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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