer, or at least a vaccine against breast cancer, is actually possible. In our lifetimes.

Every walker has to raise a minimum of $2,300 just to take part.  It’s not for everyone.   People who are anxious about the distances involved or the amount of money required are free to walk in the Komen Race for the Cure – a 5k race with no fundraising minimum.   $2,300 per walker — and most walkers raise more — means that each 3-Day, nightmarishly difficult logistical undertaking that it is, raises a lot of money.   If the fundraising minimum was a lot lower, thousands more walkers would take part, and the event would grow so large that overnight camping would require whole state parks.    To keep the event within the scope of what can actually be managed with a mostly-volunteer staff, the fundraising minimum has to be pretty substantial. 

And that, my friends, is what the 3-Day is all about: making a substantial impact in the war on breast cancer.   And helping guarantee a full and happy lifetime for everyone, a lifetime without fear of breast cancer. A world without breast cancer for our wives, for our sisters, for our mothers, for our daughters, for ourselves, and for the future.

That’s what the 3-Day all comes down to in the end: A WORLD WITHOUT BREAST CANCER.

Originally published at The Guy In The Pink Helmet. You can comment here or there.

This morning I finished a teleconference, hung up the phone, and reached for my Droid, idly checking my personal email before going on to the next item on my crowded schedule.

I wasn’t expecting any special emails; when you’re an email addict (as I apparently am), checking email is as automatic as breathing or getting hungry at lunchtime.    But a special email is what I got:  “Congratulations on your fundraising,” signed “Susan G. Komen 3-Day.”  I knew that such emails are typically sent when you reach major fundraising milestones.   You have to raise $2,300 to take part in a 3-Day, so they send an email when you raise your first $100, at the halfway point, and so on.  I’d long since passed such milestones as “first $100 raised” and “$1150 raised — halfway to your goal!”   Disbelieving, I thought “the next milestone was my minimum — but I was $208 short a few minutes ago!”

I opened the email and, surprise surprise, it contained congratulations on making my minimum!  Odd.  I closed the email and scrolled down through my unread messages and … there it was, unexpected but very very welcome — “A donation has been made on your behalf“.   But how could I have gone from $208 down to making my minimum unless…

Yeah, you guessed it.   Someone had been very generous, in the amount of $250.  In one fell swoop I went from below my minimum to $42 over!   I looked for the identity of the donor and read the name “Susan Sawyer”.   That didn’t instantly ring a bell, so I logged in to my 3-Day fundraising page to see what else was on file and found out the rest.  Susan is a fellow Boston 3-Day crew captain, taking part in her first-ever 3-Day, period, in 2012.  She’d found my blog and read it and wanted to help out — period.   (I did a little more checking and was very impressed — Susan is the top crew fundraiser for Boston, with just under $3000 raised in her own right. )

I’ve been walking on air ever since I got those two emails.   Almost literally.  I just got asked by a co-worker why I’d been bouncing around grinning all morning. 

Until you’ve trained for a 3-Day and fundraised for a 3-Day, you probably won’t really “get” how exhilirating it is to see a donation come in.  $2300 is a lot of money and you have to ask a lot of people before you get there.   To reach that milestone is an absolutely wonderful feeling.

But I can’t stop here: cancer doesn’t take a day off, and neither can I.  I’ve upped my fundraising goal to double the minimum:  $4,600.    And I know I can make it, thanks to generous people everywhere who share the same goal: creating a world without breast cancer.

Thank you, Susan, and thank you, everyone!