I went into Dance Marathon believing that dancing for 30 hours straight would be an easy and even enjoyable feat. But as my mind and body soon learned, there is nothing enjoyable about heavy eyelids, an empty stomach and cramped feet.
My mentality before DM was that since I practically grew up dancing, doing it for an extended amount of time would not be difficult. While I was growing up, my Latino family would encourage all the youngsters to learn how to shake their hips and bump their bodies to the festive rhythms of salsa and merengue music. Birthday parties, weddings and simple gatherings were considered "lame" if no one was dancing.
Once in high school, my dancing abilities made me a sort of celebrity on campus. Known by the cool crowd as "the smart kid who can dance," I made more of a name for myself by doing the tootsie roll at Junior Prom than by writing scandalous editorials for the school newspaper.
And when I witnessed my first DM at the Northwestern campus my freshman year, my feet were itching to be among the "lucky" students who had signed up to participate in the charity event. The itch to dance was so bad, in fact, that a friend and I couldn’t help but sneak into the Louis Room to groove alongside our DM buddies for a few hours.
After such a history, I honestly thought adding 30 more dancing hours to my lifespan would be no sweat. I walked into Norris University Center that Friday afternoon completely confident of my endurance — even after drinking caffeine and getting only three hours of sleep the night before (those papers had to get done somehow, right?).
Whether because of my friends’ contagious hyperactivity or Sean Paul’s "Get Busy" (one of my favorite songs, which was coincidentally played during the first block), the first 12 hours of DM went by at an alarmingly fast pace. I actually welcomed the sunrise with a big smile on my face because I mistakenly assumed the hardest part was officially over.
But as soon as the clock hit the 15-hour mark, my body shut down and pain began to settle. Whenever I would stop dancing to listen to someone speak on stage, my eyelids would involuntarily close in a desperate attempt to get some sleep before the music began playing again.
The pain and fatigue stuck with me up until the very last minute of the marathon. I soon learned that the only way to numb the pain was to simply keep dancing. But as soon as we would stop to listen to a speaker, the pain would rush back all at once and slap me on the face.
DM is a test of endurance, a trial of pain — in a way, a metaphor linking the dancers’ experience with the tribulations that face the children who benefit from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Yet despite the torture, there is satisfaction in knowing that by dancing, I helped raise $619,346 for a good cause. There is a satisfaction in knowing that just as the dancer’s pain and fatigue goes away with a full night’s rest, a kid’s pain may likewise go away one day with the research funded by those hundreds of thousands of dollars every single DM’er helped raise.
As the charismatic DM emcees taught me, DM is not for pure enjoyment — it’s for "dah keedz."
Reach Allan Madrid at [email protected].
