Monday, April 11, 2016

Gratitude Monday: Walking in all weathers

Yesterday I participated in a WalkMS event, as I’ve done for a few years. This time it was in Northern Virginia, where the temperature was about 25 degrees lower than it’s been for the walks I did in the Valley They Call Silicon.


I’ll confess that I found the organization of this event somewhat slapdash in comparison with the West Coast ones. Well—smaller and less collegial. It was a nice walk through some of the newest and oldest parts of Reston, but the start and finish were underwhelming. They put up the MS arch only minutes before the start:


And it didn’t last for even the first finishers less than an hour later:


I also missed the encouragement we got along the way in years past. Perhaps it’s because they run a bunch of these things all over the greater DC area during the month of April (the one in Manassas on Saturday actually had snow), and they’re a little pro forma about it.

Nothing pro-forma about the participants; there may not have been the numbers of teams I’ve seen in the past, but everyone is serious about the reason for the walk.


And thus my reason for gratitude. I’m thankful for the people who haul their asses out of bed on weekend mornings to walk one or three miles in the snow and cold (or the sunshine and heat) to raise money to help bring an end to a miserable bastard of a disease. And I’m grateful that I was part of it again.






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