Portland Race for the Cure

I've been meaning to write this for a week now. I was invited to join a team to walk at the Portland Race for the Cure. The Portland one is the 3rd largest in the nation. A lady that my inlaws are friends with and that I know as well invited us to join her team to go walking together. My inlaw's neighbors are sisters of this lady, so she had about 20 people or more walking in our little group. Unfortunately, it was also the Primary program, so the girls went to church with Jason and I got downtown with my inlaws. My fil picked me up and went back to their house to walk to the bus with one of the other families.

We all had our shirts on with sweatshirts underneath since we were walking to the bus at 6:45am. They all had white supporter Komen shirts on while I wore my bright pink one to signify being a survivor. There were very few people on the bus on a Sunday morning, but slowly more and more people got on and there were like 4-5 more white Komen shirts joining us. We got into downtown and had to get off the bus because it was blocked by all of the runners that had just started the 5k run. I felt my heart go in my throat from seeing everyone running for the same reason and purpose.

Then we discovered the hard part. We had to cross that street to get to where we were meeting everyone in our group. We should have thought about it longer, but we didn't. So we got our courage up and attempted to dash across the street against all the people running. If you've never done it, just imagine trying to be a salmon swimming upstream against the current and you get the general idea.

We go to find our group and walk to the waterfront. There are literally thousands of people roaming around. We see that people are already lining up for the 1k walk which is what we signed up for, so we go and get in line. They have streets blocked off people to walk on and they had barriers all around them. For the 1k walk, we had to walk around all these barriers and I was able to get a peek at the starting line. I was walking with my inlaws and it's a good thing I'm so tall and wearing pink. They are short and wearing white so they blended right in with everyone else but they could see me right away if we got separated from each other. Our walk was on Naito Parkway and turned so that we ended the walk on the sea wall down past the Morrison or Burnside bridge. I lost count which one it was. At the end of the race, all the survivors were handed pink rose courtesy of SWMC. I was hoping to see someone I recognized, but I didn't. I looked around and could tell that I was one of the youngest people there with breast cancer. It was rather unsettling, but not too bad.

Once our walk was over, we wandered around the waterfront looking at everything. There were so many people there that it started to get claustraphobic. On the walk, it wasn't so bad. Even with all those people, you are all going in the same direction with the same purpose. Once it was over, it was people walking everywhere in every direction. I'm not crazy about crowds so I was trying to inwardly calm down. Once we got past a certain point, it was a little easier. I went to the Survivor tent and got a nice bag full of goodies and had a survivor picture taken behind the tent. I can't find my bib number, otherwise I could go online and buy a copy of it. But $10 for a 4x6 doesn't seem worth it. After checking all the sponsors's tents, we attempted to get back to the streets the buses were on. Again, a problem. By that point, the 5k walk had started. THAT'S the main event so many people were there for.

There were 46,000+ people preregistered and I think nearly 30,000 of them were in that walk. I heard later that one person said it took her 30 minutes just to get to the starting line! That's crazy!!! Thrilling but crazy. We got smart this time though. We tried to go around them. When that didn't work, we staggered our way across the street and did pretty well. All the buses were blocked by the 5k walk so we were stuck at the bus stop. Every few minutes, they would stop the walkers and allow the buses to go by. We waited at our bus stop for at least 25-40 minutes for a bus to come. Then we got on and waited a bit longer while more walkers went by.

All in all, it was a wonderful incredible experience. It was so comforting to be with so many people fighting against the same thing. It was also so sad how many people were there "In Memory" of people too. So many women have died from this disease, including friends of mine on the support board I go to.