Vanessa has a favorite 3-Day moment, but this one happens before the opening ceremonies have even been set up. Take a look at what she told me her favorite 3-Day moment is, it’s a great story. If you would like to donate to one of the Coconutter Strutters or ask Vanessa about joining her team, go to http://coconutterstrutters.com.
When you read through your Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure walker handbook, you may think to yourself, “Geez, what am I going to do on all those long training walks, it’s going to be so boring!”. After all, while you are walking, you should not be listening to an MP3 player, using your phone, updating Twitter, posting blog posts or sending text messages. All of these are prohibited with good reason, too keep you safe. But it does bring up the question, what ARE you going to do on that 18 mile walk. This week I’ll explore some of your options and also ask you to post comments of any other suggestions you may have!
Bring a Friend
The most obvious solution is to bring a friend along with you for the walk. Now you notice that I didn’t say, bring a teammate. While your teammate probably qualifies as a friend, there are many walkers who either do not walk on a team or if they are on a team they don’t live near any of their teammates. So ask your non-3-Day friends if they would walk with you. I’m not suggesting that you bring them along on a full 12 mile walk, but tell them you’re going on a 12 mile walk and see if they would walk 4 of them with you. That way you’re not scaring them with 12 miles, but you have 4 miles that goes a lot quicker. Because when you’re talking with friends the miles will go a lot quicker than when you’re by yourself.
Count the Lions
On my first 3-Day Kandice, my team captain, and I came up with a game that kind of alleviated some of the boredom. You can do this on training walks too and while it is probably more fun with multiple people you can still do it on your own. As we walked through our first day, we started noticing that there were a lot of houses that had stone lions out front. A lot of them looked oddly out of place. We decided to start counting every time we saw a lion (even though there were two at most houses we still counted individually to make sure to include the houses with only 1 or with more than 2 lions).
It kept us on our toes about being aware of our surroundings and was kind of fun at the end of the day to say, “wow, we saw 37 lions today”. Maybe the area that you are walking in doesn’t have lions, but I’m sure if you look around long enough you’ll find some oddity that a lot of people have that you can start counting to help tick away the time a little bit. Keep in mind that since this game is only really occurring when you see the lions, you can play this with some of the other suggestions. Thanks to Kandice for playing count the lions with me!
Blog-Fund Raiser
I walk a lot by myself and I use a lot of this time to think about what I’m going to write in my next blog or what I’m going to do for my next fund raiser. I even thought up the idea for this post when I was walking a week or two ago. Most of the script for the first week of my video fund raiser I thought about and went over in my head many times on a walk before I even recorded it. Yes, it’s not necessarily hugely entertaining but I have found that it makes the miles go by a little quicker.
3-Day Alphabet
This is a game that I’m not sure I ever played but it makes me think of childhood car games. Basically the goal of this game is to go through the entire alphabet saying things that are related to the 3-Day that begin with the letter you are on. For Instance:
A – Arch Support
B – Body Glide
C – Camel Back
And so forth. If you’re playing with friends, take turns and go through the entire alphabet. It gets harder as you, so I don’t feel bad about giving some suggestions for the first three.
Sing a Song
While it may occasionally get you strange looks from people that don’t understand that you’re walking on a very long walk, singing can actually help pass the time. You can sing a song you already know, something that’s on the radio or go back to your days at camp and pick something from there! If you can’t think of anything, you could make up your own song. Since you’re only singing it for you, it doesn’t even have to be a good song!
Team Building
Another thing that I like to try to do while I walk is think about how I can get more people on the team. I like to think about my friends and who I think might be willing to join and raise the money and do the walk. If I think of some that might be good, I think of how I would approach them to get them to walk. Another way that you can think of team building is if you have a friend walking with you from the first suggestion. Now would be a great time to tell them about why you’re walking on the 3-Day and what a great cause it is that all these funds are going to and about the great experience walking on the walk. I’m not saying to accost them and make them not want to walk with you again, but sometimes just sharing your experience from the 3-Day is enough to get people interested in joining up. At the very least it allows you to spread more awareness about the cause!
So those are my few suggestions about alleviating some of the boredom while you are out doing training walks. Got an idea that I missed? Post it to the comments so that everyone can see it!
Jennifer is the team captain of Lynda’s Ladies. Last week she sent me this video of some of her favorite 3-Day Moments! She also talks about the post office and the importance of sending a letter to the walkers you support! If you would like information about joining Jennifer’s team, contact her through Twitter: http://twitter.com/LyndasLadies
I’m going to nerd it up a little bit in this post. Never fear, the next post I do should be a lot less nerdy! The next topic I’m going to cover in your digital 3-Day life is the redirect. This is one that I don’t think many people have started using, but I have found it immensely useful. I’ll start by explaining what it is:
When you give someone your URL to donate, you probably give them something in the form of http://the3day.org/goto/john. The user goes there, then clicks the donate button and donates and everything is fine. When I give people the URL to donate, I send them this: http://60miles3days.com/donate and this sends the donor directly to the donation form so that there is no thinking about it. It’s very handy, pretty useful and I’m going to talk about why you would do it and then how you would do it. First with the why.
Why?
Easy to Remember
If you have a web page already that people go to, it’s much easier for them to remember that site than to have to add another site to their memory. Not only that, they have to add a goto in there. I admit, this is probably the least compelling of my reasons. However, the donor doesn’t have to then look on the page for the donate button. Small item, I know but every little bit helps. We will have some better reasons next.
Repeat Offender
If you know that you are going to continue walking year after year, this may be the best reason. Wouldn’t it be great to just give the same URL every year. Yes, I know that you can choose the same URL year after year, but they changed the structure of it after 2008 (it used to have the year in it) so it’s possible that it may not remain the same. Also, if you are crazy like me and sign up for the next 3-Day at the event, you can immediately switch the URL to point to the new fund raising form instead of jumping through a few hoops to get it changed in the 3-Day system. This means that if you have people that wait until after the last minute to donate, they will be giving you a head start on the fund raising for next year.
Double Walker
This is the reason I started to use redirects. I’m walking in two different walks this year. Instead of having to give out one URL and then when I had my minimum for the first walk give out another URL, I used a redirect. Earlier in the year if you went to http://60miles3days.com/donate you would go to the donation form for my Boston walk. Now that I have raised the money for that, I can switch it to the Dallas walk and my donors don’t have to worry about which one I want them to go to. I automatically direct their traffic to the correct donation form.
Team Player
Another reason is that maybe you are a super star fund raiser and got all your fund raising done in a couple of weeks and now you want to help your teammates do their fund raising. Since you have awesome donating friends, you can easily change your redirect so that it points to one of your teammate’s donation pages instead of yours. They still have their own donation url, but now yours points to their donation form. Now you are helping them reach their goal!
How?
So there are a couple of things that you need to have in order to do the redirect.
If you have the two above things, then you will need to make a folder that you want to use (named something like donate, to use the example of my redirect). In that folder, make a file named index.php and the contents of the file should look something like this:
<? php
header( ‘Location: URL’ ) ;
?>
Where URL is the actual location of your donate page. This is assuming that your web host uses PHP (most do).
Huh?
Now, what can you do if you don’t have a domain name or a host or the necessary technical skills to make this work? First, ask a friend that does know this stuff and they might be able to help. If you don’t have a friend like that, you can send me a mail (click contact at the top of the page) and for a certain number of people I can make some redirects for you off of the 60miles3days.com page.
