Relay for Life

This past weekend, May 29-30, I did Relay for Life! Relay for Life is a walk put on by the American Cancer Society and involves fundraising either just for fun, or fundraising to reach a specific goal. Most individuals and teams that participate set a goal for how much they hope to collect in donations. The next step is to put on some comfortable walking shoes or other foot wear and start walking around the track.

We had rainy weather for part of last Friday, so by the time the walk started at 6pm, the track was covered with puddles and pretty muddy. Over the course of the night, the mud started to dissipate with all of the people walking over it. At about 2:30am or so, drizzling commenced, continuing and getting heavier as it got towards sunrise. By that time, I had reached to about the 13 or 14 mile mark.

Circling around the track as it got closer towards the end, I could smell the breakfast that the Rotary Club members were preparing for the participants, and it motivated me to continue on walking, knowing that cooked food was soon going to be served. As I walked more, I had to take more frequent breaks, due to developing a blister on my left foot. Every time I rested, it felt wonderful, but when I tried to get back up, it was as if my whole body from the waist down was paralyzed. I could barely move after standing back up and my feet and legs ached like I had been walking for days, not hours.
By the time I had completed 21 1/4 miles, I decided just to do three more laps to get to 22 miles, despite originally trying to get to 24 miles. I kept track of my miles with beads, an on-site fundraiser one of the other teams was doing. You get a length of string by giving them three dollars and it has a starter bead on it. These were whitish colored glow-in-the-dark beads. For every time you go around 1/4 of a mile, you get another glow-in-the-dark bead. For each mile, you pick out a colored one, and each colored one represented a different type of cancer-pink for breast cancer, royal blue for colon cancer, and green for kidney cancer, etc. Some people that were doing this had just one color for the colored ones, like for instance, pink. I at first was going to do a color for that represented the type of cancer that each person I was related to had. Green for my father-in-law, who had kidney cancer; royal blue for my mother-in-law, who had colon cancer; light blue for my husband's grandfather, who had prostate cancer; and pearl for my grandmother, who had lung cancer. I then decided just to use all of the colors, instead of just those four.

At the end of 22 miles, at 10:30am, an hour and a half before the end of the event, I stopped walking and had a string of beads a foot and a half long. I was so exhausted that I lay down on the ground with a blanket over me and slept until five minutes before the end of the event, missing all of the closing ceremony. A lot of people were surprised about how many miles I had done, including my husband and father-in-law.