{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

{In the first part of this series, I began with the selection and gearing up issues and choices I ran into with walking my second marathon. Now, we’ll move into training and fundraising. Also, now’s as good a time as any to repeat that I am NOT a medical professional, I am NOT your doctor, and I am not a certified personal trainer. Before you decide to do any of the stuff I talk about, go talk to someone who can give you a professional medical opinion.}

Training

Ah, training. My least favorite part of any event – not because I don’t like having to train but because I often find it hard to allocate the time to train. When you’re training for an event that involves speed, like running or swimming, your training is timed around a speed sport. When you’re training for an event that may or may not involve speed but that requires a lot of endurance, your training is timed around building endurance. Walking a marathon isn’t something where you immediately focus on how fast you can do it; the goal is to finish, not necessarily to finish first. And, unlike training for something like a 5K or 10K walk (which I don’t even really train for, after the number of them I’ve done in my life), training to walk 26.2mi can take TIME. Think about it this way: the average non-speedy walking speed is around 15-20min/mile. That means that a 5K (3.1mi) walk should take about 45-60min to complete when not packed in like sardines. A 10K should be double that, so maybe up to 2-1/4hrs. A marathon, however, could then run you anywhere from 6-1/2hrs to 8-3/4hrs.

Imagine trying to train for an event that takes you an entire work day. It’s nuts.

And then there are the logistics, like finding bathrooms along your route (once you’ve mapped a route), staying hydrated and fed, and even HOW to map a route! It adds up to a lot of stress very quickly.

To minimize frustration, I came up with a couple of routes that I could easily tap as standard walks, and I familiarized dh with them so that he would have a general sense of where I’d be when in my training walk. Google Maps has a nice option for doing walking directions; it’s not perfect, but it’s useful enough that you can drag the route around until you find your desired mileage. For me, a 10K is my preferred length for a weekend training walk, since I can’t get 2hrs of dedicated time during any given day in the work-week to walk. Typically, if I can manage to get about one hour a day, 2-3 times a week, I feel like I got a decent set of workouts in for a work-week. On the weekend, at least one longer walk (such as a 10K), makes me feel a lot less like a schlub.

There are training calendars out there that will help you figure out what you need to walk and when, such as these from The Walking Site. Remember, though, that it’s not all about just walking. You have to intermix the walking with other exercises, like strength training or some form of weights work, so that you’re cross-training. Whether you decide to go for personal training or just buy a DVD from Jillian Michaels, there are tons of low-cost, high-value options to help you build strength and insert some variety in your schedule. For me, I found that some of the workouts I did when testing out products I was reviewing, like the Empower Fitness Fingertip Grip Medicine Ball, helped me cross-train. And the stretches I got from the trainer at my gym were ones I used both when I was cooling down from walks and when I was stretching during the marathon walk.

Think of all of these things as tools that go into a toolbox; use what you need when you need it, but fill it as much as you can so that you have the best possible chance for success.

I will admit that I didn’t train as much as I wanted to this summer. Early and often, I let picking up the kids, my husband’s triathlon training schedule, and a whole host of other things give me the excuse as to why I wasn’t working out that day. So, when it came to the day of the marathon, I really didn’t know how I would do. Scary stuff.

Fundraising

The other marathon associated with this walk is the fundraising component. You can raise as little as $300 (or at least that was the minimum this year), and once you cross the threshold of $1250, you start making “Pacesetter” designation. Given that I’m not sure I’ll ever raise another dime for Komen, I wanted to pour all of my effort into this; I decided I REALLY wanted to make Pacesetter.

I started out by leaning on the tools available through the Walk web site. Most events these days have either use a solution from Kintera or make their own Kintera-like setup, so there are the usual reports, e-mail features, etc. I blasted out an e-mail and waited. And waited. And waited. Sigh.

Realizing that my own group of friends and family would be insufficient to get me where I needed to go (and understanding that from the moment I set my goal of $1250), I set up a meeting with the Corporate Social Responsibility team at my office. For some folks, this may be a function embedded within Human Resources; ours is a wholly separate team that handles all of the requests for fundraising events, among other things. Anything related to philanthropy goes through them. Unfortunately, since I work in Rhode Island and live in Massachusetts, I wasn’t able to use all of the internal means we have available in order to promote my events. Ah well. This is where knowing A LOT of people comes in handy. Being shameless also helps, too.

I decided to do two events, the most profitable being an “opportunity drawing”. In any other world, we’d call that a “raffle”, but there’s all kinds of legalese around raffling, whether or not it’s gambling and BLAH BLAH LEGAL BS BLAH. The way it works is simple enough: just come up with a bunch of baskets or gifts that people can donate to get a chance to win. Each donation results in the donor getting tickets. The key thing for it not to be a legal nightmare is to make sure that anybody can participate; if someone had no money (or simply didn’t want to donate) but wanted to get a ticket, I’d give them one. It’s as simple as that. Also, I had to keep the total value of any one gift to no more than $250. OK – easy enough.

I had a few things I pulled together myself, plus a basket donated by a co-worker and a bunch of stuff I got at BlogHer ’12. That raised me enough to get me about 1/3 of the way to my goal, which placed me within striking distance when combined with what I’d gotten from friends and family. A few more reminder e-mails and some pleas on Facebook got me the remainder weeks before the Walk started – and I raised almost $1400. It was really amazing.

Realizing that some long walking events, like the 3-day breast cancer walks, have stiff donation minimums (usually $2000 or more), I can’t imagine trying to raise money without doing something drastic – like opportunity drawings at work, having a lemonade stand, or hitting up extremely rich relatives. It’s hard to raise money when the economy’s somewhat in the tank and people are more worried about making their mortgage payment than cancer research. Still, people opened up their wallets, and I’m sure it helped my cause tremendously that The Jimmy Fund has tremendous name recognition in New England. The fundraising was somewhat stressful, but the help I got from the Walk organizers made it a ton easier (once they had my event information and approved it, I was able to get official materials with the Jimmy Fund Walk logo to use as part of my promotions). Key lesson for those who haven’t done this before: work with the official teams in your office and at the event, since they are there to help you. Most companies like to tout their philanthropic work, so don’t be surprised if they jump at helping to take credit for the good work you do. For me, that’s fine…as long as I get what I need in order to raise the most possible money for charity.

Next post in this series: walking…