As I write this, it has been exactly two weeks since Jane and I finished walking SIXTY miles in three days in the Chicago version of the Komen3Day for the Cure.

We were both thrilled to have finished, exhausted and blistered, but happy and proud. The walk’s closing ceremony, held just outside Soldier Field as a thunderstorm approached, was inspiring, but, truthfully, I just wished I could sit down.

Sixty miles is a long way. I was really tired.

Two weeks later, though, it’s not really the mileage and the physical part of the walk that has stuck with me.  My blisters have healed, and I no longer stagger when I get up from a chair.

What I remember most are the stories.

I can see the face of the woman who, on the last Sunday of the walk, was exactly three years out from her last chemo treatment. Walking next to her was her 14-year-old daughter. We didn’t have to ask why she was walking.

I met another woman who told me one evening as we both waited for some expert stretching by volunteer chiropractic students about how her best friends hadn’t really wanted to talk about her doing this walk. How she felt as though they thought her breast cancer (she is a two-year survivor) might still be catching. I can still see the hurt on her face.

I remember the guy in the shiny pink satin bra (really) who had already done two of the “3days” this summer; there are 12 altogether. I never heard his connection to breast cancer, but he always had a smile and a topic of conversation to focus on, even when the going got tough.

Jane and I caught up on her job, my job, her husband, my husband, her daughter, my son. We laughed. We trudged. We slept (in pink tents). We didn’t sleep (it was really hot). We enjoyed all of the wonderful distractions that the towns we walked through put out for us, from cute cops in pink uniform shirts to popsicles and stickers and cookies.

I was particularly touched by a lone woman who sat on her stoop on Foster Street in Chicago and threw rose petals at us as we walked past. “Thank you, thank you,” she said. “You should be walking on rose petals.”

And the crossing volunteer at a busy downtown Chicago lakefront intersection telling perfect strangers on that brilliant last afternoon, “See these women? They have walked almost 60 miles, and raised more than $5 million for breast cancer. I am so proud of them.”

That’s right: 1,900 walkers in Chicago raised $5.1 million for the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which will fund everything from support groups to advanced research to targeted genetic therapies to mastectomy rehab. That makes me really proud.

What I am most happy about, though, is that women with breast cancer now have hope. They have therapies to try. They can talk about their anger, their fear, their chemo. Even with perfect strangers.

When my mom was first diagnosed, it was sometime in the 1970s, before Betty Ford talked about her mastectomy, and long before survivors in pink boas wore t-shirts that crowed, “Save the Ta-tas” and danced together to “We Will Survive.”

We didn’t really talk about mom’s breast cancer. I don’t know to this day what kind she had, or what she did about it. I don’t really even know how old she was when she was diagnosed. When she died, we were so young. We’ve missed so much without her.

But what I DO know is that my walk and the money it raised, thanks to so many of you, means that we can keep moving forward in the fight against breast cancer. Altogether, with your help, I raised $3,635! That means more women will join that survivor circle, and more daughters will be able to celebrate graduations, grandchildren and all of the other milestones that make life so sweet. Together.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support, your gifts and your belief in what I did in Chicago two weeks ago.