The 3-Day

                                  

This year I signed up for the Susan G. Komen 3-day for the Cure. 

I will walk 60 miles over the course of three days, I will sleep in a tent (me in a tent! outside!), I will have raised at least $2300 in donations.

This walk is something I have been anxious to participate in for years but life always got in the way. This year I stopped making excuses and signed up.

I haven't even started the walk and I can't even tell you how hard the journey to get there has been. I try to fit in all of my training, but I work, go to school, it's been 110 degrees allfreakingsummer and the last thing I want to do is go outside and walk 10 miles. I hate asking people for money and fundraisers are hard HARD work. 

I buy new shoes-socks-powders-creams-gels every week to try and get rid of the blisters that everyone looks at and tells me "those are horrible, I don't ever get blisters though so I don't know what you should do". I have 12 blisters on the bottom of my feet at this very moment, and I plan to walk 10 miles tonight, tomorrow I'll report back to the running store on how our new experiment is going. 

We are planning on hosting our fourth garage sale to raise money in a few short weeks, and then I am missing a weekend away trip to a football game that I really, really wanted to go to because we need to squeeze in one last fundraiser. 

All this to say it's not easy, I've already wanted to quit (and in theory I haven't even started) and I've cried and I've pouted, and I've neglected things that need to get done and feel guilty because everything can't have my attention and WALKING 17 miles for a training walk takes F O R E V E R! 

Through all of this (and the flat tire I got after a long walk on Saturday that had me sitting in a parking lot barely able to moving balling my eyes out waiting to be rescued) I have to remind myself why I signed up for this walk, why I am doing this. 

I am walking because the most significant risk factors for breast cancer are being female and getting older (two things that are pretty impossible to avoid).

I am walking because the first time I watched someone lose their mother to this disease we we were in fourth grade and saying "I'm so sorry" wasn't enough then or any other time since. 

I am walking because I want to see an end to cancer. I am walking because without a cure, one person will die of breast cancer every 13 minutes in the United States.

I am walking because I can. 

No matter how hard (and time consuming) I feel like this walk has been I know that my struggles cannot compare to someone who is battling cancer, or someone who is watching their loved one battle this disease. I will fight through blisters and exhaustion and I'll be thankful that is all I am fighting.