OyChicago blog

My teammates in action at their fundraiser, “Beer Pong for Boobies!”

Some of the new faces you’ll be seeing around here—Jacey Bader, Abby Halper and Rachel Friedman—and I are in training. We’re participating in the 2-day Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. It’s a whopping 39 mile walk for whoppers, which I’ve realized over the past few months, is much more difficult than it first seemed.

Why didn’t I realize how long it takes to walk?

Rachel: “So, we have to train 20 miles today.
Jacey: “We’d better start early in the morning.”
Abby: “I’ll serve brunch at my house at 10:30 and then we can get started.”
Me: “Ok, we’ll be done by what, umm, 6pm?”

It’s a commitment. And whoever said that walking isn’t hard is wrong. By mile 9, my knee is hurting (I’ve succumbed to wearing a knee brace, don’t laugh if you see me out on one of these training walks.) My shoulder, yeah, I don’t know how walking hurts my shoulder, but it does.

I’ve always not-so-secretly dreamed of running a marathon, but it seems that dream has ended. I’ll announce it right here on the blog, it WON’T be happening EVER. I’m drawing the crazy line at walking a marathon (and a half.)

All whining aside, it’s been a great experience so far. If you’ve read my bio, then you know I am a big fan of ice cream. Well, one plus to spending your weekends walking all over the city is that you manage to stop and try every sort of ice cream in every ice cream store known to Chicago. Treats still reigns supreme in my world, but I’ve tasted some close contenders—iCream and Yogun Fruz—are also pretty damn good.

I’ve had so much fun with my Motor Boat teammates. Yes, it’s a reference to Wedding Crashers. They’re all fabulous and the only people I would voluntarily chose to spend walking away my valuable weekends. They are so committed to this cause. The team has managed to raise ridiculous amounts of money—we are well past $10,000.

You have to have a lot to talk about to make it through several hours walking together, which for us sometimes means reverting to grade school activities to pass the time. For example, Jacey never learned that state song most of us picked up somewhere around the third grade. It’s the one that goes, “Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado Connecticut…” So we taught it to her—somewhere around Lincoln Park, we realized that none of us remembered what came after Nevada. We had to stop for an emergency Youtube break (luckily one of us lived close by) before we could continue walking.

Breaks are important and frequent. Rachel likes to stop for hot dogs and we might have (just once) traded walking for beer and pizza. Although, we had an excuse that day, it was raining.

We’ll be out in full force this weekend; we only have a few weeks left to go before the big days!

If you want to hear more of our rambling, possible whining, but mostly cheering tales from the front, make sure you follow OyChicago on Twitter. We will be tweeting throughout the two day walk—June 6 and 7. (We will also post our tweet updates on the blog the following Monday.)

Or, you can always find a place along the path to cheer for us and the thousands of others who will be walking to save the boobies!