From left to right, Cartus employees Carole Evans, who walked 20 miles, Doug D'Jay, who walked 75 miles and Stephanie Jacobsen, who walked 26 miles. Photo by Linda Casey.
Hello, dear 75 Mile Walkathon participants and volunteers and Cartus Facilities staff and visitors from Save the Children.
The 75 Mile Walkathon to build a School in Sudan for the Darfur Refugees was a smashing success, and you are ALL responsible for that. We had a table full of drinks and bagels and granola and Dunkin Donuts and ghost lollipops, as well as Mac & Cheese (which two people said was the best they ever had!) and meatballs and turkey chili (my favorite, and my secret weapon!) We had a cheering section for much of the day, welcoming people after each completed lap. We had a security guard inches away from start to finish. (Many thanks to Facilities and especially Larry Post, the V.P. who made it possible for us to use our parking lot.) We had a warm camper for a cold night.
We were almost 20 walkers including children, and we had a great time. Walking and talking, talking and walking, getting to know one another well. (Really, really well, in some cases. Think anyone would sponsor you for a 24 hour Talkathon? Just a thought.)
In case I didn’t get to share this with you, our good friend Mary Staudt, Committee member and a middle school teacher in Armonk, NY, had organized a Walkathon last week at her school, each day between 2:30 and 3:30. Over the course of the week 72 students participated. Last Friday, when I visited, it was preceded by an excellent presentation made by a Darfur refugee named Bushara Dosa (welcome to the Committee, Bushara, our first Darfuri member!) to two assemblies of students, probably 600 students in total. (Great, great job, Mary! You continue to inspire me.) Anyway, the rain (and even a little snow up by us!) started just AFTER her Walkathon, and ended just BEFORE our Walkathon. It just squeezed into that time slot. How about that!
Most everyone walked much, much farther than they ever had before, which is quite a huge accomplishment. (I was going to end that statement with “…of which you should all be proud”, but we should try not to be proud. We are merely doing what is necessary and required.) Special recognition should go to little Lisa Vigna, a waiflike lawyer who came by train and bus all the way from New Jersey, and who walked until 3:00 AM, when the cold with the wind chill caused her to stop her Walkathon at 50 miles. (50 miles!!) Don’t worry, my kind wife offered to drive her home after seeing how hard it was for her to take a few steps after she woke up in our camper on Sunday morning.
From that point I was on my own. Let me share something remarkable with you. Without companionship it could get tedious, so I calculated that if I could increase my pace to 5 miles per hour, I could cut off 3 hours. Now, during the Walkathon I had advised some people that you should avoid going up into the “aerobic zone”, because unless you are an athlete, you will tire yourself out much quicker. However, I started race-walking (silly arm movements and everything!) as fast as I could, and kept it up until the finish, about 6 hours. (I finished in about 23 hours, at roughly 9:00 AM.) The amazing thing is this. Sure, I’ve been “training” since the beginning of the summer, but I’m not by any means an athlete, and when I race-walk, which is about the same speed as a slow jog, I get winded. I did not get winded during those 6 hours which started AFTER I had already walked 50 miles. My heart was not pumping harder than normal. I didn’t even feel cold. (I took off my jacket, hat and gloves, because I was perspiring.) My wife, when waking up in the trailer in the morning, came out and said, “Are you out of your mind? Have you lost all sense of judgment! It’s freezing. Put on your jacket, and take off your sweatshirt, it’s soaking in the back. So, I was exercising hard enough to soak through my sweatshirt, but my heart wasn’t beating hard and I wasn’t winded. I can’t understand it. Was it a minor miracle? I am not ruling it out. You may recall that I sent an email previously about a young man who told me that there was no way I could make the distance, and that he would come along and carry me. Well, he ended up not coming, but perhaps Somebody Else carried me?
One other thing I had the had the opportunity to reflect upon in the long hours (actually, they seemed kind of short) during the time I was alone until the sun came over the horizon (what a celebration we had!) was that refugees frequently MUST walk “day and night”, but without shoes (!), without food, without water, without Ibuprofen (which helped A LOT those last 25 miles), carrying whatever they can of all they own. How do they do it? Many can't. 10,000 of the 20,000 Lost Boys of Sudan perished on their terrible journey.Below you will find some pictures from the event. Thank you all, very much.
~Doug D'Jay
P.S. As of the end of December, our Walkathon has raised in excess of $17,000, easily exceeding our $10,000 goal.
P.P.S. The small number of walkers was due to Cartus' liability concerns. In exchange for graciously permitting us to use their facility, a limit of 30 walkers was imposed.