This week, it’s much less a poll and more of a quiz to see if you can figure out how many bras I will be packing for the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure ® Let’s see how many get it right! I’ll post the actual answer next Friday!
Author Archives: john
In normal life, I don’t think you could call me a hugger. Don’t get me wrong. I hug my wife, kids and other family members, but I usually don’t include people outside of that in my hugging. There are occasions where it happens, but when I get together with friends I don’t greet them with a hug. There are probably a lot of people out there that can identify with me. It’s not that I don’t like people, I just don’t typically hug someone unless they are somehow related to me.
In more ways than one, I am a different person when I am on the 3-Day for the Cure. This includes hugs.
In 2007 when I first started walking in the 3-Day, you couldn’t probably say the same thing. At the beginning of that walk, if a stranger had come up to me and asked for a hug, I might have given it to them, but not because I wanted to. But during the course of that walk something happened. I ended up not being able to walk with my team for most of the last day that year. Kandice had been red carded, though I know she would have continued walking if they would have let her, and my mom had been having knee problems the whole weekend. I ended up walking with another team, that was really nice. We talked and they accepted me as part of their team. By the end of that day, even though I had known them for maybe six hours, they were like family to me. When we got to the finish, I gave them all a big hug. Then when I saw my teammates, I gave them both a huge hug and started crying.
It was a long and exhausting walk and it was really good to see the both of them at the end of the day. I think in that moment, a switch got turned on. I realized that everyone on the 3-Day is your family, so it doesn’t matter if you’re not comfortable with giving hugs to strangers, these people are not strangers.
If you are getting ready for your first 3-Day, you may be thinking that it’s not possible, that there is no way that you will feel comfortable hugging someone that you meet on the walk. Before you make that determination, I want you to think about why that someone might need a hug. Maybe they have blisters on their feet and don’t feel like they can make it, but they know that they can’t stop. Maybe their teammate recently lost their fight against breast cancer and now instead of walking on a team with them, they are walking in their honor. Maybe they get reminded of loved ones every time they go on the 3-Day and need a hug to ground them. Or maybe, just maybe, they think that their family member (you!) needed a hug.
Whatever the reason is, if you see me on the walk, don’t hesitate to come give me a hug. If you’re in Dallas and you need a hug, come meet me at the Energizer® tent in camp, where I will be spending my evenings as the Keep Going® Blogger. I welcome the hugs. Like I said, you’re family.
Friday Poll – Where’s Your Water?
June 25th, 2010 | Posted by in General - (Comments Off on Friday Poll – Where’s Your Water?)
I’ll be honest here and say that this post was a little tougher to write than others. If you have read this blog for some time, I’m usually talking about ideas for the walk, or praising my donors in fund raising efforts or putting up videos of people talking about their favorite 3-Day moments. I’m not usually talking about how I was selected for something, but this time I will.
Energizer® has this fantastic program going on called the Keep Going® Blogger. What it boils down to is that they are picking 3-Day for the Cure® bloggers from each of the 15 walks and simply asking them to blog about their experiences. They have gone through the process and selected me as the Dallas/Fort Worth Keep Going Blogger! I’m pretty excited about it, even if it is a little hard to put that excitement into words. Big thanks to Energizer for doing this program!!
If you haven’t been to 60miles3days.com before, I invite you to keep coming back! I’ll be having a weekly post with training, fund raising, packing and event tips as well as weekly video chats with walkers who talk about their favorite 3-Day moments, why they walk and much more! I realize that this post probably won’t give you a real taste for what goes on here, so if you’re looking for something that will give you a better idea, just check out It’s Potty Time one of the more popular posts on here. I’m really looking forward to getting to talk with other walkers with this program and I’m always looking for more walkers to tell me about their favorite 3-Day experiences, if you have one that you would like to share (you don’t have to be anywhere near Dallas to share it!) then just click contact above and let me know! If you’re walking in the 3-Day for the Cure in Dallas, drop by the Energizer tent there and visit me. I’d love to meet you!
Thanks everyone for coming to visit and I hope to see you again real soon!
I’ll wrap this up with a few links that you should maybe check out:
Energizer on Facebook and Twitter
Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure
60 Miles (me) on Twitter
It seems like a simple concept, if you’re on a team you should probably meet with the team to discuss team business, but until last year I had never really had a formal team meeting. I always saw them as something that a big team would do and I had never been on a team with more than three people. I figured that we could all keep in touch individually and through the occasional team e-mail and that would be fine. We did OK like that, but a lot of stuff came to light when we all talked with each other and were able to heard and respond to concerns, questions and ideas.
Team meetings don’t have to be an in-person affair. I realize that people are busy and a lot of times teams are spread across the country, so sometimes a phone call is as good as you can get. But if you can get all of your team on a conference call, it’s way better than having no team meeting at all. So here are some great reasons that your team should really be meeting at least once every other month, if not once a month.
Accountability
Probably the biggest reason out there is accountability. This goes for training and fund raising. I don’t want to let my team down, so if I am having a call where everyone is telling about their plans for what they are going to do for fund raising or a training walk that they just got back from I know that I need to get on the ball and catch up with everyone. It’s not that it’s a competition, but seeing how your teammates are doing in these two critical areas will help you gauge how far along you should be by this point. If you have only raised $100 and the other four people on your team are already halfway to their goal, either you’re not putting enough effort into fund raising or you should start adapting some of the techniques that your team is using to help you catch up.
Planning
If you have a team that is planning on doing team fund raisers, a team meeting is a great place to hash out details of how it is going to go down. I realize that a lot of this can be done through e-mail, but I will admit that sometimes I get lost in the sea of e-mail if everyone in the team just keeps replying back and forth. Being able to have a conversation about getting your fund raiser together will make it easier for everyone to follow and make their voice heard about what needs to be done.
First Timers
If you have some first time walkers with veteran teammates, this allows them a chance to ask those questions about the walk that everyone has. Stuff like, “How much should I be walking?”, “What do you do at camp?”, “What should I pack?” and much more. If your team is comprised of first time walkers only, this might be a good time to get to know some of the walkers on the share list and see if there is a veteran walker in your area that might be able to come to your team meeting for a little bit to field questions and help you build the comfort level.
Meet the Team!
Chances are that unless all of your team is from one specific pool of people that you know (like family or work) then not everyone on the team will know each other. Use a section of your team meeting to have time to get to know everyone. The last team meeting that I went to, we had a question of, “what was the most embarrassing wardrobe malfunction you have had?” It seems like a simple enough question, but it got people to talk about something that was a little embarrassing and I think it helped everyone to know each other a little better. When everyone knows everyone better it makes it easier when the time comes to select your tent mate. It’s possible that there are people in the team that don’t know a lot of their team members and don’t already have a designated tent mate. Having a little get to know you time will allow them to know first of who doesn’t have a tent mate and second of if they can get along (though let’s face it, it’s the 3-Day, most people get along).
To the Event!
The last thing I will talk about for having a team meeting for is to actually do planning for the event. If you are walking in an out of town event, this could mean planning the travel arrangements and hotels for before and after the walk. If you are walking in the town that you live in, it could mean arranging for transportation from someone’s house to the event. At the last Texans for Tah-Tah’s meeting, we even talked about what shirts we would wear on what days so that we would be all co-ordinated and easier to pick out in a crowd.
The team meeting is a great thing to do with every team. If it’s just two people on your team, it may not be necessary to have the meetings frequently, but you should still plan on having a meeting or two just to hash out some stuff and keep each other motivated. As the team gets larger, I think the need for meetings gets more and more.
Twitter
Copyright © 2024 All rights reserved.
Designed by 