Today I am officially kicking off my fund raising for the 2013 Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure. “What’s that?” you say,”I thought you were crewing this year and didn’t have to fund raise.”  Sure, as a crew member I don’t HAVE to fund raise.  There is no minimum that I have to hit, but since when did a minimum have influence on how much I was going to raise for the fight against breast cancer.

This wasn’t something I had to think long and hard about.  I didn’t hem and haw about how much money I should raise.  When I signed up to be on the 3-Day crew this year it asked me what I wanted to set as my goal.  I left it set at $2300, not because it was just easy to leave it as default, I want to make sure that I hit that goal. Check it out:  http://the3day.org/goto/walk60 and while you are there, click on that donate button to make a donation!

If you can donate to help me reach my goal at all it would be a huge help.  Thank you so much for your support in the fight against breast cancer!

 

I checked it out today.  It’s been over a year since I posted on this blog.  Which is pretty amazing considering that for a year I posted without fail every week.  I guess after my last 3-Day walk I pretty much went into hiding.  I didn’t really maintain Twitter, I didn’t walk, train or talk to anyone about the 3-Day for the better part of a year.

When I was trying to decide what to do last year, I asked a lot of people for their input.  It was a pretty even split between people saying that I deserved a rest and people saying that breast cancer doesn’t rest and I should keep fighting.  It was not an easy decision, but then I went back to some stuff I have said in the past.  I wrote a post a couple of years ago called Keep Going With Balance and in it I tried to stress the importance of not only continuing the fight against breast cancer, but keeping balance with the rest of your life.  In it, I basically said that if every moment of your life is devoted to the fight against breast cancer to the point that you don’t live your life then it’s not worth it.  I probably didn’t use quite that language, but that was the general idea.

It was with this belief in mind that I decided to take the year off.  I had spent a lot of time and effort in five years and a lot of that kept me away from spending some time with my family.  I decided that I needed to reset and spend a year not focusing on the three day.  A year focusing on my family.  After a year, I can say it was time well spent.

On November 7th I signed up for my next 3-Day for the Cure.  I signed up differently than I have ever signed up, as a crew member.  I’m not sure why it took me so long to decide to crew one of these events, but the time has finally come and I’m excited about it.  In the 2013 3-Day season I will be participating as a route safety crew member in the Dallas/Fort Worth walk.  I’m excited about it, but at the same time I’m going into something that I have never done before.  If any of my crew buddies can give me some words of advice, it would be much appreciated!

This is a short post, but I’m sure that as the year progresses I will have a lot more to say about this awesome journey.

 

Some, but not many, of you know that my birthday is right around the corner.  Wednesday to be exact.  Over the years I have seen several people ask people for donations for their birthday instead of gifts or anything like that.  Well, I’m going to do something, but for my birthday this year I would like to give, not just receive.  So here’s what I’m doing:

Instead of asking you to donate to me, I’d like to ask you to donate to my wife.  This is her first year doing the 3-Day for the Cure and she’s been having trouble getting her fund raising kick started.  This is where you can come in!  For my birthday, please consider donating to my wife to help her reach her goal of being able to do the 3-Day for the Cure in San Diego.

For every $10 dollars that you donate to her fund raising, you’ll be entered into our drawing for a $500 Visa gift card!  Normally we give you a bonus entry at $50.  But it’s my birthday! So for every $50 you donate Kristen’s fund raising between now and the end of my birthday month (September) you’ll get THREE bonus entries!!!  That means if you donate $50, you get 8 entries to a drawing that only has 174 entries as of the writing of this post!  Here’s where you can donate:

http://walk60.com/kristen

Thank you for anything you can do!  It would mean a great deal if you can help out!!!

 

Every year that I have walked in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure I have always seen firefighters while I have been on the walk. In Boston last year we walked by a fire station where the firefighters cheered us on and had a soaker hose to help us cool off. In Dallas a couple of years ago they were handing out cold bottled Gatorade. I’ve seen pictures of firefighters in pink fire fighting gear helping with fund raisers and I think they even did the walk in at least part of their gear. Last year in Dallas, I even saw this pink fire truck named after the wife of one of the firefighters who lost her fight against breast cancer:

Saying that firefighters have helped in the fight against breast cancer would be an understatement. They have been warriors in the fight against breast cancer and you can see the mark they have made every year. They deserve a huge thanks, but not just for helping in this fight.

For those that read this and don’t know, I live in central Texas. This year, Texas as a whole has taken a beating from wild fires. The extremely dry weather coupled with record-setting heat have made conditions ripe for massive fires. This past weekend was a rough one for the firefighters in central Texas. At least four fires broke out: a massive one in Bastrop that has destroyed over 25,000 acres of land and is still burning as I write this and three others, one of which started right outside my neighborhood.

Sunday afternoon our next door neighbor came to the door and asked if we knew what was going on.  We didn’t and she told us that we needed to come see something.  We walked out of the house and immediately saw a large plume of black smoke rising from somewhere behind the house across the street.  We didn’t know what it was coming from, but we could tell that something was going on because of the flurry of activity on the street.  People were loading cars up and driving off.  There were more cars out on our quiet street than I had seen in a long time.  Kristen and I talked for a moment and decided that it was time to pack up and head out too and then figure out later what was going on.  We could always come back if it was an overreaction.

As it turns out, it was not an overreaction.  A short while after we left the neighborhood, mandatory evacuation was announced for all 4000-ish families in the neighborhood.  Now we began to really worry.  If it had gotten worse after we had left, how close was the smoke to our house now.  We tried to remain upbeat though.  All of our family made it out safely (even with pets) and all the news reports that we had seen said that there were no residents injured or killed in the fire.  We were definitely grateful for that.

Despite the fire and rescue crew having too few resources (again, there were at least four other fires in the central Texas area) we were able to return to our home just shy of 48 hours after we left.  There was a bit of worry as we drove up to the neighborhood.  While we knew that the house was still standing (thanks to a little bit of geekery on my part) we weren’t sure what the condition of the rest of the neighborhood was.  We had heard on the news that at least 30 homes had been destroyed and 20 more had been damaged.  My heart goes out to those people that have lost everything, stay tuned after the break for how you can help.

As we pulled up to the house everything looked intact and it ended up that it was.  Reading through some of the Facebook posts and blog entries, we discovered that the fire was stopped about two and a half blocks from our house.  Thanks to the dedication and efforts of the firefighters, many homes were saved, including our own.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I have always seen firefighters during the 3-Day for as long as I have done the walk.  I’ve always thought that it was great that they were out and thanked them for being there.  I do think it’s great that they support a cause like the 3-Day for the Cure.  Even though I know that they are always there for emergencies, I’ve never thought about what that means to me.  It’s because of them that my family is safe and that my house is still here.  I will be eternally thankful to them.  Even if you haven’t had to have the help of their services, I encourage you to thank a firefighter the next time you see them.

If you would like to help out relief efforts for the Texas wildfires or any disaster, text the word REDCROSS to 90999 to give $10 to the Disaster Relief Fund, or go to www.redcross.org to give even more.  For those that are local to the Austin area, there are a lot of organizations taking donations.  This site has a pretty good list of several of those organizations that are taking donations not only for the fire I described above, but also for the Bastrop fire:  http://steinerranchpost.com/wiki/steiner-ranch-fire-donations-volunteers-resources/donation-spots/

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

 

If you have ever gotten a donation for the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure before, then you know the feeling that you get when that e-mail hits your inbox:

A donation was made on your behalf.

Those six words can really make your day, especially if you have been in kind of a slump for fund raising.  I feel that’s where I was a couple of weeks ago, so you can imagine how excited I was to get not just one of those little e-mails, but four all at the same time.  As I went to click on the e-mails my mind raced through all the questions that usually happen:  Who sent in the donation? How much was it for? Why were there four?

As I opened them up one after another, a couple of things became clear.  One, I was pretty sure that I didn’t know these people.  I say pretty sure because over the years there have been a lot of people that have heard me talk about walking in the 3-Day and occasionally I have gotten donations from them.  This doesn’t happen a whole lot, but when it does sometimes I’m left trying to figure out who the donor is.  As I looked through the names on the donations that I had received, I didn’t recognize the names at all.

The second thing that I noticed is that they were all from Michigan.  This is where I started realizing that my excitement may have been a little premature.  While I do know some people in Michigan, the number is fairly small.  This meant that the chance that the donations were meant for me and not someone else was getting less and less every minute.

The third thing about the donations, they were all mail in donations.  When you get a donation for the 3-Day, within your participant center you can tell whether it was made online or mailed in as a check.  There’s a field that says “offline confirmed” if it was a check and all four of these had this displaying on them.

The last item I noticed is that they were for a sizable amount of money.  The total for all four donations was for more than $800.  That amount happened to get me over my minimum fund raising requirement.  Because of this, I had to find out what the situation was, whether or not the donations were going to stay in my fund raising or not.  In the past I have always encouraged people to continue fund raising when I reach my goal, so you might be asking yourself why it mattered if the donation went to me or not if I was going to continue fund raising.  The fact of the matter is, yes, I will continue fund raising but whether these donations will stay with me or not will determine whether I will continue fund raising on my account or whether I will fund raise to help my teammates.  Trust me, I have no intent of slacking off.

Since the donations had no contact information (no e-mail address was provided on the donation form) I had to find some way of verifying what was going on with the donation. Enter the 3-Day hotline.

Have you ever contacted the 3-Day coaches at 800-996-3Day?  If you haven’t and you have questions about anything 3-Day related, this is a good place to start.  I haven’t had many opportunities to call, however whenever I have the 3-Day coaches have always been helpful and worked to get me an answer to my question.  I called them up last week to ask a status of the donations I had received because I wanted to make sure that if they were supposed to go to someone else that they would get there and help out with their fund raising.  The person I talked to was helpful, but in the end she told me that it looked like the donations were processed as they were supposed to have been based on paperwork.  She put a note on my account in case anyone showed up with missing donations, but that’s where we sit right now.

Take it from me, when you get a donation e-mail from the 3-Day it may not always be as cut and dry as you think.  Sometimes donations end up in the wrong place.  Sometimes they end up in the right place, but it doesn’t seem like it.  If you happen to get one of these unexpected donations, be thankful for it but also follow up with it.  Those donations could be the donations that someone else needs to actually participate in the walk.  For my case, I’m going to view this as a sign to start helping my teammate fund raise.  If it happens that the donations are in the wrong place then I’ll just go back to wrapping up my fund raising again.